by Dan Nexon | 17 Jun 2009 |
Now this is pretty damn interesting:Researchers were scratching their heads earlier today at a meeting convened by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) over puzzling results from last month's nuclear test by North Korea. While the test produced a clearly recognizable seismic signal that was picked up by CTBTO's worldwide network of sensors, the organization's atmospheric detectors failed to pick up a whiff of the...
by Peter | 17 Jun 2009 |
As the incredible events in Iran unfold--in the streets of Tehran and on Twitter--the obvious question is: is this the 'Green Revolution' or something else for which we don't have a pre-fab category.I would call your attention to two outstanding posts that give a very good insight into what to watch for. The unifying theme was perhaps best articulated by an anonymous Iranian commentator at Salon: "Legitimacy, much debated by social scientists,...
by Dan Nexon | 16 Jun 2009 |
Some comments from a friend of Iranian extraction, who kindly agreed to allow me to repost them here.As someone who has family members primarily outside Tehran and who has been following the revolt via them, I can say that what drives everything, that intensifies protest, that prevents a calming down of anger is the very clamping down on all press that the conservatives immediately mobilised and which they thought would be effective in...
by Randy Waterhouse | 16 Jun 2009 |
The news yesterday that the Iranian Guardian Council has ordered what amounts to an inquiry into certain disputed ballots may at first glance appear as a positive development. However, it is not at all clear that simply recounting certain ballots is going to truly reconcile the apparent disparity between the expected results and the actual results. I would posit that right now you have the leadership in Iran scrambling to send signals both...
by Charli Carpenter | 16 Jun 2009 |
... a mechanism existed by which citizens of countries around the world could weigh in on the elections of a particular country, proportional to that country's impact on their country's politics, as computed by some impartial international authority, and actually have their opinions count for something?
by Dan Nexon | 16 Jun 2009 |
I apparently missed the memo, because I only just discovered that the right-wing chattering class is accusing the Obama Administration of "moral cowardice" because it won't hand Ahmadinejad and his associates a rhetorical loaded gun to use against the opposition.I don't know what's most annoying about this kind of accusation.1. Is it the narrow parochialism of people who just don't understand that some foreign populations react poorly to the...
by Dan Nexon | 16 Jun 2009 |
From a recent article on social-science methodology:For example, gravity is a trivial necessary cause of revolution, because gravity is simply always present regardless of whether or not a revolution happens.Clearly, not everyone in my field is a science-fiction fan.nb: someone has suggested to me that the authors mean "revolution" as in "Venus revolves around the Sun." But gravity is certainly not a non-trivial cause of such revolution; given...
by Dan Nexon | 15 Jun 2009 |
Today's rally in Tehran was, by all accounts, truly massive. Now the BBC reports the security forces pro-Ahmadinejad militia members opened fire on at least some of its participants. I may have been premature in my assessment of the regime's ability to disrupt collective mobilization against it by targeting vectors of communication among members of the active opposition. With a united opposition still capable of turning out large numbers of...
by Dan Nexon | 15 Jun 2009 |
Today Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordered an investigation into allegations of vote fraud in the presidential election as "tens of thousands" of pro-Mousavi protesters took to the streets in a so-far peaceful march. The march suggests that despite the government's extensive attempts to disrupt counter-regime mobilization, opposition leaders and ordinary people are making headway in coordinating their activities. I still...
by Dan Nexon | 15 Jun 2009 |
Mark Beissinger, in a fantastic article entitled "Structure and Example in Modular Political Phenomena: The Diffusion of Bulldozer/Rose/Orange/Tulip Revolutions" (abstract), develops an account of what he terms "modular revolutions":In the study of collective action, the notion of modularity has often been applied to the borrowing of mobilizational frames, repertoires, or modes of contention across cases. The revolutions that have materialized...
by Randy Waterhouse | 14 Jun 2009 |
Nate analyzes some statistical analysis claiming to show fraud in Friday's elections. Short story, he is not buying the analysis (as the results are mostly an artifact of how the numbers were released), nor is he discounting the possibility that it occurred (which, I would say, is more than reasonable).Rob Farley links to a nice summary regarding what's in the air regarding the dimensions of the 'political coup'. Part of this, if true, shows an...
by Dan Nexon | 13 Jun 2009 |
I agree with Josh Tucker that Iran doesn't really fit the major categories of regime-type au currant in comparative politics, but, as I also suggest in comments, we should only lose sleep over that if we treat analytic types as filing boxes for cases rather than, say, as ideal-typifications. Still, if the analysis I'm seeing from reliable sources (and I, like Randy, have no idea what to make of the election outcome in Iran), it does seem that...