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

The Kony2012 Experiment

by Charli Carpenter | 15 March, 2012 |

So Kony 2012 has been labeled the fastest-growing viral video of all time. While it's not clear how many of those "views" included actually watching the whole video, Invisible Children has certainly made an impact. The film has been criticized and satirized for inaccuracy, narcissism and counter-productivity... though not by everyone. After a week of observing the debate, I have three thoughts. 1) The message is about the power of social media, not about Kony. I went for almost 72 hours following the Kony2012 coverage before actually finding 20 minutes to watch the film. When I did, I was...

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Targeting in Armed Conflict: DPH, CCF, WTF?

by Charli Carpenter | 13 March, 2012 |

Usually when I blog about drones and extrajudicial execution, someone leaves a comment to the effect that terror suspects are "legitimate military targets" under the re-envisioned laws of war. The question of whether they are or aren't is a bit tricky, but since the number of bloggable stories is vastly outweighing the time I have to post at present, I've called in my colleague Betcy Jose to explain. - Charli Carpenter Guest Post by Betcy Jose, University of Colorado-DenverQuiz: You’re a sniper in the armed forces of your country which is in the midst of a civil war. Among the following...

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Friday Nerd Blogging

by Charli Carpenter | 2 March, 2012 |

Citizens of Nerd Nation, I invite you to ingest (if you haven't already) this Geek-Hall-of-Fame-Worthy post. Therein, Rod Hilton explains how to properly introduce newcomers to the Star Wars films.There are two obvious choices for watching the Star Wars saga.Release Order – Watch the films in the order they came out, recreating your experience with the films for someone new to them.Episode Order – Watch the films in the order George Lucas intends, starting with Episode I and going straight through to Episode VI.There are two critical flaws with both of these orders, unfortunately, that...

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A Farewell to Norms

by Charli Carpenter | 28 February, 2012 |

Here's something funny: I've been so mired in studying how international norms emerge for the past few years that I haven't given much thought at the theoretical level to how they fall apart. To be fair, constructivists have paid much less attention in general to norm death than they have to norm creation. Finnemore and Sikkink's "norm life cycle" stops at norm internalization. And even though scholars like Patrick Cottrell have pointed out that new norm creation itself usually happens by killing off old norms or institutions, there's not a lot of studies about how norms collapse.Then along...

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Friday Nerd Blogging

by Charli Carpenter | 24 February, 2012 |

"hunger" "rebellion""mutations""killer kids""torture and execution""weapons""medicine""tributes""weird science"This President's Day week, tickets went on sale for The Hunger Games movie. While you re-read the books and prepare yourself to be generally underwhelmed by the film (seriously? casting kindly-wise-old-Father-of-Elizabeth-Bennett as a bloodthirsty dictator?), let me encourage you to purchase The Hunger Games Companion. The Companion is jam-packed with history, science, survival facts, literary analysis, mythology and trivia about real-life sites around which the key phenomena in the...

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Learning to Fish Through Human Rights Data

by Charli Carpenter | 23 February, 2012 |

I often encourage my students to distill complex analytical concepts into terse, plain English. But some things can't be boiled down to a tweet, as I discovered this week when attempting to explain Cingranelli-Richards data coding in response to Joshua Foust's queries on my abusers' peace post.What I didn't think to tell him in response to his original question was: here is how you can look it up for yourself. So this post contains (I hope) a better answer to Josh's question but also a brief primer on the CIRI dataset, what it contains and how to use it. I should add that I've never used it...

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The Constructivist Peace: Shared Norms and Pacific Relations Among Human Rights Abusers

by Charli Carpenter | 20 February, 2012 |

Timothy Peterson and Leah Graham recently published a study in the Journal of Conflict Resolution showing that, after you control for the democratic peace, similarities in human rights performance have an important effect on any two countries' likelihood to go to war. The interesting caveat is that this finding holds true for states that abuse their citizens as well as those that don't:Although mutual norms of domestic non-violence are more pacifying than mutual disregard thereof, the authors argue that a wide disparity in norms is more aggravating than shared norms... that norm asymmetry is...

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