The Duck of Minerva

Friday Nerd Blogging

by Charli Carpenter

14 October 2011, 0305 EDT

And this week, in problematic-representations-of-indigenous-populations-on-children’s-television, Lucasfilm brings you Nomad Droids:

Well I guess some foreign policy subtext in TV for eight-year-olds is a step up from 99.7% of what’s on American prime-time. Thanks to Clone Wars, my kid is quickly becoming fluent in such concepts as strategic depth, diversionary warfare and humanitarian mission creep. Last week he learned, for example, that real soldiers treat disaster relief as an annoying distraction from their actual job; that, though not bothering to understand what the locals need might backfire, it will mostly backfire on the locals; and crucially, that what appears to be an ecological problem might just be chalkable-uppable to mis-communications between political actors. Everything can be fixed through diplomacy.

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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