An interesting story via Laura Rozen, Andrew Sullivan, and Cunning Realist. According to reports, a series of emails and an internal Army memo suggests that US soldiers have used insurgents' wives as leverage in order to get the suspects to surrender. So far, there has been no confirmation that the detentions actually led to the surrender of the insurgents targeted. There is no mention of explicit threats of violence against the wives which...

Mansfield and Snyder were featured on NPR's Morning Edition today. Have a listen.Filed as: Democratization, Democratic Peace

The world is abuzz this morning with the news that the radical muslim group Hamas has apparently won a majority of seats in the recent parliamentary elections in Palestine. The group which in the past has called for Israel to be 'wiped off the map' has apparenlty won a a 53% majority of seats in the parliament. Hamas' victory seems due in no small part to the dissatisfaction on the part of Palestinians with the incumbent government and their...

One of the perennial issues for academics, and perhaps especially for academics studying social phenomena (although I can easily see how this would be of concern for those of my colleagues in the physical sciences as well), is the relationship between the issues and topics that we choose to study and the concerns of politicians, bureaucrats, and the electorate as a whole. This is a perennial issue in part because, whether we teach at public or...

I was going through some of last week's dead tree editions of the NY Times and found this in the January 19 edition:Six former heads of the Environmental Protection Agency, including five who served Republican presidents, said Wednesday that the Bush administration needed to act more aggressively to limit the emission of greenhouse gases linked to climate change.Speaking on a panel that also included the current agency chief, Stephen L....

Peter Beinart writes in the Washington Post (hat tip: Marc Schulman) about cycles of isolationalism. I tend to cringe whenever I read invocations of "political cycles" in American history, so I was pleasantly surprised to read Beinart's comment that:Such theories, of course, lack social scientific rigor; American foreign policy cannot be set to a clock. But cyclical thinking still subtly frames much public discussion. For President Bush, the...

In a speech last week at a nuclear submarine base in Brittany, French President Jacques Chirac signaled a shift in his country's nuclear doctrine (for coverage see here, here, and here; for hilarity, see Chirol over at Coming Anarchy). The speech outlined the reconfiguration of French doctrine which reflects Chirac's concern with ability of regional powers/actors to threaten French strategic concerns. This shift has been in the works for over a...

[Updated 1/23]George H.W. Bush, "Global Message", March 19, 2003:In a free Iraq, there will be no more wars of aggression against neighbors...no more poison factories...no more executions of dissidents...no more torture chambers and rape rooms.Nicholas D. Kristoff, The New York Review of Books, "Genocide in Slow Motion," February 9, 2006:On one of the first of my five visits to Darfur, I came across an oasis along the Chad border where several...

Spread the quacky goodness and vote Duck for "Best New Blog" in the 2005 Koufax Awards [Voting isn't open yet, so check out our competition and be ready to cast your ballot].Patrick and I just wrapped the Mershon leg of the "realism and constructivism" conference. We'll be back to blogging soon. Heck, I'm even thinking of completing my long overdue final installment on balance-of-power theory soon. Please remind me in the future never to...

The United Nations has cancelled the speaking engagement of Pakistani human rights activist Mukhtaran Mai (a.k.a. Mukhtaran Bibi). For those that don't remember, Ms. Mai was sentenced to be gang-raped by a tribal court as punishment for misconduct by her brother. She fought her rapists in court and won, giving the compensation she received to schools in her district. Apparently, the Pakistani government blocked the appearance. The appearance...

This headline today on Yahoo (from AP) made me laugh out loud: "U.S.: Venezuela Overspending on Military."And we were just discussing this kind of American hypocrisy. Venezuela is planning a "buying spree" for military equipment that goes beyond the country's legitimate needs, the State Department said Friday.In recent days, the United States has sought to block proposed sales of military planes and other equipment to Venezuela by Spain and...

Tom, an often-funny blogger at at Functional Ambivalent, today criticizes "liberals" among Kevin Drum's commenters for failing to respond to a direct question Kevin asked concerning the US attack in Pakistan last week. Here's the question from the popular blog: For the sake of argument, let's assume that we had pretty good intelligence telling us that a bunch of al-Qaeda leaders were in the house we bombed. And let's also assume that we did...