The following, unless otherwise specified, result in the taking of one drink for every observation/sighting at the Annual Conference of the American Political Science Association. The Duck of Minerva is not responsible for any liver damage or unfortunate choice of panel questions that may result after participating in this game.Someone wearing their conference badge at 2am or more than a mile from the actual conference site.Bow-ties.Observing...
When I was a college student, I spent every Labor Day working in the debate squadroom at Kansas. Everyone on the team, in fact, was expected to put in a full day working on their affirmative cases, negative arguments, etc. Sometimes, debaters learned the identity of their colleague on that day -- it is a two-person team activity after all. After the work ended, our coach and his wife hosted the team for dinner.Even though it was a Labor Day of...
[cross-posted at Current Intelligence]Earlier this week, President Obama announced the end of America’s combat mission in Iraq and pledged his commitment to begin drawing down American forces in Afghanistan beginning next summer. A key theme in his address to the nation was the need for the United States to redirect resources from nearly a decade of two wars and invest in the economy at home. Yet, although the President is trying to move away...
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,...
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...
[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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...