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

Visualizing the Human Rights Issue Agenda

by Charli Carpenter | 17 June, 2011 |

Part of the research project that is keeping me too busy to blog involves capturing, coding and visualizing the issue agenda for various transnational networks. Here is a visualization of the core human rights network on the World Wide Web, circa 2008.* (Nodes represent organizational websites and ties represent hyperlinks between them. Node size corresponds to in-degree centrality within the network.)You can click for a larger view.It looks to me as if there are really two networks here: a human rights network and a development network, all tied together conceptually under the rubric of...

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Friday Nerd Blogging

by Charli Carpenter | 10 June, 2011 |

And so on.* H/T WinterisComingBitch. Scott Meslow ponders the human security implications of Ned's choices. *Oh, the pedagogical possibilities! Does Ned Stark represent constructivism? Or does he represent the mocking realist riposte to constructivists as naive fools? Or only a mockery of that riposte? (For readers not yet following Game of Thrones on HBO, this. For viewers who wish more depth on the Starks, this. To those viewers who've also already read the books, please no series spoilers in comments.)

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Visualizing the Correlates of Global Issue Creation

by Charli Carpenter | 9 June, 2011 |

My big work-related task this month is to pull together my focus group findings into something approximating a theoretically relevant conference paper. I like to start with visualizations.This chart is derived from a code scheme we developed to categorize human security practitioners' responses in focus groups to the question: what factors facilitate or inhibit the emergence of new issues on global policy agenda? Answers fell into five broad buckets, and this is an overview of the contents of the various buckets and how they relate to one another and to the extent literature on advocacy...

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Unpacking the Anti-Drone Debate

by Charli Carpenter | 8 June, 2011 |

My student Lina Shaikhouni and I have a new Foreign Policy piece in which we make "The Case Against the Case Against Drones," to paraphrase Stephanie. Therein, we argue that although there are many good reasons why drones shouldn't be used as they are being used, or where they are being used, the arguments against drones per se are often based on misconceptions or assumptions for which we don't have good data. In particular, we point out: 1) drones are not killer robots 2) there's no evidence that "video game" warfare makes war more likely 3) drones don't violate humanitarian law3) we don't...

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Goldstein: The World Has Never Been More Peaceful

by Charli Carpenter | 6 June, 2011 |

Joshua Goldstein has a must-read book in press entitled Winning the War on War. I've seen the advance version and like many things about it, not least of which is the easy-reading style pitched at an informed lay audience, the way he begins with a thought experiment rather than with a bunch of statistics, then draws the reader through available scholarly research in an entertaining way to develop his argument. The thought experiment: imagine you're in a time machine moving backward from 2011 to prehistoric times, comparing a) the past ten years with the past twenty; b) the past twenty years...

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Friday Nerd Blogging

by Charli Carpenter | 3 June, 2011 |

My partner had a different reaction than I did to Khal Drogo's war speech in "You Win or You Die." (Originally I was going to name this post "Over-Critical Acclaim for the Khal's Speech." Or, "Sex and Violence in Game of Thrones: Contributions of a Pro-Feminist, Anti-Chest-Thumping Standpoint."*)In the latest installment of our "Two Profs at Home Over-thinking" series, Stu and I discuss whether it is politically incorrect to appreciate Game of Thrones in all its nasty brutishness. *With apologies to Bob Keohane. (Also far as invented languages go, Sunju Park Kang argues feminist IR qualifies.)

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The Khal’s Speech

by Charli Carpenter | 2 June, 2011 |

Khal Drogo's earlier lines in Game of Thrones consisted mostly of occasional Dothraki grunts and a few mono-syllables of broken English. Then we arrive at the visceral war speech scene in the latest episode... either Geoffrey Rush has been secretly coaching the horse-lord,* or the directors intentionally downplayed Jason Momoa's talents as an actor to build up to this: *Actually, the coaching is probably done by David Peterson. For more on how you too can curse and threaten in Dothraki, click here or here or follow this. For more on invented languages generally, here is a great summer read.

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New Research on Global Agenda-Setting

by Charli Carpenter | 31 May, 2011 |

A couple of years ago I wrote a post entitled the "Top Twelve Emerging Human Security Issues of the Next Decade." Those of you who have followed my writing know I'm especially interested in candidate issues that for one reason or another get neglected relative to others that end up being more prominent in global policy networks. As many of you know, this is part of a longer book project on the politics of issue selection in advocacy networks. Since blogging from me will be slow for the next few months as I make headway on the book version of what I've found on that score, I thought I'd at...

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Five Myths About International Criminal Trials

by Charli Carpenter | 28 May, 2011 |

On the basis of what empirical studies I could find about the effectiveness of international tribunals versus execution of mass-murderers, I debunk the following in my latest Current Intelligence essay, responding to effects-based claims on both sides of the debate about whether Osama bin Laden should have been tried instead of summarily executed:MYTH #1: OBL Could Never Have Received a Fair Trial. MYTH #2: OBL Would Simply Have Used the Court as A Way to Promote Jihadism.MYTH #3: A Trial Would Have Become a Focal Point For Further Attacks.MYTH #4: A Trial Would Have Helped Deter Future Acts...

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Fresh Meat

by Charli Carpenter | 27 May, 2011 |

I am pleased to introduce a new crop of guest bloggers for the 2011-2012 academic year.Catherine Weaver hails from the Lyndon Johnson School of Public Affairs at UT Austin where she teaches international political economy, specializing (among other things) the culture, behavior and reform of international financial organizations - a smoking hot IR topic if there ever was one. She is the author of The Hypocrisy Trap and the co-editor of Review of International Political Economy.Joshua Busby teaches with Kate at the Johnson School, but specializes in transnational relations, climate change,...

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