The Duck of Minerva

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

Monday Linkage

by Charli Carpenter | 19 August, 2013 |

Rosa Brooks compares our drone wars to Egypt's crackdown. Context by Fred Kaplan on the drone era. Lovely Umayam on the perils of crowdsourcing. Podcast: NPR's Ian Masters and Columbia University's David Philips on the Syrian refugee crisis. Area 51 documents have finally been declassified. The documents suggesting that there was never anything there but a secret spy plane program. What this means for Wendt/Duval's argument I will leave to commenters. Two excellent new articles on war law compliance by political scientists: Dara Kay Cohen on why some but not all armed groups commit rape;...

read more

Jean Bethke Elshtain, 1941-2013

by Charli Carpenter | 18 August, 2013 |

The New York Times recalls her as a post-9/11 public intellectual who served as an "intellectual beacon" and "guiding light for policymakers" during a tumultous political era. The Atlantic describes her as a uniquely non-secularist scholar, whose "greatest legacy" was her "serious intellectual commitment to including God in discussions of politics." At Crooked Timber, Corey Robin counters the notion that she was a "realist" and criticizes her support for Bush-era policies under the mantle of "just war theory." As I sifted through some of the official obituaries, it surprised me how few of...

read more

Resistance is Not Futile.

by Charli Carpenter | 14 August, 2013 |

A claim common among opponents of a treaty ban on autonomous weapon systems (AWS) is that treaties banning weapons don't work - suggesting efforts to arrest the development of AWS are an exercise in futility. Now this claim has been picked up uncritically by the editors at Bloomberg, writing in the derisively titled, "No Really, How Do We Keep Robots From Destroying Humans?": "Bans on specific weapons systems -- such as military airplanes or submarines -- have almost never been effective in the past. Instead, legal prohibitions and ethical norms have arisen that effectively limit their use....

read more

Beyond Robopocalypticism

by Charli Carpenter | 9 August, 2013 |

In all the media frenzy over “killer robots,” Terminator imagery comes up a lot. So do references to Battlestar Galactica. So does a specific scene from Robocop, soon to be remade to resonate with public fears of domestic drones. These iconic narratives invoke a recurrent theme in American science fiction about lethal robot malfunctions or uprisings against their human creators. So prevalent is this theme in anti-killer-robot media coverage that some have argued concern over autonomous weapons is a product of science fiction itself: Hollywood is apparently to blame for priming the public...

read more

Ducklings!

by Charli Carpenter | 29 July, 2013 |

I am delighted to report that Steve Saideman, Robert Kelly and Megan MacKenzie will be joining the ranks of permanent Duck contributors as of today. This leaves room for new guest bloggers: Stacie Goddard, Johannes Urpelainen and Jillian Schwedler. Stacie Goddard joins us from Wellesley College where she teaches international conflict, specializing in diplomacy, security studies, weapons and war and network politics. She is the author of Indivisible Territory and the Politics of Legitimacy: Jerusalem and Northern Ireland. Stacie is also a member of the International Studies Association's...

read more

How the Media is Mis-Reporting the DOD’s Drone Casualty Study

by Charli Carpenter | 18 July, 2013 |

Earlier this week I posted about the classified DOD study showing a high rate of civilian harm from drone attacks. Not much else can be said about this finding by analysts until the study is de-classified, so instead let me discuss at some length the one other thing we do know: that the media has badly misreported this story. The headline should not be "New Study: Drones Kill Ten Times More Civilians" as so many articles are claiming. It should read "DOD Analyst: Classified Study Shows Drones Likelier to Cause Civilian Harm." What is the difference? There are three. The first is the...

read more

What We Know, Don’t Know, Can’t Know and Need to Know About the DOD’s Classified Study on Drone Deaths

by Charli Carpenter | 15 July, 2013 |

Just before Independence Day, an analyst for a defense research agency stated in a media interview that a classified DoD study shows that drones are likelier to cause civilian harm than attacks from manned fighters. Lawrence Lewis, a researcher for the Center for Naval Analyses, says these findings resulted from a  statistical analysis he conducted using classified data from Afghanistan mid 2010-mid 2011 as part of a project funded by DoD's Joint Center for Operational Analysis. If true, this would dramatically shift the discussion about the humanitarian impact and value of armed...

read more
Race, Gender and Civic Justice in America

Race, Gender and Civic Justice in America

by Charli Carpenter | 15 July, 2013 | ,

The idea that citizens should be empowered by law to lethally judge who is a criminal threat is dangerous and wrong. Here's one reason why: Just a small-n social experiment? Yes, though here are some stats to demonstrate how this does and is likely to play out in the criminal justice system..

read more

Friday Nerd Blegging: Science Fiction and Foreign Policy Discourse

by Charli Carpenter | 12 July, 2013 |

Lawfare T2000 from Adama on Vimeo. The video you see is not just an intriguing and entertaining way to express one position in legal arguments around the debate over autonomous weapons. It represents a fascinating foreign policy artifact, a data point in the policy discourse over the value of a pre-emptive ban on autonomous weapons, one in which science fiction metaphors are given a prime place. This raises intriguing questions about the relationship between science fiction and foreign policy and how we might study it.  The creator of this video is Tom Malinowski, who has just...

read more

The State of the Killer Robot Debate

by Charli Carpenter | 9 July, 2013 |

In a new piece up at Foreign Affairs on the killer robot debate, I attempt to distinguish between what we know and what we can only speculate about around the ethics / legality of autonomous weapons. The gist: Both camps have more speculation than facts on their side... [But] the bigger problem isn’t that some claims in this debate are open to question on empirical grounds, rather that so many of them simply cannot be evaluated empirically, since there is no data or precedent with which to weigh discrimination and proportionality against military necessity. So, instead of resting on...

read more