Like everyone else, I'm still trying to catch up after the Thanksgiving holiday. So I have a quick, kind of speculative post this week. It looks like the distressing saga of Matthew Hedges has finally been resolved. As I wrote about before, Hedges is a grad student in...
Note: this started out as "Morning Linkage" but quickly became an extended comment. I apologize for the poor proofing.Four Americans, including US ambassador Christopher Stevens, were killed in the...
The website e-IR asked me to review how mainstream media have represented radical Islamist media in the past decade, and what this means for the spread of radical discourses more broadly. Here is my...
It would be funny, except that it isn't.Taleban militants operating in Pakistan's Swat region who agreed a peace deal with the government have expanded operations into nearby Buner.Dozens of...
So this past week I traveled to New York to conduct interviews with representatives of the Holy's See's Permanent Obverver Mission to the United Nations as part of my project into norm contestation among global civil society actors during multilateral treaty negotiations. I found the papal diplomats to be informed, open-minded, friendly and intellectually engaged about human rights and human security. But they didn't at all like the idea that I was interviewing them as part of a project on "non-state" influences on UN treaty-making.They imagined I'd be interviewing other governments as well,...