by Jon Western | 2 Sep 2010 |
I've been on the road most of the summer (8 of the past 10 weeks) so the blogging has been quite light. I spent twelve days in Israel and then a bit more than three weeks doing research in Europe followed by my first real vacation in more than a decade -- a three week car trip with my kids out to visit family and friends in the upper Midwest. One of the more intriguing elements that linked all three trips was the presence of conservative,...
by Rodger Payne | 1 Sep 2010 |
Search the current White House website for the phrase "Bush Doctrine" and "no results" are returned. However, as I've previously argued, that does not mean the Obama administration has abandoned the Bush view of "preemption" (which was really a rebranding of preventive war). This week, the Pentagon has announced a new cyber-spin on "preemptive war": The Pentagon is contemplating an aggressive approach to defending its computer systems that...
by Bill Petti | 31 Aug 2010 |
[Cross-posted at Signal/Noise]It's that time of year again. The passing of the summer, the start of the fall. Most importantly, it signals the start of that most magical of times--the start of the fantasy football season.This year I am in three leagues--one for work, one for "stat-geeks", and one for family and friends. I decided to tweak the way I approached the draft this year and wanted to share a bit of the strategy with readers.One of the...
by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson | 26 Aug 2010 | Featured
Ah, the viciously gate-keeping peer review, the contemporary equivalent of burning the heretics at the stake. Receiving such a review seems to be a rite of passage in virtually every academic field and discipline of which I am aware, and though the details change, the general theme of such a review is always something like: "Author didn't make the argument I would have made or have made, or even worse, Author directly challenged the argument I...
by Laura Sjoberg | 23 Aug 2010 |
A former Israeli soldier posted pictures on facebook of herself with Palestinian prisoners who were tied up and blindfolded. In a photo album called "The Army ...The Most Beautiful Time of My Life," Eden Abergil posted these pictures and responded to friends' comments. One is particularly striking: a facebook friend of Abergil's commented that she looked sexy in the pictures. Abergil responded: Yeah I know lol honey. What a day it was. Look how...
by Charli Carpenter | 22 Aug 2010 |
I spent last week at an ICPSR workshop on network analysis methods in Bloomington, Indiana, and while I wouldn't say I'm exactly an expert now on network analysis, I did learn to do a few interesting things with my human security data.For example, below is a visual representation of the "human security issue agenda" as represented by 88 websites of organizations in the "human security network" circa May 2008. I identified the organizations in...
by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson | 20 Aug 2010 | Featured
Here at the opening of the new academic year, I sometimes find myself called on to make speeches welcoming students to campus and that sort of thing. I can't resist the opportunity to actually inject a little practical-moral content into what can otherwise be fairly fluffy events, and this year I've been playing with a particular metaphor for college education that I am somewhat fond of. I've given versions of or excerpts from this talk a...
by Rodger Payne | 19 Aug 2010 |
For many years on my personal blog, I monitored the disintegration of the "coalition of the willing" in Iraq. My last post on this topic was apparently in December 2008, when the United Kingdom announced that it was soon withdrawing its final troops from Iraq. Prior posts had documented the exits of Australia (2007), Denmark, Latvia, Lithuania, Georgia (2007), Japan (2006), Italy (2006), Poland, the Netherlands, Thailand, Hungary, the Dominican...
by Vikash Yadav | 16 Aug 2010 | Featured
Since the Nineties, Indian elites have been increasingly described as "pro-American." While attending a mini-conference of a segment of India's foreign policy and security elite in New Delhi last week, I kept noting how widespread the "pro-American" sentiment seemed to be. In fact, I heard one of the intellectuals argue that India's rise would naturally be assisted by other secular, pluralistic, constitutional democracies and resisted by states...
by Bill Petti | 13 Aug 2010 |
I came across this Chris Anderson piece from a 2008 issue of Wired via Ana Andjelic. Anderson argues that in the era of Big Data we no longer need to rely on theory and the scientific method to achieve advances in knowledge:Google's founding philosophy is that we don't know why this page is better than that one: If the statistics of incoming links say it is, that's good enough. No semantic or causal analysis is required. That's why Google can...
by Charli Carpenter | 13 Aug 2010 |
Despite what is sometimes argued, fighting wars is not a crime. But it is against the law for weapons-bearers to target large areas indiscriminately without regard for potential collateral damage. Instead, they are required to carefully choose only legitimate military targets. In my view, the same standard could be applied to whistle-blowing advocacy groups: organizations like Wikileaks should engage in precision targeting of legitimate...
by Charli Carpenter | 11 Aug 2010 |
In an earlier post on the lessons of the Afghan War Diaries, I pointed out an unfortunate legal fact: that civilian harms aren't necessarily evidence of war crimes. But I also argued, as I long have, that such "unintentional" civilian casualties are unacceptably high. Today, I have an op-ed in the International Herald Tribune that goes a bit further, suggesting a number of ways that the rules of war themselves could and should be updated to...