Christopher Clary on his new book, which looks at why international rivalry is a hard habit to break.
Christopher Clary on his new book, which looks at why international rivalry is a hard habit to break.
This week has seen a number of key events and crises in global politics that have made crystal clear once again the careening mess that is US foreign policy under the current administration. The...
This World Politics in a Time of Populist Nationalism (WPTPN) guest post is written by Nikhil Kalyanpur, a PhD student in Government at Georgetown University. He researches...
Editor's note: this post originally appeared on my personal blog. It contains some links to posts that appeared here at the Duck. 1. An interview with Jim Fearon about Ukraine. Lots of good stuff...
Good morning Ducks, here are your links from South Asia... (I am not even going to pretend I know what's going on in the Ukraine, Syria, Somalia, or Venezuela. I'll stick to what I sort of know...). Vasundhara Sirnate at The Hindu writes passionately in defence of the offensive. While Indian liberals will (rightfully) continue to be upset at Penguin India's capitulation to the so called "offended" feelings of a small and obscure group of Hindu fanatics, the liberals fail to realize that the increasing pressure to censor and protect the sentiments of various religious communities is actually...
Today's thought experiment: A foreign national is killed in your state, igniting emotional protests and a road blockade by members of his community. Your state is almost entirely economically dependent on tourism. There's standard boilerplate for these events, right? You express regret, you pledge to investigate the murder, you vow that locals who violently attacked protesters will also be brought to justice. Now imagine that it was a Nigerian national who had been killed. And the death may have been linked to rival drug gangs fighting over territory. Does the picture change? Recent events...
Why, yes that is the Indian Foreign Minister, Salman Khurshid, and Norway's Foreign Affairs Minister and Political Scientist, Espen Barthe Eide, in Svalbard. Are they trying to tell Duck fans something? [Discuss]
The world has payed attention to the gang-rape of a young woman (her name has not been made widely public) in Delhi and her struggle to survive over the last few weeks. The reports of the brutal incident on December 16th broke through the national news of India and set waves of reports through the rest of the world. The sheer violence, randomness, and horror of it seemed to fixate the globe. Now, as we learn that this woman's struggle to survive after multiple surgeries, cardiac arrest, and evidence of brain damage has ended, there seems to be an attempt to shift this story back into...
Two years ago, Der Spiegel published an audio recording of secret negotiations involving many of the world's most important leaders meeting together on Friday, December 18, 2009, during the Copenhagen climate summit:The world's most powerful politicians were gathered in the "Arne Jacobsen" conference room in Copenhagen's Bella Center, negotiating ways to protect the world's climate. US President Barack Obama was perched on the edge of a wooden chair with blue upholstery, talking to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The blue turban of Indian Prime...
So the US is supposedly going to pivot to Asia and start worrying more about China. This makes sense (which is probably why we won’t do it). The Middle East has become a pretty terrible sinkhole of American power. Increasingly the verdict on the war on terrorism is negative, and we should probably retrench from the Middle East (but we won’t because of the religious right’s interest in the region). Mearsheimer argued that if it weren’t for 9/11 we probably would have focused on China a lot earlier. Kaplan sketched how the US would defeat China in a war. I argued a few years ago, at the height...
Guest Post by Joel OestreichA few days ago I met the woman in the attached photograph. Her name is Karima. She is a college graduate who was born a male and, at 21, had gender reassignment surgery. Some time later she entered the “Miss Transgender India” contest and took fifth place. Her boyfriend, out of jealousy, set her on fire (her neck, torso, and upper arms show terrible scars) and broke her leg so badly that she can no longer stand unassisted.After that experience, Karima joined a group of “hijra”. In India, hijra are communities of transgendered people who identify as women or who...
The term "Indo-Pacific" has been used since the mid-seventies, mainly to refer to a biological ecosystem. In the last few years, however, "Indo-Pacific" has come to describe a set of interrelated maritime security challenges from the East China Sea to the Arabian Sea -- particularly as India's Navy makes forays into the South China Sea and China seeks to protect its supply routes through the Indian Ocean. But the geopolitics brought into focus by this "45 degree tilt" of the map is not restricted to India and China; it also includes the US, Australia, Japan, and the rising powers of...