As I’m sure all astute Duck readers are aware, today marks a critical day in the US House and Senate – if no deal is struck today on a spending bill, the US government will shut down at one minute after midnight on Tuesday morning. The issue at the heart of the...
Gunmen killed scores of students in their sleep at Yobe State College of Agriculture in Nigeria early Sunday morning. via Adam Jones on FB, it is interesting to note this massacre was reportedly...
A story in the New York Times this morning suggests that the National Security Agency has been analyzing our social networks through email and phone call records, apparently...
Former Duck guest blogger Betcy Jose has published an excellent Foreign Affairs Snapshot pointing out the irony of a robust norm enforcement operation in Syria to protect the chemical weapons taboo,...
A little late Friday morning reading: Moving toward a Syrian Tribunal?  Several former tribunal prosecutors will introduce their draft resolution on October 3 calling for one. Leslie Vinjamuri explains why she thinks the UNSC is wise not to refer Syria to the ICC. Research from our friends at Political Violence at a Glance making more news. Speaking of PV@ataGlance, Joe Young has a good piece on al-Shabab. More baby steps in the effort to get control of the global small arms trade. Things are not going well in Iraq -- street battles between current and former terrorist militias. And,...
Originally circulating as "Every Sci-Fi Starship Ever In One Mind-Blowing Comparison Chart," there are some pretty important gaps in this picture, including (allegedly) no Serenity and nothing from Spaceballs. Still, a noble endeavor. If you haven't already seen them comments at Kotaku are fun to read.
I was transfixed this week by the week's events in Kenya, the attacks by Al-Shabaab on the Westgate shopping center that resulted in the deaths of at least 60 people. With friends just a stone's throw away from that mall, it was hard to turn away from that unfolding set of events. So, this week, to give you some context, I've linked a number of stories that try to explain how the attack could have happened, why al-Shabaab appears intent on this kind of action, and what this means for security in East Africa. At the same time as we have witnessed this horrific tragedy, there appears a...
Perhaps the first Monkey Cage post at the Washington Post presents some numbers that show that policy-makers tend not to like the higher tech kind of poli sci (or theory) We knew this from previous TRIP reports and other studies, but still it is important to consider such stuff, especially given that quantitative work (in IR, anyway) is now about as prevalent as non-quant work. One might be tempted to argue that we should stop or reduce quant work given that a key audience may not like it so much. My first reaction was to think about baseball. The rise of statistics to evaluate...
Michael Desch and Daniel Philpott at Notre Dame have concluded their two-year Mellon funded working group on religion and IR and published their final report titled Religion and International Relations: A Primer for Research. Desch, in his introduction (titled: "The Coming Reformation of Religion in International Affairs? The Demise of the Secularization Thesis and the Rise of New Thinking About Religion"), starts with a puzzle expressed by working group participant Timothy Shah: “religion has become one of the most influential factors in world affairs in the last generation but remains one...
Action on Armed Violence is circulating some terrific info-graphs and advocacy videos documenting civilian harms from various conventional weapons in Syria: By even the most cautious estimates, explosive weapons have killed and injured tens of thousands of people in Syria. They are thought to be responsible for about 40% of deaths in the conflict. Crucially, civilians are overwhelmingly the victims of this group of deadly weapons, which includes rockets, mortars, tank shells, and air-dropped bombs. In Syria, more than 90% of the casualties of explosive weapons have been civilians. And while...
Grand Strategy is an arcane and misapplied concept.  Developing a Grand Strategy to deal with China that focuses on cyber capabilities is a dangerous move that will have large repercussions for the international system.  The National Interest recently hosted a debate about the merits of the Air Sea Battle strategy versus the Offshore Control strategy. Here, I focus on the newly developed Air Sea Battle strategy since it is likely the more troubling of the two strategies due to its focus on offensive cyber capabilities. The question I have is why is the United States preparing for a war it...
The international news continues to be dominated by Saturday's terrorist attack at Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya. The coverage of the attacks in most major newspapers has been excellent (and peppered with first-person reflections) due to the large number of reporters and photojournalists who are based in Nairobi. Somali Islamist group Al-Shabaab claimed responsibility via Twitter, and Twitter struggled to deactivate its feeds. The immediate demand was the withdrawal of Kenyan troops from Somalia, where they have been assisting AU forces and the interim Somali government since October 2011....