Steve Walt has a challenge: ...who are the most amusing, entertaining, or witty writers in the field of international relations and foreign policy? I don't mean books or articles that are "funny" because they are wildly off-base; I mean scholars who are a joy to read...
Unidentified ‘British security officials’ are telling journalists there is a possibility that sections of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) could attack next Friday’s royal wedding in London. At an...
Nobody has come close to explaining how strategic narratives work in international relations, despite the term being banded about. Monroe Price wrote a great article in the Huffington Post yesterday...
India appears to be continuing to shift its West Asia policy away from a once budding partnership with Iran, which aimed among other things to stabilize Afghanistan. It is rumored that in late...
I have already posted at the Duck and also at my blog on the spat between Tom Ricks and Peter Feaver. Today, Feaver responded to Ricks. I don't want to get into the he said/he said debate. I just want to raise one point and then develop it a bit:Feaver is not really doing social science here. He is seeking to explain why a particular decision happened, but he is missing a huge opportunity to develop a general understanding of Presidential behavior about the deployment of troops. He is only focused on the surge, and his narrative suggests that Bush was making some good, tough decisions...
Part 3 (of 3) ...In concluding, Elshtain characterizes my essay as “overreach,” “hyper-theorizing,” and “prosaic,” arguing that (like “the entire post-structural arsenal”), “when you get down to the nitty-gritty, things slip through your fingers.”Its true that my essay discusses more than it could ever back up – because the essay is not a research essay or an original work, so much as it is an accounting for, and asking for recognition for, hundreds of books and thousands of articles that provide evidence for the points mentioned in it which are categorically ignored in Elshtain’s discussion...
We also talk about Libya, R2P, Wikileaks, gender, and why Dan should give critical theory a second chance despite how they left things. I do feel compelled to explain the weirdness around 21:20. We had a tech fail (I blame the Cylons) and fixing it disrupted my original plan to cite my co-blogger Vikash Yadav on some very important insights in this post. So I asked Sang Ngo at BHTV to splice in a clip I recorded afterwards, making the shout-out. He obliged me, though despite his techno-wizardry it didn't turn out quite as I'd hoped only because I was rather more sloshed at the end than in...
Eric Posner had a recent piece in The National Interest on the concept of "lawfare," in which he appears to define "lawfare" as efforts to undermine powerful states' foreign policy goals by holding them accountable to international norms (he lumps Wikileaks and Human Rights Watch together as two such entities), then to say that NGO activity in this area isn't really "lawfare," (well duh) and then goes on to say (conflating NGO activity with lawfare) that actually, the non-state sector is so powerless that really, states like the US shouldn't worry too much about all this "lawfare."Lawfare is...
Elshtain, before characterizing my article as a “massive shopping list” of “feminists argue,” “feminists claim,” etc. (i.e., as the critical literature review that it is and she forgot to do before writing her initial article), “engages” my questions about her approach to each of Waltz’s three images, and her finding that gender would not change how we think of any of them.Though she characterizes my work as failing “to grapple in a theoretically sophisticated way with the Waltzian inheritance,” doing that inheritance justice requires it engage with ideas that have evolved in the last 50...
So President Obama has his own doctrine now, because Wolf Blitzer tells us so. It is basically what Ross Douhat of the New York Times called the “liberal way of war” in a column on March 20. Libya is the “beau ideal of a liberal internationalist intervention” – humanitarian, multilateral and limited. This is the same columnist who just six weeks before called claimed that the President’s “foreign policy has owed far more to conservative realpolitik than to any left-wing vision of international affairs.” So which is it? Is Obama a liberal internationalist or a realist, seeing as the two are...
So this is my first foray into this brave new world of blogging, at the invitation of Charli and others at the Duck of Minerva. I think my main credential is having called Dan Drezner something profane at a workshop in Montreal, which is to say, my outspoken personality. What I exactly said to him said escapes me, but I suppose that same limited memory speaks for my potential as a blogger as well. For the record, I do not even own a cell phone that can text and I just learned what an RSS feed is, or at least I think I did. And Charli taught me how to hyperlink, which I am very excited about,...
If I read him correctly, Armed Liberal thinks that I advanced an argument for intervening in Libya and that this makes some people who opposed the Iraq War a bunch of hypocrites.Or that my description of Obama's justifications are accurate and that those justifications don't sufficiently distinguish Libya from Iraq.I'm not entirely sure. Probably because I'm still kind of sick and I'm very tired. Regardless, AL raises some key issues after quoting my post:That kind of thing makes liberal hawks get all starry eyed. But what makes Libya different than most of the other places where tyrannical...