One of the more interesting issues raised informally during the time I spent at the Lincoln Center's Emerging Technologies Workshop was the relative likelihood of developments in lethal autonomous robotics leading to fully autonomous armies: that is, eliminating the...
This is what I'm talking about:City University London's Centre for Information Leadership is hosting this free symposium to bring together academics and practitioners from across industry to tackle...
I'm going to delve clumsily into IR Theory here, so I'd be grateful to get some feedback on the question of the 'Realist' minimum.In a fascinating post recently on US-China relations, Stephen Walt...
In a reflective post not long ago, Robert E. Kelly noted:"...we are elated that the Libya operation worked, (against all odds given the Iraq experience and what we know about foreign intervention in...
Are we doing better or worse than in the Great Depression? Are we coming out of it, or still sinking... or, is there worse to come? Should I be frightened?? Recent reports of millions more foreclosures made me wonder what direction we are going in. A couple of things I've been reading recently:Over at Vox, Eichengreen and O'Rourke answer the question on a lot of minds: is this crisis as bad as the Crash and Great Depression of the 1930s? They provide nice graphs of output, trade, and stock markets for both periods. Two things stand out to me: the collapse in trade and stock markets in the...
I’m finding it difficult to usefully add to the debate over the “Guantanamo Lawyers”/"al-Qaida Seven" that has emerged over the last week or so. Basically, the fundamental issue is that people “we” dislike or who have (allegedly) done horrible things are actually entitled to certain fundamental rights under both American and international law – including international law signed and ratified by the US Senate. That this law applies to terrorists has been the subject of several now high profile Supreme Court decisions (notably Hamdan).So the legal issues here, the right to a fair trial (or, in...
Not to worry, the World Cup in South Africa is only 100 days away. It's been six years since FIFA awarded the World Cup to South Africa and there is a lot of excitement about an African nation finally hosting the World Cup and how the event has the potential to be a transcendent event. (I still wonder how things might have been different in the Balkans if the unified Yugoslavia team had defeated Argentina in the 1990 Quarterfinals shoot out and advanced...but I digress...) It's been less than twenty years since the end of the apartheid regime and, if the event goes smoothly, with more than 1...
I, like Laura, am a bit slow off the take regarding post-ISA blogging. In my defence I have a 6-hour jet-lag that was aggravated by United Airlines being successful in severely messing up every single segment of my flight to New Orleans and back. (The friendly skies? More like the unfriendly kick in the... oh forget it.)Certainly one of the highlights for me was the panel (already discussed here, here , here and here) on international relations, academia and blogging. I don’t want to beat a dead horse, but I did want to add my $0.02 (~£0.013) It was great to see Dan Drezner, Stephen Walt,...
I liked Virginia Haufler's post on Canadian Banks, and in a related vein wanted to point out some interesting research on lobbying by the financial industry in the US. In a brief about their latest research posted on VOX EU, Deniz Igan, Prachi Mishra, and Thierry Tressel, three IMF economists, basically conclude that the US financial industry has lobbied its way out of regulation.They note:"The Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 requires lobbying firms and companies with in-house lobbying units to file reports of their lobbying expenditures with the Secretary of the Senate and the Clerk of the...
Recently I assigned my students to identify the nationality of different global companies. The results were interesting. No matter what information they looked at-- from the nationality of CEOs and managers, to the location of most employees-- major global companies had clearly identifiable nationality even when the majority of sales were abroad. Some companies seemed to try to hide their background when marketing abroad--hello, did you know T Mobile is DeutscheTelekom? Most of my students didn't-- but their actual operations remained culturally distinct. This not a new observation (see the...
The legality of the 2003 Iraq War has been back in a big way in the UK over the last few weeks. This, no doubt, is the result of several high-profile figures who were involved in the decision as to use force testifying in front of the Iraq Inquiry.For the uninitiated, the Iraq Inquiry is an independent panel of figures set up “identify lessons that can be learned from the Iraq conflict.” It is often referred to as the Chilcot Inquiry, so named for the chairperson, Sir John Chilcot, and the panel of experts also includes such notable IR/War Studies-type figures as Sir Lawrence Freedman.Last...
Hi. I've been invited to guest blog here at Duck of Minerva for a little while. So I thought I'd introduce myself... I'm Vikash Yadav. I teach Political Science and International Relations at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY. My doctoral research (and first book) was an attempt to apply the framework from Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality to understand the concept of risk and its effects in international financial markets. I have also worked on the political relationship between international financial institutions and low income countries. My current research and...