Found this baby while prepping slides for my "Battlestar Galactica and Civil-Military Relations" panel presentation at ISA-Northeast conference next week. Happy Friday.
Friday Nerd Blogging
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Found this baby while prepping slides for my "Battlestar Galactica and Civil-Military Relations" panel presentation at ISA-Northeast conference next week. Happy Friday.
On Friday, I gave some remarks in Dallas, Texas to a group of young leaders from different professions as part of the Next Generation Project organized by the Strauss Center for International...
I've been in the throes of finishing a book and other matters so I haven't had a chance to blog much lately. A couple of quick observations on the death of Qaddafi (assuming the reports are...
Qaddafi has lost his contest with Hussein and Bin Laden for hiding the longest from US/Allied/Local searches. Lots of folks will make much of this event, as they should. I have already seen a...
Nothing risks inviting cynicism and despair like teaching and learning about failed states. For the second year I'm teaching an upper level International Relations course titled "Weak and Failed States" in the Poli Sci Department at UMass Amherst. Much to the confusion of my students, I introduce the course by explaining that "weak and failed states" is a highly contested concept, driven more by policy agendas than empirical consistencies, and analytical re-conceptualized so many times over that it's almost entirely useless. In other words, welcome to Political Science! But, as a catch-all...
One of the few items recently that has caused me to emerge from my nothing-but-Friday-nerd-blogging temporary hiatus was this article on civilian war deaths by Michael Spagat and his collaborators. I wrote a post with some praise and some questions, and recently received a thoughtful response by email from Michael and his crew in which they further detail the coding methods used in the project. Since the original thread generated some interest, I've decided to post their response here.Civilian Targeting Index Clarificationby Madelyn Hicks, Uih Ran Lee, Ralph Sundberg and Michael SpagatSince...
And now for something completely different... Feminist Ryan Gosling...
 Colonel Gian Gentle, a confirmed counterinsurgency [COIN] skeptic, raises questions for Col. Paul Yingling about the role of generals as COIN seems to be falling short in Afghanistan. Yingling made much noise in 2007 by attacking American generals for poor leadership in 2007, as the US was losing in Iraq at the time. Gentle is essentially pushing Yingling either to call Petraeus a bad general now (since Afghanistan is not such a happy place) or retract his earlier criticisms.While this is an argument between two Colonels, I am stepping in because I received a similar question last week at...
Long-time Bosnia watchers Vlado Azinovic, Kurt Bassuener, and Bodo Weber from the Democrtization Policy Council in Sarajevo issue a warning to the EU and NATO to restore a deterrence capability in the country:The deterioration of the prevailing political dynamic is not only continuing, but accelerating one year after the general elections of October 2010. The mix of variables makes political miscalculation all the more likely. The costs of such miscalculation by local political actors are likely to be far greater than they were prior to 2005 because of the perceived potential to realize...
I remember well the first time I ever encountered the concept of "fair trade": it was on a poster in the cafeteria of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Bonn, where I spent time during the summer of 2002 doing research in the "Archives of Social Democracy" for my first book. The poster proudly proclaimed that the coffee served in the cafeteria was fair trade coffee, and explained the basic principle -- growers were paid a decent wage for their product -- along with urging people to purchase fair trade coffee elsewhere. Before too long I started to see the same symbol for fair trade...
My daughter loves the Game of Thrones story as told to her orally by my brother on a boat in Bali this summer. Yet she remains curiously unwilling to read the books or watch the HBO version with me. Apparently she might find it too hard on her stomach - puzzling, given her affinity for the eminently stomachable Hunger Games trilogy... perhaps to capture the teen sci-fi market George R. R. Martin should consider a final installment:
A few of us in the Politics/IR Department at Reading were asked to summarise the major results and effects of the war in Afghanistan for its tenth anniversary today. I should have talked more about the overall economic crisis that the war on terror has accelerated, but anyway:Today is the 10th anniversary of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan. But it is not the anniversary of the start of the war between the United States, the Al Qaeda network, and the Taliban. The armed struggle can be dated earlier to Osama Bin Laden’s fatwa and unilateral declaration of war on the US in August 1996. After...