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Monday Linkage

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by Charli Carpenter

19 August 2013, 1029 EDT

Rosa Brooks compares our drone wars to Egypt’s crackdown. Context by Fred Kaplan on the drone era.

Lovely Umayam on the perils of crowdsourcing.

Podcast: NPR’s Ian Masters and Columbia University’s David Philips on the Syrian refugee crisis.

Area 51 documents have finally been declassified. The documents suggesting that there was never anything there but a secret spy plane program. What this means for Wendt/Duval’s argument I will leave to commenters.

Two excellent new articles on war law compliance by political scientists: Dara Kay Cohen on why some but not all armed groups commit rape; Devorah Manekin on why some but not all weapons-bearers commit opportunistic violence against civilians. Both articles rely on new primary datasets with weapons-bearers, and both point to the organizational structure of small units as a key factor.

A Valerie Strauss Kenneth BernsteinWAPO op-ed piece from February on the relevance of public education policy to the situation we face in higher ed is going around on Facebook again and for good reason. Damning, erudite and well worth a second read.

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.

2 Comments

  1. LFC
    LFC on 19 August 2013 at 15.37 EDT

    Two corrections, if I may, on the last item. First, it’s not by Valerie Strauss. It’s a re-post by Valerie Strauss of a piece by Kenneth Bernstein. Second, and more nitpicky, it’s not an op-ed b/c Strauss is a WaPo blogger, not a columnist. (Granted, the designation “op-ed” is a bit funny in the digital context since it’s an abbreviation, as you may know but some others may not, of “opposite the editorial page,” referring to the fact that columnists appear opposite the editorial page in the typical hard-copy version of a newspaper.)

  2. Charli Carpenter
    Charli Carpenter on 20 August 2013 at 14.26 EDT

    Thanks LFC! Fixed.