After Stephanie's posts, I watched a few old episodes of Yes, Minister (and why I love Netflix). Hung parliament or not, Sir Humphrey's British diplomacy is on the verge of success....
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Peace Settlements May Do More Harm Than Good.
This is according to a new policy brief out from the Belfer Center at Harvard, in which Monica Duffy Toft details a study of 137 civil wars fought from 1940-2007. Toft finds that more civil wars are ending in negotiation these days than in stalemate or in victory by one side over the other, possibly reflecting the diplomatic norms promulgated across the globe by the conflict prevention sector. But:Does the trend toward negotiations correlate...
America’s resource curse
With much of the country focused on the oil disaster in the Gulf, it's clear that America's energy policy is a wreck. My native state of North Dakota is booming from a major oil find. But, it too, is realizing the costs and curse of oil. The Bismarck Tribune is running an excellent series on the changing landscape of western North Dakota and worth a read.
Watching Hunger
I finally took the time (and found the courage) to watch Steve McQueen's "Hunger" (2008). It is the story of the events that led to the 1981 Irish hunger strike at Maze Prison in which Bobby Sands and nine other men died. The film is hauntingly beautiful from an aesthetic standpoint and horrifying intellectually. There are very few films which actually merit the adjective "powerful," this is one of them. (I am still processing this film in my...
Threat inflation: intergalactic edition
Should IR scholars worry about material threats emanating from outside the confines of earth? IR scholars Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall sort of tackled that question in a 2008 article in the journal Political Theory. They discussed the "UFO taboo," which essentially prohibits "the authoritative public sphere" from "taking UFOs seriously." Dan gave the scholarly response some attention at the time.In any event, here's a summary of the Wendt...
Headlines
It is all a matter of how you spin it I guess:1. "Pentagon Report Shows Afghanistan Violence Up 87 Percent, Support for Karzai Low" Fox News, 29 April 2010.2. "Pentagon says Instability has 'Leveled Off'" Washington Post, 29 April 2010.3. "Encouraging trends in Afghanistan despite rise in violence" CNN, 29 April 2010.
The Johnny Foreigner’s Guide to the UK Election Part III – Cursing old ladies edition
I’ve been getting surprisingly decent feedback on these posts. Some of my colleagues at work (who know more about democracy and elections than I do) have said that they felt that they were not entirely wrong or embarrassing so I’ve decided to stick with it until it’s all over next week – and then get back to blowy-uppy-thingies after 6 May.So what did we see and/or learn in the last leader’s debate on foreign policy last week?My first...
Anyone have any old drachmas?
Is this the end of the grand Eurozone experiment? I have to admit that I've had a general feeling for the past couple of months that the Germans would, in the end, cough up a bail-out package for Greece because of a sense that there is no real alternative. But, despite the fact that Angela Merkel finally appears to be asserting herself, now I'm really not sure how it will end. Rumors are swirling that Portugal and Spain will also need bailouts...
Professor Fred Halliday
I was alerted this morning to the death of Professor Fred Halliday. Halliday, who specialized in the Middle East and was very much a legend around the London School of Economics. I was fortunate enough to be in one of the last classes of MSc students who sat through his IR theory lectures. These classes were a very strange tour de force – mixed with anecdotes of Professor Halliday’s meeting foreign leaders, intellectuals and peppered with...
“Step One to a messy divorce”
Sorry I've been out of the loop for a month or so -- I volunteered to lead a search committee for the head of a local organization and I'm just now catching my breath. (Note to self: Volunteering is really hard work and takes a ton of time...)So, I opened the New York Times this morning and notice that Africa's largest country may be on the brink of splitting apart after the country's presidential elections earlier this month. The rivals, Omar...
“If You Want to Change the World, Change the Armies.”
I finally saw Men Who Stare at Goats this weekend. A significant number of reviews from last year when it came out reference the epigram to the film, "More of this stuff is true than you think." However in my mind, the most important quote in the film is the one above. If you try to read this film through any other lens - pacifism, spy culture, truth v. fiction re. the paranormal - it doesn't work very well. That's why a lot of reviewers either...
Brutality and Counter-insurgency
Recently, while discussing the war in Afghanistan with a conflict studies program in the mid-west, I had a rather odd debate with a leftist professor who was devil's advocating what he claimed was a "neo-conservative" position (based on some of his recent interaction with naval officers and RAND researchers).His main argument revived the "stabbed in the back" hypothesis from the Vietnam era. The argument essentially posits that...