This is a guest post by Theresa Squatrito, Assistant Professor at the London School of Economics, Magnus Lundgren, Postdoctoral Researcher at Stockholm University, and Thomas Sommerer, Associate Professor at Stockholm University. On May 6, 2019, former U.N. High...
To begin with a confession, I have spent far too long contemplating what to write about as my first post, due in no small part to sharing fellow Guest Duck Tom's nerves about joining such formidable...
Hello there! I'm very excited to be blogging here at Duck of Minerva for the next several months, and I'd like to thank all the full-time Ducks for the opportunity! For my first post, I thought I'd...
This past week I was invited to speak as an expert at the United Nations Informal Meeting of Experts under the auspices of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW). The CCW’s purpose is...
Part of the research project that is keeping me too busy to blog involves capturing, coding and visualizing the issue agenda for various transnational networks. Here is a visualization of the core human rights network on the World Wide Web, circa 2008.* (Nodes represent organizational websites and ties represent hyperlinks between them. Node size corresponds to in-degree centrality within the network.)You can click for a larger view.It looks to me as if there are really two networks here: a human rights network and a development network, all tied together conceptually under the rubric of...
Controversial feminist lawyer Catherine MacKinnon titled her latest book Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues. MacKinnon was, of course, referring to a feminist campaign to have women's rights recognized as human rights (see, e.g., the work of Charlotte Bunch) ...but what struck me about this title is the normalcy it implies - like, questioning women's humanity (and thus their eligibility for human rights) is as commonplace as any other international dialogue.Feminist work on human rights has been very diverse - and by no means only a project of Feminist IR. Women, and feminist...
The more I think about it, the more atrocious it is that a three year old burn victim in Pakistan or Libya cannot automatically access morphine. Imagine being such a child's parent, watching her suffer without pain relief. Imagine being a “collateral damage” victim undergoing surgery for shrapnel removal without anesthetic. Or imagine being an earthquake survivor like the Haitian 10-year-old above, having your mangled limb amputated and then trying to recover with no means to manage your pain.Recently I spent some time talking to Jason Nickerson, a PhD candidate in population health at the...
Adam Jones and Augusta del Zotto made this case years ago, and so have I. Glad to note the New York Times has finally taken notice by publishing Lara Stemple's excellent op-ed: AS disturbing new reports of male rape in Congo made clear, wartime sexual violence isn’t limited to women and girls. But in its ongoing effort to eradicate rape during conflict, the United Nations continues to overlook a significant imperative: ending wartime sexual assault of men and boys as well.Sexual violence against men does occasionally make the news: the photographs of the sexual abuse and humiliation of Iraqi...
Clay Shirky has the lead article in this month's Foreign Affairs on social media and world politics. Although both governments and activists both seem to be assuming that the effects are a boon to civil society, Shirky begins by pointing out that the record of such effects on political mobilization is a mixed bag:"The use of social media tools - text massaging, email, photo sharing, social networking and the like - does not have a single pre-ordained outcome... the safest characterization of recent quantitative attempts to answer the question 'do digital tools enhance democracy?' is that...
It hasn't exactly been getting great reviews: the 1982 version had a plump, red thumbs-up rating of 69% on Rotten Tomatoes, whereas the sequel is at a festering, sickly 49%. Most of the bad reviews fall into the "meh" category: all glitz, no story. But there's also push-back by those who see some 'big ideas' embedded in the film. Let me use one articulation of Tron: Legacy's big ideas in particular as my foil - the following is written by a blog commenter at MovieCityNews reacting to a post by David Poland. Murdocdv's comment was then recycled by Poland on its own post which has attracted...
Kevin Bales, President of Free the Slaves, has won the 2011 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. The prize is worth $100,000 this year.The press release describes the award-winning ideas from Ending Slavery, the most recent book published by Bales with University of California Press:In the book, Bales outlines steps to end the enslavement of some 27 million people worldwide. Slavery and human trafficking are tightly interwoven into the modern global economy, so new political and economic policies must be enacted to suppress them, he says.Slavery, illegal in every country but...
While WikiLinks is dumping information from the US military all over the internets, the South African government is taking some rather disturbing steps to ensure that citizens, citizens and pretty much everyone in between will not have the right to access any information deemed a threat to "national security". What kind of information threatens national security? Well, according to the “Protection of Information Bill”, pretty much whatever government (local, regional, national) decides. It’s a dangerously vague bill that could possibly do great harm to South Africa. I don't think I need to...