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...
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I wonder if he’s got facebook?
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...
What I Learned At Nerd Camp
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...
A Rock in the River
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...
Coalition of the Unwilling: Final Edition?
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...
Indian Pro-Americanism
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...
The Danger of Data without Theory
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...
Smart Bombing War Criminals While Avoiding Civilians
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...
How About Some Collateral Damage Control?
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...
Could Simple Automated Tools Help Wikileaks Protect Its Afghan Sources?
Julian Assange has a problem. When pressed by human rights organizations to redact any current or future published documents because they too feared the effects on Afghan civilians, he reportedly replied that he had no time to do so and "issued a tart challenge for the human rights organizations themselves to help with 'the massive task of removing names from thousands of documents.'" Leaving aside his alleged claims about the moral...
Web 2.0 and the IR Profession
Dan Drezner and I have a new essay in International Studies Perspectives on the ways in which user-generated technologies are impacting the discipline of IR. Here's the abstract:The International Relations (IR) profession has not fully taken stock of the way in which user-driven information technologies—including Blogger, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Wikipedia—are reshaping our professional activities, our subject matter, and even the...
That’s President Timberlake to You!: Which Rock Stars Should Rule the World?
After hearing that former Fugee and musical star Wyclef Jean is running to be the President of Haiti (despite not having lived there for decades and apparently not actually speaking French very well), I got to thinking – what other musical super stars could run as leaders to help fix the nations of the world? In what way could Lady Gaga help with nation-building projects? Could Paul McCartney advise the World Bank in any way (other than being...