by Daniel McIntosh | 15 Sep 2009 | Featured
A reporter for OpenDemocracy spent the month of August touring China, looking for signs of democratization. He finds more than he bargained for: Indeed, in interviewing people from various organisations and from very different perspectives, I was struck by a consistent undertone of worry about the prospect of a regime change (even a "colour revolution") along the lines of those in the post-Soviet states in the early 2000s - which culminated in...
by Rodger Payne | 15 Sep 2009 | Featured
Recently, I've been reading and mostly enjoying Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World. It is a remarkable book, offering sweeping analysis of all sorts of global trends. Not just anyone could have tackled this project and it is definitely to Zakaria's credit that he has put together a well-written and interesting book about an important topic -- the apparent long-term relative decline of the U.S. and the rise of the "rest" of the world...
by Charli Carpenter | 15 Sep 2009 |
I just finished reading the UN Security Council's latest Cross-Cutting Report on The Security Council's Role in Disarmament and Arms Control; Nuclear Weapons, Nonproliferation and Other Weapons of Mass Destruction. It's an excellent overview for non-experts on the relationship of the UN Security Council to nuclear diplomacy. Background sections cover the history of UNSC's involvement in disarmament and arms control and why it mostly failed...
by Laura Sjoberg | 14 Sep 2009 | Featured
I am overdue on a journal contribution I need to finish today (hopefully, the editors don't read this blog), but couldn't pass this one up ...Referencing an article in The Daily Telegraph called "Men Lose Their Minds When Speaking to Pretty Women," Dan Drezner writes a blog entry on Foreign Policy, "The Trouble with Dames in World Politics," where he, among other things, blames the Cuban Missile Crisis on Jackie Kennedy, expresses concern that...
by Charli Carpenter | 14 Sep 2009 |
Hat tip to President Barack Obama. (The good stuff begins about 10 minutes into the clip.)
by Peter | 14 Sep 2009 |
So, I guess this is goodbye-- for now at least, for a while.Starting tomorrow, I'll be officially joining the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs as an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow. For the past 2 weeks, I've been going through AAAS orientation, a program designed to introduce scientists to Washington.This fellowship process has been quite the experience. I'm in a class of over 180 fellows--all Ph.D.'s in the...
by Laura Sjoberg | 13 Sep 2009 | Featured
I didn't get my local newspaper in Blacksburg, and usually use national sources (the New York Times and Wall Street Journal online, mostly) to get my news. Its been awhile, actually, since I've gotten a "local" newspaper (actually, I think, since the Pensacola News Journal where I grew up) and even longer since I've had to rely on it for news ... I don't have the APSA excuse for not blogging (for the first time in my career, I didn't go)....
by Charli Carpenter | 12 Sep 2009 |
Tantalized by Eric Randolph's glowing review, I watched The Hurt Locker this past week. I can see what Eric means by the film being almost in its own genre - a film about the everyday work of soldiering during an occupation, with no grand narrative about the rightness or wrongness of the war. But in my view, that is it's own grand narrative: a study in what soldiering is becoming, and the implications for soldiers and for society. So I viewed...
by Bill Petti | 12 Sep 2009 | Featured
In a recent report, Garnter proposes that as corporations try to benefit from the growth of social media they will come to rely more and more on employees with formal, advanced training in the social sciences.Gartner Vice President Kathy Harris discusses in some detail four areas of jobs needed in the near future. Though she never really uses the words "social networks" the implication is that most companies aren't really geared toward taking...
by Drew Conway | 11 Sep 2009 |
It is an appropriately gloomy day here in Manhattan, as the city and the country remembers the horror of September 11th, 2001 and attempts to continue to collectively heal. For me, part of that healing process has been trying to understand what happened, and more importantly, how to prevent it from ever happening again. Over the past eight years many others have been moved to investigate and analyze these events, which has lead to a plethora of...
by Charli Carpenter | 9 Sep 2009 |
Joshua Keating at Foreign Policy asks whether North Korea's release of a dam, whose water ended up killing 6 South Koreans Sunday, constituted a "water attack" on the South. I see this as another example of apologies - or lack thereof - making a crucial difference in diplomatic constructions of what an incident "is." Who knows whether this was intentional or what the motivation. North Korea's refusal to apologize will send a message of cruel...
by Charli Carpenter | 9 Sep 2009 |
Courtesy of Wild Ammo.