My friend, Stacey Philbrick Yadav, has just posted an interesting take on American policy in Yemen at Foreign Policy. She writes: I've been traveling regularly to Yemen since 2004, conducting research on the relationship between Islamists and leftists in Yemen's opposition parties. Throughout this time, I have maintained correspondence with Yemeni journalists and political activists from a wide range of ideological positions. They are united in...
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Good news on Iran?
Haaretz.com is reporting that Iran is suspending its uranium enrichment program for two months. This news arrives amidst a flurry of other related reports about Iran and its nuclear program.Many political pundits have been blasting the Obama administration for its "total dud" diplomatic efforts towards Iran, noting that the U.S. deadline for Iran to make a deal about uranium enrichment elapsed in December. During the 2008 campaign,...
Sailing up stream….
Last week appeared to be Development Week at Foggy Bottom. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave her long-promised "Development" speech. The next day, Dr. Rajiv Shah was sworn in as the new administrator for USAID. In his speech, he identified four key priorities for his tenure: 1. To improve lives and fight poverty,2. To expand human rights and economic opportunities,3. To build democratic institutions and improve governance 4. To advance...
Gitmo
According to the Department of Defense, many of the captives released from the U.S. prison on Guantánamo Bay "return" to extremist activity -- and the rate is increasing. This is from the LA Times story of January 7: A new report estimates that one-fifth of the detainees who have been released from the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have resumed extremist activity, a Defense Department official said Wednesday, a figure that...
Paul Campos: “Stop Playing Terrorball”
Paul Campos of Lawyers, Guns and Money has an op-ed in the Washington Post Wall Street Journal that everyone should read on how the US government, media and citizenry can stop handing political victories to even the most incompetent of transnational criminals by over-reacting to the supposed "threat" posed by global "terrorism." I like it so much I've reprinted large amounts below:I'm not much of a basketball player. Middle-age, with a shaky...
James Fowler: Formidable Opponent
It's always great to see fellow political scientists on late-night talk shows. Last night it was James Fowler of UC San Diego. This is the guy I blogged about last year when he published an article in a leading political science journal on whether the Colbert Bump was actual or real. (His conclusion: the alleged bump is "more truthy than truth.")But Fowler's main research agenda is social networks. In his interview last night, he discusses the...
Is the jury out on universal jurisdiction?*
The two different countries I call home (Canada and the UK) have recently had to deal with universal jurisdiction in relation to war crimes.First, as I’ve written about here, it has come to light that Canadian officials likely knew that Afghans captured by Canadian forces and subsequently transferred to Afghan prisons were being tortured. Failure to react to such allegations and relevations is a crime under the Third Geneva Convention Relative...
The sources of Uganda’s anti-gay bias
The NY Times ran a story this morning on how three American evangelical Christians influenced the gay death penalty bill now pending in Uganda. While the emphasis in the story is on the influence of the American evangelical Christians, there is a line in the NYTimes article that deserves more attention: Many Africans view homosexuality as an immoral Western import, and the continent is full of harsh homophobic laws. In northern Nigeria, gay men...
The Top 12 Emerging Human Security Issues of the Next Decade
The human security advocacy network - a conglomeration of NGOs, IOs, state ministries, think-tanks, and independent opinion-makers working in the areas of development, human rights, humanitarian affairs, conflict prevention, environmental security and arms control - has generated a lot of new attention to emergent threats to individual freedom from fear and want in the past ten years. As the tag cloud below shows, landmines, child-soldiering,...
Which New Year’s Eve would you rather celebrate?
Dan Drezner and Bill have both flagged Randy Schweller’s new piece in National Interest. I’ve just finished reading the piece and I agree with them – it’s really a depressing read. But, it’s the type of piece that we see periodically – it tries to take stock of the state of the global politics and IR scholars’ understanding of it. In many way, it reads a lot like Mearsheimer’s “Why We Will Miss the Cold War” or Huntington’s “Clash of...
Facebook Back in the Hot Seat
A few weeks ago Facebook unleashed its new Terms of Use on the unsuspecting user community. As anyone with a FB site knows, though the changes were touted as enabling greater user control over personal information, FB's new default settings enabled "Everyone" to view users' information unless users were savvy enough to update their settings - a change that caused the Electronic Privacy Information Center to file a complaint with the Federal...
Susan Strange was (mostly) Right
I just re-read Susan Strange's article, "The Westfailure System" in the Review of International Studies 25, 3 (July 1999). In either early 1999 or late 1998 (depending on the editorial schedule of RIS), she wrote:"I have put the financial failures of the state-based system first because my current research has convinced me that it is the most acute and urgent of the current threats-without-enemies. If we do not find ways to safeguard the world...