Many of the Journolist critics have expressed concerns that the listserv's membership -- you had to be political "center to left" to join -- fomented groupthink. Andrew Sullivan's critique is succinct, but he's hardly alone in leveling the charge: "It is this tendency to groupthink and exclusivity that concerns me."Reihan Salam, who was generally sympathetic to Journolist in an on-line piece he wrote last week, has recalibrated his argument to...
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From QIZ to ROZ
In 2008, after kicking around the idea for a couple of years, the US formally proposed to create Reconstruction Opportunity Zones (ROZs) in remote parts of Pakistan (FATA, NWFP, earthquake affected areas of Kashmir, a part of Balochistan province) and all of Afghanistan. The idea was modeled on the Qualified Industrial Zones (QIZ) preferential free trade agreement set up to help forge a liberal-economic peace between Israel, the Palestinian...
Why states shouldn’t count on Facebook for foreign policy
My colleague, Ben O’Loughlin at Royal Holloway, has written a blog post on the potential consequences of states in the West, particularly the US and UK, increasingly relying on informal social networking of its citizens to promote foreign policy priorities. This would be a move away from the kind of ham-fisted attempts at public diplomacy seen in the wake of 9/11 aimed at getting Arab states to “like” the west to allowing every day citizens to...
Kosovo: Countrified!
Just in case you were in suspense, the ICJ has declared that Kosovo's declaration of independence to be legal. Unsurprisingly, the Kosovars are happy, the Serbs are not happy and countries with independence movements are probably a bit more nervous. As the Guardian reports:The ruling is expected to have profound ramifications on the wider international stage, bolstering demands for recognition by territories as diverse as Northern Cyprus,...
The Transit Trade Agreement
Although the story has garnered relatively little attention in the US, the Afghanistan-Pakistan Transit Trade Agreement (APTTA) is probably one of the most important developments impacting the medium-term economic and political health of Afghanistan. As the US State Department correctly noted,"This agreement is one of the most important, concrete achievements between the two neighbors in 45 years and represents the most significant bilateral...
Top Secret America: The Garrison State has arrived
A couple of thoughts on Dana Priest and William Arkin's series that began in the Washington Post yesterday. First, this is the type of story that is all but non-existent in our non-stop 24-hour news cycles -- a two-year investigative report that pulls together thousands of bits and pieces of information and carefully assembles them to tell the bigger story of where we have traveled in the past decade. (I see that the story actually bumped CNN's...
What I Ended Up Reading in Between World Cup Matches Abroad
Last month during the Greece/South Korea World Cup game, my eight-year-old son noticed the players speaking to one another in English, and asked me: “Mom, is English the official language of soccer?” As with so many of his astute little queries, I didn’t know the answer at the time. But while in Asia, I read three fabulous books that kept bringing me back to this question and finally not only answered it, but helped me see why it matters.First:...
Hypocrisy watch
Before departing on vacation, Stephen Walt posted about a rift between South Korea and the United States concerning spent nuclear fuel reprocessing. The U.S. is opposed, primarily because plutonium is a byproduct, while South Korea wants to reprocess waste so as to reduce the volume of nuclear refuse from its large-scale atomic energy program.To reduce proliferation fears inherently tied to plutonium production, South Korean policy in this area...
International Justice Day
Today is International Justice Day – at least according to the Coalition for the International Criminal Court. (What?! Aren’t you celebrating?!)It comes at an interesting time. The ICC ruled this past week that the charge of Genocide may be included as part of the allegations against Sudanese President Bashir. Secondly, the ICJ will be ruling next week on Kosovo’s declaration of independence.While both of these may suggest that international...
The IDF’s blog campaign
During my recent trip to Israel, I had the opportunity to talk to a young IDF officer who was assigned as a spokeswoman/public relations specialist for one of the IDF's commands. I told her about Stephanie's recent post on the Gaza flotilla raid and how the Israeli Foreign Ministry quickly tweeted a response to Stephanie about the post. She told me that there is a new effort by both the Foreign Ministry and the IDF to respond rapidly to...
Congratulations Spain!
I've been traveling in the Middle East and Europe for the past month and watched all, or parts of, 15 World Cup games in ten or so cities -- including a kibbutz in northern Israel -- with commentary in at least seven languages. I watched the games --mostly in bars -- with Algerians, Mexicans, Germans, Italians, Palestinians, Israelis, French, Australians, etc.... I also watched kids playing and dreaming of their own World Cup on street corners,...
Fatwas and Football…erm… Soccer (or Bend It Like Osama)
I’ve noticed that there has been little ‘quacking’ (ugh, I finally went there) on the blog on the subject of the World Cup. This might be due to the fact that I think pretty much all of us, regardless of location, are North American where ‘soccer’ is a fabulous summer sport if you are a female university student or a 9 year old. (Actually, that’s not fair – I went to a DC United game last fall and had a blast. It's a well-kept secret that US...