by Jon Western | 12 Jan 2011 | Featured
The conversation on last week's tragedy in Tucson has gone from the absurd to the absurd to the absurd. The late George Gerbner who was the long-time Dean of the Annenberg School of Communication at UPenn and who later finished his career at Temple University was a pioneer in the study of media influences on society and violence. He frequently warned against assuming or inferring a direct relationship from a specific media event or elite cue to...
by Vikash Yadav | 12 Jan 2011 | Featured
The visit of the Indian External Affairs Minister, S.M. Krishna, to Afghanistan a few days ago overlapped the Afghan High Peace Council's visit to Pakistan to establish a joint Afghanistan-Pakistan Peace Jirga. Although the overlap of the two events appears to be coincidental, it highlighted the complex trilateral dynamic that must be negotiated.India has now fully backed the reconciliation process with the Taliban in Afghanistan, although...
by Charli Carpenter | 12 Jan 2011 |
Vesla Weaver and Amy Lerman have published a study in the American Political Science Review on the relationship between contact with the US criminal justice system and disaffection from US government and politics. They find that even after controlling for other important factors, contact with the criminal justice system is a significant predictor of civic and political disengagement and mistrust of government.Contact with the criminal justice...
by Dan Nexon | 11 Jan 2011 |
Although it received comparatively little attention in the US, the State Department's attempt to push for Turkish-Armenian normalization was one of the great foreign-policy follies of the early Obama Administration. There was little chance that the Turkish public would accept normalization absent some kind of Nagorno-Karabakh (NK) settlement; the political viability of normalization in Armenia wasn't much greater, particularly given hostility...
by Dan Nexon | 11 Jan 2011 |
As James Poulous reminds me, 2010 ain't got nothing on 1968, let alone the long 1960s. Violent rhetoric?Worse.Societal polarization?Worse.Political violence, including assassinations?Much worse.It is something of a testament to how far we've come that what outrages us now is relatively tame compared to the spewings of the far left and the far right less than half a century ago.I still don't have much use for claims that center-left politicians...
by Dan Nexon | 10 Jan 2011 |
If you haven't noticed, there's a debate going on about the relationship between rhetoric and violence (meta). I basically agree with Henry Farrell's take:One can say that there is (moderate) evidence supporting the argument that violent rhetoric makes violent action more likely. But this does not and cannot show, in the absence of other evidence, that any particular violent action is the product of a general atmosphere of violent...
by Vikash Yadav | 10 Jan 2011 | Featured
The Christian Science Monitor is reporting that the hackitivist collective [?] "Anonymous," famous for DDOS attacks on Mastercard and Paypal after the Wikileaks Cablegate fiasco, is attacking the government of Tunisia's website in support of the growing and increasingly violent protests there:"But the unrest has since spread to a wide cross-section of Tunisian society, reflecting broader discontent with inequality and autocratic leaders...
by Charli Carpenter | 10 Jan 2011 |
John Sides at the Monkey Cage weighs in with some social science on the relationship between militant metaphors in political speech and individuals' willingness to engage in actual political violence against government officials. The findings he cites: an experimental study has shown there seems to be no effect on the overall population of exposure to "fighting words" in political ads, but there is an effect on people with aggressive...
by Laura Sjoberg | 9 Jan 2011 |
This week, the New York Times published a (largely true) piece about the evils of going to law school, echoed by my friends on twitter and in the blogosphere have responded quickly, and in agreement. Like many political science professors, I am constantly telling our students not to go to law school - when 53% of our majors list it as their primary goal after undergraduate school. I even spoke a seminar at UF called "Why NOT go to law school -"...
by PM | 8 Jan 2011 |
Glenn Greenwald reports on the case of Birgitta Jonsdottir, the Icelandic MP and former Wikileaks volunteer. The U.S. Department of Justice has subpoenaed Jonsdottir's Twitter records, as well as the records from many other users of the service, from November 2009 onward on the grounds that the department believes that the records may be used in a criminal investigation. What is newsworthy about this is not that the U.S. DoJ continues to...
by Dan Nexon | 6 Jan 2011 |
Context available through an additional click.
by Dan Nexon | 6 Jan 2011 |
Brad Delong:The treaties of Muenster and Osnabrueck in 1648—the Peace of Westphalia—and the earlier peace of Augsburg in 1555 established the principle in European international law that internal affairs were nobody else’s business.No, it didn't. In addition to stipulating a number of territorial adjustments, the Peace of Westphalia:Reformed the Imperial Constitution to create non-violent processes for adjudicating religious disputes;Reduced...