by Bill Petti | 7 Dec 2009 |
A while back I started reading The Fat Tail, a book about political risk by Eurasia Group's Ian Bremmer (who also pens The Call for Foreign Policy) and Preston Keat, but couldn't really get into it. I recently picked it back up and have been plowing through. I am reserving my final judgment until I've had a chance to complete it. However, one area has already irked me enough that I wanted to post a (rather long) comment: their treatment of...
by Jon Western | 7 Dec 2009 |
A group from MIT won DARPA's recent balloon challenge. In case you missed it, DARPA placed ten 8-foot red balloons around the country on Friday and issued a challenge to groups to be the first to identify the correct location of all of them. The winning group received $40k.Here's how DARPA defined the challenge:a competition that will explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wide-area team-building,...
by Charli Carpenter | 3 Dec 2009 |
It may come as a surprise to you that, having spent most of my career in a policy school, I have never taught a doctoral seminar surveying the field of IR theory. Until now. Frankly, I'm pretty daunted by trying to squeeze the empirical, substantive, methodological, epistemological and theoretical complexity of the entire field into a semester. I've settled on making sure they have a basic foundation on which to begin the IR comp reading list:...
by Charli Carpenter | 3 Dec 2009 |
Blogging will be light over the next few days as I'm traveling to conduct focus groups with global civil servants drawn from the network of organizations working broadly in the area of human security, to figure out why some issues resonate and others fall through the cracks in these networks. Before I disappear, I thought I'd draw readers' attention to a new human security campaign just taking off, to get your hunches as to whether it has what...
by Charli Carpenter | 2 Dec 2009 |
Foreign Policy covers "the world's reaction" to Obama's West Point speech last night on his troop increase in Afghanistan, but their sole representation of the Afghani reaction is a menacing quote from a Taliban spokesman Qari Yousuf Ahamdi. Al-Jazeera has a better look at the varied response within Afghanistan. The NY Daily News has a round-up of reactions from service-personnel. Rob Farley's discussion with Matthew Duss on Bloggingheads.tv...
by Rodger Payne | 1 Dec 2009 |
Trita Parsi, who heads the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), has won the 2010 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. The prize is worth $200,000.The press release describes the award-winning ideas from Parsi's Yale University Press book: Improving relations between Iran and Israel is the key to achieving lasting peace in the Middle East, says the winner of the 2010 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving...
by Daniel McIntosh | 1 Dec 2009 |
Serbia is going to the World Court today to ask for an advisory opinion on the independence of Kosovo. The US and most of the EU has recognized a new Kosovar state; Russia, Serbia, and most of the rest of the world has not. The Serbian Foreign Minister observed that the decision to go to court marked a "paradigm shift...the first time in the history of the Balkans that somebodyhas decided to resolve an issue of significance using exclusively...
by Charli Carpenter | 30 Nov 2009 |
60 Minutes ran an excellent expose on conflict minerals in the Congo last night. You can see some of it here:Watch CBS News Videos OnlineGood coverage of an under-reported area of the world. It left me with two thoughts: First, via Facebook, my colleague Virginia Haufler suggests this story shows that corporations rather than states are running the show in issue areas such as conflict minerals - both as trouble-makers and potential governors....
by Bill Petti | 28 Nov 2009 |
This week, the government of Dubai decided to delay payment on the tens of billions of dollars that it's Dubai World holding owes to various creditors (UBS speculates as much as $80B). Dubai World is the vehicle through which the state has invested heavily in various real estate projects around the world. In order to fund the expansive projects and investments, the government sought billions in debt to fuel their initiatives.By delaying payment...
by Charli Carpenter | 27 Nov 2009 |
As a once-a-year-antidote to my usual posts on human (in)security, today let me briefly note a few positive news stories about which we should all be thankful this season:1) Despite the recession, burglaries are down 30% in major US cities. I am thankful for this, and for the spirit of sharing, simplicity and honesty that unites people during hard times.2) Political leaders may not have figured out how to do it yet, but protecting the planet we...
by Charli Carpenter | 25 Nov 2009 |
According to CNN, administration officials just announced that after a "review" of US landmine policy, they will maintain the policy of previous administrations in refusing to sign the Ottawa treaty. According to State Department spokesperson Ian Kelly:"We made our policy review and we determined that we would not be able to meet our national defense needs nor our security commitments to our friends and allies if we sign this...
by Charli Carpenter | 25 Nov 2009 |
Jon recently blogged about humanitarian law and violence in video games. Last month two Swiss NGOs published a 46-page report on the topic, examining a number of popular game for their laws-of-war content, finding them lacking and proposing industry-wide norm change: The aim of the study is to raise public awareness among developers and publishers of the games, as well as among authorities, educators and the media about virtually committed...