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 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 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,...
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...
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...
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...
I've been traveling in the southwest and reading different newspapers than I usually do. As a result, I learned that Phoenix is America's "kidnapping capital." The LA Times published the AP story I saw on December 27:The latest figures show Phoenix had 302 kidnappings in the first 11 months of 2009, when the city recorded an average of 27 abductions each month. The city had reached a 10-year high in 2008 with 359 kidnappings. The expected...
Wow. If the use of non-binary-gender-codes on census forms is an indicator of progressive human rights law, Pakistan has now left the US in the dust: Late on Wednesday, the Supreme Court in Pakistan ordered that the government officially recognize a separate gender for Pakistan's hijra community, which includes transgendered people, transvestites, and eunuchs. The court told the federal government to begin allowing people to identify as hijras...
For my first blog post here at Duck of Minerva, I thought I should stick to one of my areas of experience (if not expertise): Alcohol.The Canadian Press has picked up on the fact that although there are many Canadian wines available at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, there are only three Canadian beers (– and hardly the finest that the landmass north of the 49th has to offer: Molson Canadian, Alexander Keith's Ale or Blue Light.)...
I have now seen Avatar twice, (one in each 'D'), and I can say without spoiling anything that critics like Armand White and Annalee Newitz* are way off base in describing the film as "the corniest movie ever made about the white man’s need to lose his identity and assuage racial, political, sexual and historical guilt." Corny, maybe a little. OK, maybe a lot. But imperialist?According to White:Avatar’s going-native F/X fantasy infantilizes...
From ICanHasCheezburger.com.
I first posted this two years ago; since it's that time of year again, and since I still stand by what I wrote then, I am re-posting. 'Tis the season, and all.Ever since the invention of the InterNet, not a December goes by without some version of this making the rounds of listservs and e-mail chains and the like. I must have received it a dozen times from various sources. It's cute and funny and all, but I must say that I've never been...