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

Extreme Dissertation Writing

by Charli Carpenter | 10 July, 2012 |

Wow. If you can write a dissertation on the politics of shark attacks as an IR specialist, I think you can do pretty much anything. From the Ted website:Chris Neff is a third year PhD candidate in Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney. He is conducting the world's first doctoral dissertation on the politics of shark attacks.Of course, I'm curious to know how this dissertation topic relates to IR precisely. (I get the comparative politics angle.) Perhaps Megan, who I believe teaches in his department and to whom I owe the incomparable joy of watching this clip,...

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Head of State

by Charli Carpenter | 15 June, 2012 |

As if controversies over graphic sex, gratuitous nudity and rat torture weren't enough, now this. Yep, that's George W. Bush's head on a spike, in the Game of Thrones Season 1 scene where Joffrey torments his fiance Sansa by forcing her to view various decapitated heads.Fans didn't actually catch this, until producers pointed it out on the DVD commentary. The news was popularized on a Reddit thread, picked up by  IO9 and quickly caused a stir. According to the producers, this "wasn't a political statement... we just had to use whatever head we had lying around..."At Lawyers, Guns and Money,...

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Targeting the Source: Why Supporters of Abuse Should Be Held to Account

by Charli Carpenter | 4 June, 2012 |

Guest post by Katherine Boom, University of Massachusetts-Amherst           As Bashar al-Assad’s violent crackdown on civilian protesters unfolds, the international community agonizes over how to punish the Syrian government. But while the debate rages over whether to respond to Assad through sanctions, military intervention or a punitive tribunal, few are questioning how to treat his third-party supporters. No case of mass atrocity occurs in a vacuum: states or groups committing crimes receive support from outside sources. Yet the international mechanisms for punishing crimes against...

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Hanging Out on the Theory-Practice-Policy Divide

by Charli Carpenter | 30 May, 2012 |

In Spring of 2006, I was nearing the end of data collection on my investigation into the human rights of children born of rape and exploitation in conflict zones, and I presented my preliminary findings on the topic atUniversity of Pittsburgh’s Research in International Politics (RIP) monthly brown-bag. In such circles, heavily dominated by empirical approaches, one does not present normative theory (that is, value-laden arguments about how the world should look) or policy-oriented sets of recommendations about particular problems. Rather, one identifies empirical puzzles about the world and...

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Networks in Arms

by Charli Carpenter | 22 May, 2012 |

This video is part of an advocacy strategy launched by a new NGO, Article36, whose focus is the humanitarian control of weapons technology. The organization takes its name from the provision in the 1977 Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions that requires governments to consider the humanitarian impacts of new weapons.Article 36 operates from a principle that practical, policy and legal controls over weapons should be founded on publicly transparent and evidence-based analysis. Such controls should aim for prevention of unintended, unnecessary or unacceptable harm, and should be open...

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HBO Has Solved Its Spoiler Problem.

by Charli Carpenter | 18 May, 2012 |

David Birtley's to-die-for posts chronicling HBO's deviations from the Song of Ice and Fire book series get longer each week over at Wired.Some fans are annoyed at the significant and at times random plot innovations in Game of Thrones (in Season 2 Tywin has come off as a loving grandfather, Arya is killing all the wrong characters, and Dany's dragons have mysteriously vanished!)But I actually think this is nothing short of brilliant precisely because it solves one of the key issues plaguing the series: the spoiler problem.You see, every week the latest episode is disected in the fan...

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