by Charli Carpenter | 21 Oct 2009 |
Human Rights Watch founder Robert Bernstein lit a fire under human rights activists yesterday with his NYTimes op-ed yesterday, criticizing the organization for its focus on Israel rather than more autocratic regimes in the Middle East.His argument is really about organizational mandate and issue selection: faced with the need to select among the many abuses competing for intention, how should a group like Human Rights Watch prioritize its...
by Jon Western | 19 Oct 2009 |
Could Afghanistan get any messier? I'd like to have anyone advocating McChrystal's recommendations explain to me how this would work... From the New York Times "Audit Said Likely to Show Karzai has 48 Percent of Vote":Mr. Karzai’s campaign officials have complained about the work of the five-member panel, saying that foreigners were unfairly influencing its outcome. And Mr. Karzai himself indicated this weekend that he might oppose the results,...
by Charli Carpenter | 19 Oct 2009 |
Much was made over the weekend of 14 gang deaths in Rio, host of the 2016 Olympics, forcing Brazil onto the defensive. I wonder if the same attention would have been given to the following news story from last week, had Chicago won the bid:Community activists said the recent murder of a Fenger High School honor student exposes a problem many teens face every day: safe passage to and from school. “I wonder how many more teens will be murdered...
by Charli Carpenter | 16 Oct 2009 |
... but for the fact that, though security specialists can theorize the millitarization of cyberspace they cannot manage to provide wireless access at their otherwise excellent academic conferences.Will my IPhone be sufficient to the task? Stay tuned.8:25 am PST: Geostrategy and Post-Arctic World panel, James Manicom draws interesting links between nationalism and EEZs. Offshore territorial disputes in the Arctic & Spratlys are less about...
by Jon Western | 16 Oct 2009 |
There has been a lot of criticism of President Obama's decision making style in the last couple of weeks. Last week, Dan Balz had this description: The president, according to one official, came to last week's meeting with his top advisers armed with a list of questions, carefully written down in his precise handwriting, that were designed to generate a thorough airing of the choices available and the underlying analysis behind them.So far so...
by Charli Carpenter | 15 Oct 2009 |
Cleitus the Black has left a long comment in the thread about my Georgia War report commentary that requires a response longer than I can give there. (For someone who appears to be on permanent hiatus from his/her own blog, CTB certainly seem to find time to leave lengthy dissertations in comments on other people's...)CTB asks:"What is the international standard for an 'acceptable' number of Russian (or American, etc) citizens living in a...
by Bill Petti | 14 Oct 2009 |
For those that have not yet heard, the Nobel Prize for Economics (actually named the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel) was awarded this year to two recipients, one of whom--Elinor Ostrom--is a Political Scientist. As Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution notes:It's a nod in the direction of social science, rather than economics per se. It's another homage to the New Institutional Economics and also to Law and...
by Drew Conway | 13 Oct 2009 |
I have alluded to the work of Jason Lyall on the use of indiscriminate violence in counterinsurgency in the past. Briefly, Lyall's paper (recently published in JCR) examines how the Russian army used targeted and non-targeted shelling in Chechnya through a pseudo-natural experiment. The paper is fascinating, however, I always had two major issues with it; first, Lyall claims randomization and thus indiscriminate violence through the "harass and...
by Charli Carpenter | 12 Oct 2009 |
I have a commentary at the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty website today on the EU's Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Conflict in Georgia. It expands on my earlier remarks about the gap between the report's findings and the political spin: "Those who read the entire report will find it is a masterpiece of legal and evidentiary analysis. The authors have painstakingly synthesized multiple branches of international law with...
by Charli Carpenter | 11 Oct 2009 |
See many other zombie roadsigns at Interbent.
by Charli Carpenter | 10 Oct 2009 |
Yes, the other big news story of the day. (OK, of yesterday.)
by Rodger Payne | 9 Oct 2009 |
According to the Nobel website, the Peace Prize is supposed to be awarded annually to "the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses".In 2009, the Norwegian selection committee decided that the most deserving person is Barack Obama. Frankly, I'm a little surprised.Yes, I was pleased in April when the...