The Convention Concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage (“The World Heritage Convention”) entered into force in 1975. The world heritage regime, in effect, produces the shared heritage of humanity. States use their right,...
The Convention Concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage (“The World Heritage Convention”) entered into force in 1975. The world heritage regime, in effect, produces the shared heritage of humanity. States use their right,...
When I first started teaching introduction to international relations, I included a lecture on the use of force in my foreign policy unit. We talked about Art's four uses of force, Schelling's...
Ah, those days when you did not feel guilty for reading something that does not contain the term “poststructuralism” and/or footnotes. Back in my teenage years, I used to devour all the books I...
If you are allergic to, let’s say peanuts, you would always carefully check the packaging of the food you buy: does the factory use them? Can there be traces in the sauce? After an unpleasant...
Three years ago, on this day, the Malaysian Airliner MH17 flight from Amsterdam to Kuala-Lumpur was shot down over Ukraine. 298 people died. In October 2015, the Dutch Safety Board (DSB) concluded that the airliner was downed by a Buk surface-to-air missile launched from pro-Russian separatist-controlled territory in Ukraine. These findings were also confirmed in September 2016 by a Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team (JIT). The Russian government disputes these findings. Let’s go back 3 years to the Russian mass media and examine what passed as "truth" about the crash. One of the first...
This is a guest post from Seva Gunitsky, an associate professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. His book Aftershocks: Great Powers and Domestic Reforms in the Twentieth Century was recently published by Princeton University Press. To understand the roots of the collusion, set aside Putin and follow the money. In the endless pursuit of the Russia-Trump collusion story, we sometimes forget a key element: this whole mess began with money, not with election interference. The connections between Trump and Russia were forged years ago, well before he developed...
Y’all are probably sick and tired of hearing about Russia: hacking, colluding, obstructing, peeing, meddling, trolling, spying... I'm waiting in terror to see what Stephen Colbert has filmed in the Motherland. So far, his mispronouncing of Sergey Kislyak’s name together with fur hat clad ‘Russian hackers’ with vodka and thick accents have not been particularly impressive. To quote Seth Meyers and Amy Poehler, ‘Really?’ Throw in a mail-order bride and we have a full house of Russian stereotypes. Has American TV not been able to come up with anything new since Boris and Natasha? Yes, Russia is...
While the Russia probe is expanding to include naïve 36-year old Harvard graduates, pundits all over the world have been worried about elections in other countries. The massive WikiLeaks dump (pun intended) on Emmanuel Macron’s campaign in France did not work, so the next troublesome case seems to be Germany (the UK is fine, they are already leaving the EU). As Quattrociocchi et al. note, the so-called ‘echo-chambers’ on social media reinforce selective exposure and group polarization, further radicalizing the political debate that is already polarized in the US. With 62% of American adults...
A dilute alcoholic solution of Brilliant Green (Viridis nitentis spirituosa) is a topical antiseptic, effective against gram-positive bacteria, also known under a Russian colloquial name zelyonka. If you grew up in the Soviet Union and ever had chicken pox, zelyonka turned you into a green-spotted leopard for at least a week: it’s hard to get it out of your skin. Brilliant green has, however, some serious safety issues: when ingested it can induce vomiting and contact with eyes can lead to grave injuries, even blindness. This is what a prominent Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny...
With populism on the march across the West in the past 18 months, conventional wisdom suggests this lurch toward nativism will continue. With the Dutch Trump increasing his seats in parliament, Turkey's President stuffing the ballot box to win a referendum taking him closer to full on authoritarianism, the National Front's candidate looking set to get into the second round of Sunday's French election by exploiting a terrorist attack, and Germany's long-time leader seeming tired and mounting a lackluster campaign, by most accounts the liberal international order is in for some additional...
I know most of you are busy watching the all-too-real reality horror show of the 45th administration, but there has been some interesting news coming out of Russia (sorry, no meteorites or Putin's nipples). On Sunday, somehow almost 90 thousand people went out on the streets in 87 cities all over Russia to protest against corruption. The unsanctioned demonstrations were met with brutal police crackdown with around 1000 protesters arrested in Moscow alone. To make matters worse, none of the TV channels reported the disturbances (apart from Russia Today, to be fair). Channel One spent about...
Do you think this person is white? If you are from Europe or North America, you might have said yes. If you are from Russia, you might have described this person as black. Most IR peeps are familiar with the fluid perceptions of whiteness and blackness that exist in the word: Sandor Gilman wrote, for instance, how Irish immigrants in the US in the beginning of the century were often considered black. The irony of blackness could not be more poignant in Russia: the famous Russian Armenian actor Frunzik Mkrtchan whose picture I put above is literally Caucasian, because he comes from the South...