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

Is the “Women and Children First” Norm a Myth?

by Charli Carpenter | 18 April, 2012 |

In commemoration of the Titanic disaster, researchers at Uppsala University have released a report analyzing the evolution and impact of the "women and children first" rule guiding evacuations from sinking ships. They examined 18 historical cases of peace-time maritime disasters involving passenger ships and concluded:Women have a distinct survival disadvantage compared to men. Captains and crew survive at a significantly higher rate than passengers. We also find that the captain has the power to enforce normative behavior, that the gender gap in survival rates has declined, that women have...

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Book Review: “The Justice Cascade”

by Charli Carpenter | 16 April, 2012 |

My "Human Security" doctoral students just finished reading Kathryn Sikkink's new book on international tribunals and it is undisputably their favorite of all those assigned this year. Partly that is because it is written in clear, non-academic prose. Partly it's the common-sense way in which Sikkink describes her methods and findings, and she ties her story concretely to ongoing policy debates. Partly it's the way she weaves a portrait of her own intellectual journey into the writing. This book is going to have wide appeal beyond the academy for these reasons, but it was also notably very...

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Popular Culture and Civil-Military Relations

by Charli Carpenter | 13 April, 2012 |

Some of those who missed the ISA panel on popular culture have asked me if I can send them my remarks. So I decided to upload them in video format as well. You can see my presentation on Battlestar Galactica and civil-military relations below. This is essentially a presentation of a research paper I did with two students, which will be published later this year in Nicholas Kiersey and Iver Neumann's Battlestar Galactica and International Relations.While we're on the topic of civ-mil and popular culture, let me be the first to say that BSG is not the only cultural artifact through which these...

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Google Scholar Dystopia

by Charli Carpenter | 12 April, 2012 |

Guest Post by Deborah AvantAnyone remember that 1980s Terry Gilliam film Brazil - a futuristic dystopia where overreliance on bizarre and mostly broken machines led to equally bizarre social maladies? Well, I’m having a Brazil moment. According to Google Scholar, I am no longer the author of my 2005 book. If you search my name, it has disappeared. If you search the title a (very well done) review article comes up but no book. The book – and my relation to it – has disappeared even when you search subject terms. According to an article in the Academic Newswire, this is a common occurrence....

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What Good is Network Theory in IR?

by Charli Carpenter | 11 April, 2012 |

In between ultimate frisbee and lying around in bed sick, I managed to attend a workshop on network theory at the International Studies Asssociation. I spent some time there thinking about different things scholars mean when they say they are doing network theory, and what is the value added to IR of this basket of approaches. Here are some tripartite thoughts on the matter, and you can probably guess which approach I'll be taking in my new book.1) Network theory provides a way to describe social relations that are neither hierarchies nor markets. This approach is associated with Margaret...

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The Future of Teaching?

by Charli Carpenter | 10 April, 2012 |

Dan Drezner was kind enough to link to my YouTube ISA Presentation. However Foreign Policy has headlined it "Is This the Future of Teaching?" Given that a number of colleagues have written to me this morning along the lines of "if that's the future of teaching, I might as well give up, it looks too hard," and "how long did that take you, anyway?!!" I feel compelled to provide some caveats. 1) If the medium is the message here, it's a message about conference presentations, not in-class lectures. And while I will continue to use video mash-ups at conferences in the future, they're not always...

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Belated Friday Nerd Blogging.

by Charli Carpenter | 8 April, 2012 |

Though my ISA experience was indeed interrupted both by an ultimate game and a nasty case of the flu, rumors of my disappearance have been wildly exaggerated. A travel-intensive Friday day plus a kid-intensive Saturday are all that have impeded timely nerd blogging this week. It won't happen often.

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Transnational Politics, i(I)r(R) and the Information Age

by Charli Carpenter | 1 April, 2012 |

Today I presented some thoughts on Henry Farrell's International Studies Association panel on "Transnational Politics and the Information Age." The panel, which included Joe Nye, Dan Drezner, Marty Finnemore and Abe Newman, looked at the subject fairly broadly:Public debates over the politics of the information age have been dominated by a battle between cyberoptimists, who believe that the Internet will lead to a fundamental transformation of social relations and cyberpessimists, who claim that the Internet will either have no effects or harmful ones. These debates partially map onto...

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Friday Nerd Blogging

by Charli Carpenter | 30 March, 2012 |

Just in time for Game of Thrones' Season 2 (which happens inconveniently right in the middle of ISA), Foreign Affairs has posted this constructivist riposte to the foreign policy commentariat's realism-worship-fest from last Season (warning: contains Season 1 spoilers):Commentary by foreign policy analysts on the first season of HBO's Game of Thrones stressed its supposed underlying theme of political realism. Thus one writer claimed that the TV show and the George R.R. Martin novels on which it is based "clearly demonstrate the power of might over right," and another agreed: "In this kind...

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Geeking Out on the Theory-Policy Divide

by Charli Carpenter | 21 March, 2012 |

As I gathered content today for my upcoming ISA presentation on social media, I was delighted to discover that my "Blog Wars" video from few years back (a response to a theory-policy debate stirred up by Joseph Nye and Dan Drezner) is cited in an academic paper as an actual contribution to the debate! The paper itself is quite good: Bradley Parks and Alena Stern conduct one of the few empirical studies I'm aware of how scholars actually interface with the world of policy. They use as a hook the debate over policy relevance sparked off by Joseph Nye's "Scholars on the Sidelines?" op-ed back...

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