Happy Belated Birthday To Lawyers, Guns and Money

5 June 2014, 1251 EDT

One of my favorite blogs turned ten this past weekend. Lawyers, Guns and Money was an early entrant to the IR blogosphere and Rob Farley and his crew are some of its most well-known voices. Last weekend they ran a series of anniversary reflections which I hope you’ll surf on over and read. They’re all amazing, funny, heart-twanging, and Rob’s in particular has a lot of history and depth to it and some nice reflections on how the blogosphere has changed in the last decade.

Since I contributed to LGM for eighteen months between January 2010 and May 2011, I also contributed an anniversary post here, in which I ruminated on work-life balance issues as they relate to different types of academic blogging, and what I found special about my time there. The take-home paragraph is below the fold:

One really nice thing for me about my stint at LGM is that I felt at liberty to experiment with all these ways of hanging out on the academia/real-world divide – more at liberty than at the Duck whose community is more largely academic and where academic debate and expertise is more highly prized as a means and an end. For example I don’t write about my children at the Duck, and I rarely write outside my academic expertise there. LGM was special to me because here I could try out different blogging personalities, seek feedback on different aspects of my social and political thinking, and think aloud about topics where I really was no better informed than anyone (much less informed at times in fact), even learn to write satirically or sarcastically when pushed to it. These were styles I did not generally use in professional settings (though now I sometimes do). So one of the things that I’m most grateful for was the chance to leave my comfort zone and branch out as a scholar, a writer and a person.

The rest is here.

Charli Carpenter

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.