Syria
- Boehner is backing Obama after this briefing.
- via CIVIC, the unclassified version of the USG’s assessment of the Ghouta attack.
- Drezner on IR theory in practice.
Academica
- The politics of academic salaries. Via.
- Rising star Dara Kay Cohen is featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education for her pathbreaking work as a scholar/public intellectual of wartime sexual violence. Unfortunately article is paywalled.
- I skipped APSA but learned via Phil Arena on Facebook of this terrific paper presented by Bear Braumoeller arguing against the declining war thesis. Goes to show Drezner is right about conference networking: present smart stuff well and others will toot your horn for you.
Humanitarian Disarmament
- The ICRC has finally issued a statement on autonomous weapons. [It does not join a call for a ban but states that there must be “certainty” that AWS can be used in compliance with IHL.]
- In its continued bid for leadership on humanitarian issues, France led a UN meeting on autonomous weapons today.
- Matthew Kroenig on why US nuclear disarmament is a bad idea.
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.
I wish the White House briefing included the alluded to map that details the places discussed.