The Duck of Minerva

Buena de Mesquita: “Iran Is Moving in a Healthy Direction.”

by Charli Carpenter

29 September 2009, 1219 EDT

Global heavyweights are debating the seriousness of Iran’s missile tests, and the newly acknowledged plant outside Qum; and what to do about it all. In this context, Bruce Buena de Mesquita‘s predictions on Iran, outlined in his new book The Predictioneer’s Game and reiterated on the Daily Show last night, are worth revisiting.

Buena de Mesquita’s computer model, which is said to be considerably more accurate than the CIA, predicts that Iran will stop after getting to the point where they could test a weapon.

As Jon puts it: “The end game is to prove they can, but then they don’t?“

De Mesquita: “Yes.”

Charli Carpenter is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She is the author of 'Innocent Women and Children': Gender, Norms and the Protection of Civilians (Ashgate, 2006), Forgetting Children Born of War: Setting the Human Rights
Agenda in Bosnia and Beyond (Columbia, 2010), and ‘Lost’ Causes: Agenda-Setting in Global Issue Networks and the Shaping of Human Security (Cornell, 2014). Her main research interests include national security ethics, the protection of civilians, the laws of war, global agenda-setting, gender and political violence, humanitarian affairs, the role of information technology in human security, and the gap between intentions and outcomes among advocates of human security.

Charli Carpenter is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She is the author of 'Innocent Women and Children': Gender, Norms and the Protection of Civilians (Ashgate, 2006), Forgetting Children Born of War: Setting the Human Rights
Agenda in Bosnia and Beyond (Columbia, 2010), and ‘Lost’ Causes: Agenda-Setting in Global Issue Networks and the Shaping of Human Security (Cornell, 2014). Her main research interests include national security ethics, the protection of civilians, the laws of war, global agenda-setting, gender and political violence, humanitarian affairs, the role of information technology in human security, and the gap between intentions and outcomes among advocates of human security.

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