The Duck of Minerva

Game of Thrones Season 4 premieres this Sunday. For your viewing parties, check out this website for Westeros-inspired fare. For those of you not yet familiar with the show, and therefore ill-advised to read Season 4 commentaries, here's a helpful series trailer to whet your appetite. (She said with a straight face.)

Fewer linkage posts lately due to conference travel, grad admissions season, linkage burnout etc. Here's a few for your clicking pleasure: Human Security: Chemical weapons are alleged to have been used on civilians in Benue State, Nigeria. Daily Kos on why the protests in Taiwan are being under-covered. I have mixed feelings about this Guardian photo-story about children born to genocidal rape survivors in Rwanda, but it's well worth a look. Hawaii has become the first US state legislature to put forth a bill banning the use of lethal autonomous weapons. Academica: International Studies...

This is a guest post by former Duck of Minerva blogger Betcy Jose, Assistant Professor at University of Colorado-Denver and contributor to Al-Jazeera and Foreign Affairs. As the number of posts here suggest, lots of us are watching the fast-moving and somewhat unexpected events in Ukraine with great concern and interest.  Others have expertly discussed the reasons for Russian military intervention in Ukraine and how the international community might respond to it (here, here, here, and here).  I’d like to contribute a different angle to this complex story by inquiring into Russian narratives...

Academica Prominent academic Stephen Hawking has weighed in on a public debate. Humanitarian Disarmament Chicago PhD Candidate John Stevenson writes in Slate about why ceasefires don't protect civilians. Momentum last week towards a treaty abolishing nuclear weapons: Mexico leads charge. Anti-killer-robot campaigners on the new Robocop. Human Rights and Armed Conflict UNHCHR's report on North Korea denounces human rights condition in country. Mark Kersten on whether DPRK could be referred to the ICC. Guernica on death and resistance in Camp X-Ray. Want your loved ones to know you survived...

Dear Mr. Kristof, Since you're getting so much hate mail from political scientists this week, I thought I'd send you a fan letter. I teach international relations at University of Massachusetts. I am an avid reader of your columns, especially on human rights advocacy. You have put issues like fistula on the global agenda. You put privileged young people in touch with global issues. You are a master at boiling down complex issues to accessible human interest stories. What I have admired most about your work is that you so rarely limit yourself to complaining. So many pundits write atrocity...

Fans must content themselves with some trivia this week. Here are "15 Things [Most People] Don't Know About Game of Thrones."

My students and I have just read Emilie Hafner-Burton's grand treatise on the human rights regime, Making Human Rights a Reality. Following her earlier empirical studies, this is a sweeping descriptive appraisal of how human rights law works and why it works so poorly, coupled with a level-headed argument about strategies that human rights champions or "stewards" might adopt to achieve concrete improvements in human rights performance by circumventing existing human rights machinery. The book is readable, exhaustive and pitched to a non-scholarly audience; it combines an overview of...

May the bard be with you. See also "The Empire Striketh Back."

So the IR blogosphere and twitterverse are in the process of exploding over this new proposal from the ISA Governing Council, which would ban those contributing to IR blogs from holding positions on ISA journal editorial boards. I second many of the questions raised by Steve and Jon and Will Moore and will write more on this topic presently. Fortunately for me as a prof, this news-flash happened to occur right as I headed to "Theory/Policy" day in my Human Security doctoral seminar in which we dwell on ISR's "Theory/Policy Symposium." So my initial reaction was to use this as a terrific...