The Duck of Minerva

Now that this academic year’s loose ends are wrapped up, it is time to refocus attention on the important topic of norm development around autonomous weapons. Fortunately for my case study there is much developing on this front, in addition to developments in adjacent but (I argue) distinct issue areas like drones.Lawfare Blog has been putting forth considerable new materials related to this debate in recent days, notably a working paper series. I’ll probably react to a number of these papers as I find time to read them; but for now I’ll note another new paper Ken Anderson and Matthew...

I am concluding a semester-long experiment in incorporating a theory/policy writing simulation of sorts into my doctoral level "Human Security" seminar. This struck me as important both because my own doctoral training left me unprepared for writing for practitioners, and because the divergent socialization of academic professionals into scholarly versus non-scholarly writing has been cited as a key impediment to successful communication with those to whom our ideas and knowledge could conceivably matter.In fact since "human security" is both an academic field and a policy domain this...

In lieu of friday nerd blogging last week (which I saw Vikash had covered) Rob Farley and I blogged heads about gender in Foreign Policy, gender and race in Game of Thrones, and popular culture in foreign affairs. [Warning: There are some mild and at least one not-so-mild TV and book spoilers in our GoT discussion. However we do let you know when these are coming.]On the subject of FP's Swimsuit Issue, Rob asked me a great question: "What did Foreign Policy do right?" I provided a facetious answer in my earlier post, and a rambling one in the video , so here's the concise, honest version:1)...