Over the past decade, I've written a couple of book chapters about the use of the internet by transnational political activists. Environment, human rights, and peace organizations, for example, utilize the internet to communicate instantly with thousands of like-minded people around the world. Technology helps overcome resource mobilization costs for social movements.This use of the web generally helps progressive organizations promote their...

As I've discussed before, the current incarnation of "al-Qaeda" appears - at least based upon public documents - to be more of a diverse movement than a single organization. Indeed, "al-Qaeda" is, in some respects, linked together by the claims of particular groups to represent "al-Qaeda" and by the tendency of many western governments, pundits, and ordinary individuals to label any militant Islamicist terrorist attack as an act of "al-Qaeda."...

Writing in Slate, William Saletan argues that Al-Queda's strategy is to "destroy democracy from within."Bin Laden's whole game plan is to turn the people of the democratic world against their governments. He thinks democracies are weak because their people, who are more easily frightened than their governments, can bring those governments down.As Saletan puts it earlier in the article:In April 2004, Bin Laden told Europeans, "Vigilant people do...

Can someone give me a good reason why Michael Totten's latest essay is any better than his first published piece? Because, for the life of me, I can't understand what the point of the thing is.Totten argues that Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon is a good precedent for a future US withdrawal from Iraq. The reason? It undermined Hezbollah and has led to a general improvement in Israel's strategic position in Lebanon. Putting aside whether that is...

Like Rodger, I've been reluctant to write anything substantive about the London bombings until we have better information about precisely what happened, and who was involved. Nevertheless, I think some conditional comments are probably in order.For those of you who haven't seen it, John Ikenberry posted a terrific email from Mick Cox - a senior international-relations scholar at the London School of Economics – about the bombings.Rodger's own...

The academic wing of the blogsphere has seen a fair amount of angst, anger, and hand-wringing over the article in the Chronicle for Higher Education, "Bloggers Need not Apply". The anonymous rant, written under the pseudonym "Ivan Tribble" (ah, the irony!), is chock full of stupidiousness goodness. Dan Drezner, Robert Farley, the Bitch herself, and countless others who I might be aware of if I weren't blogging without the benefit of easy...

Prisons are schools of crime. Put a lot of socially deviant people together and they teach each other new tricks. Social scientists studying prisons have been making this argument for decades. I state this from memory: the high school debate topic in 1976-77 (the year I began debating) was on "penal reform."It is widely accepted by both supporters and opponents of the war that Iraq has served as something of a magnet for jihadists (even if many...

While we're all digesting the barbaric bombings in London, and waiting for more information on which to base analysis, I thought I'd share one of the stranger spam emails I've received lately.dhn2，您好！ Honorable American friends,How do you do?I am a Chinese students of Moslem people university .I have a new idea on psychology ,concerning Hitler.I hope you can pass the important points of the theories on to the experts who study domestic...

Patrick Jackson and Peter Mandaville co-authored a terrific chapter for Iver Neumann's and my edited book on "Harry Potter and International Relations."Okay, you can stop laughing at us now. We all had fun writing the volume and it does, actually, have some academic merit.Anyway, the point I was going to make is this:Patrick and Peter have some very interesting things to say about the politics of translation involved in the Harry Potter books,...

I've already made myself look stupid once today, so I figure: why not have another go?When I was a PhD student at Columbia, I taught in the Contemporary Civilization program. Teaching in CC was, without a doubt, the best experience of my educational career. Not only was it just generally a good time - getting to know students, getting to watch them develop over an entire year, teaching the "classics" - but it gave me an excuse to reread...

From Political Wire:Many Democratic fans of the Washington Nationals are buying baseball capswith an alternate "DC" logo instead of the more common cursive "W" because it reminds them of the current occupant of the White House, according to the Washington Post."During the design process, a baseball spokeswoman said, nobody made the connection to a certain political figure, for whom the same 23rd letter of the alphabet is a down-home nickname."I...

Brad DeLong has an interesting post on "Wilhelmine China". In a recent Wall Street Journal Greg Ip editorial Ip and Neil King, Jr. take issue with Brad's analogy between the UK and the US in the nineteenth century. Brad quotes them:Brad DeLong, an economic historian at the University of California at Berkeley, sees a useful parallel in Britain's policy toward the emerging industrial colossus of the United States in the 19th century.... As late...