I remember well the first time I ever encountered the concept of "fair trade": it was on a poster in the cafeteria of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Bonn, where I spent time during the summer of 2002 doing research in the "Archives of Social Democracy" for my first...
Everyone knows that there are 9 planets:Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Plutowhich you remember by saying My Very Eager Mother Just Served Us Nine Pickels (or some...
Dan encouraged me to mention a new book that some Duck readers might find interesting, Hitting First: Preventive Force in U.S. Security Strategy (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), edited by...
"We're talking a whole lot worse than Three Mile Island," he said. "If an insider knows where the target sets are, in other words, the way to damage the reactor or to blow a hole in the spent fuel...
A number of weblogs have linked to Elliot Cohen's Sunday Op-Ed in the Washington Post, "A Hawk Questions Himself." Cohen defends the basic rationale for the war, but slams the administration for its poor implementation of the Iraq occupation. Key quotation:But a pundit should not recommend a policy without adequate regard for the ability of those in charge to execute it, and here I stumbled. I could not imagine, for example, that the civilian and military high command would treat "Phase IV" -- the post-combat period that has killed far more Americans than the "real" war -- as of secondary...
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 causes, typically in the face of well-funded corporate and national political opponents.Of course, the technology has a dark side as well -- and this...
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." The latter groups' rhetoric may serve the interests of those who want to represent the War on Terror as a "classic" sort of war against a coherent...
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 not allow their politicians to tamper with their security" by pursuing policies that provoke al-Qaida attacks. "Injustice is inflicted on us and on...
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 true, I simply don't understand how:1. Anyone can claim that the cases are remotely comparable;2. Anyone can write an entire article on the putative...
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 post on what the London bombings say about the flypaper rationale for the Iraq War is consistent with what a lot of other bloggers are saying,...
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 internet access, have already done excellent jobs of mocking the writer.Really, the article reads like precisely the kind of bad blog rant the author...
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 allied Iraqis are also nationalist insurgents). Conservative "flypaper theory" embraces this idea. Supporters argue that it is better to confront...