The best way to secure a more peaceful future for Afghanistan is through a United Nation peacekeeping operation.
Give Peacekeeping a Chance in Afghanistan
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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.
Recent Posts
Why We Should Stop Picking on 2020
The awfulness of 2020 has become one of the year’s most unforgettable cultural memes.
When norms collide: The COVID-19 pandemic and difficult choices on the hierarchy of norms and values
This is a guest post from Sassan Gholiagha, Anna Holzscheiter, and Andrea Liese. They are currently working together on a project on norm collisions in global politics funded by the German Research Foundation. Sassan is a postdoctoral researcher at the WZB Berlin. He has worked on norms, the Responsibility to Protect, and drones. Anna holds the chair for political science with a focus on international politics at the TU Dresden and heads the research group on Governance of Global Health at the WZB. Her areas of interest are children rights, discourse analysis, and global health. Andrea...
The Enemy’s Gate is Down
How a shift in tactical orientation by activists opposing the border camps might make all the difference.
Resistance in an Age of Concentration Camps
Erica Chenoweth et al had a great article in the Monkey Cage yesterday about the Lights For Liberty protests. On June 12, Americans turned out in nearly 700 cities to protest the complex of detention camps along the souther border in which migrants, many of them asylum-seekers from the most dangerous countries on Earth, are being arbitrarily detained without due process and in inhumane, over-crowded facilities, with children illegally separated from caregivers and held in deliberately traumatizing conditions perhaps indefinitely, in violation of both the Constitution and international...
Protecting Civilians Through Responsible Scholarly Engagement (Vacation Planning Edition)
Recently I highlighted Korbel's new Responsible Engagement Institute, an important innovation in our profession. I shouted this out in the context of my own concerns with survey experiments that (perhaps irresponsibly) inflate the appearance of American support for targeting civilians abroad. However make no mistake: just as humane treatment involves more than providing toothbrushes and soap, protecting civilians involves much more than forebearance from reigning fire upon their cities. War-affected civilians are entitled to many things besides not to be attacked directly: shelter, food and...
On Responsible Scholarly Engagement
Rob Farley has posted a Lawyers, Guns and Money podcast discussing my new research with Alex Montgomery on why reports of Americans' willingness to target civilians have been greatly exaggerated. One theme we discussed that bears emphasizing are questions of why we do the survey research we do, and how we decide what findings to publicize, where, how and for whom. Do we truly need poll data on the precise conditions under which Americans would tolerate war crimes? Is this truly a public good? Who does this serve? Who does it enable? When the results come out (if they include clues as to what...
Americans Oppose Killing Civilians. Reports Saying Otherwise Are Wrong.
Three reasons why you shouldn’t worry too much about the blood-thirstiness of your fellow Americans.
What Daenerys’ Error Teaches Us About American Tolerance for War Crimes
Alex Montgomery I have a new post up at Foreign Policy arguing that "The Bells" - and audience reactions to it - tell us something about American attitudes toward just war theory. A relevant topic with rising tensions w/ Iran, a debate over whether to pardon war criminals, and the stated willingness of our own rulers to violate war law. The underlying reason for the outcry went unspoken: The deliberate targeting of civilians from the air, using incendiary weapons that are impossible to escape, is rightly recognized by Americans as a terrible crime—something good actors just don’t do. Our...
What Game of Thrones Got Wrong About Firebombing
Much ink has been spilled since last Sunday about the massacre at King’s Landing. Why did Dany carpet-bomb a civilian population after a city had surrendered? Was this a sign of her growing madness? Or a rational strategy to cement the legitimacy of her claim? Why didn’t the showrunners build it up better? Did they compromise Dany’s story arc as a civilian-protection advocate or were her actions always foreshadowed by her worst “fire and blood” tantrums? In the handwringing over what Daenerys did, scant analysis has focused on how she did it. This is important since audiences draw inferences...