Charli Carpenter

Un-Civil Military Relations

by Charli Carpenter | 16 April, 2011 |

Starbuck's away and has various guest bloggers filling in at Wings Over Iraq. David Costelloe of Never Felt Better is among them, and his latest post is one more for my dataset on BSG analogies in Egypt commentary. In particular Costelloe argues Egypt can learn from the flaws in Colonel Saul Tigh's character and the absence of civilian supremacy it represents: Let’s break it down. He shows hesitance when handed some responsibility during a crisis, at the cost of lives (mini-series). He displays open contempt of the government in public (Colonial Day). He is the lead officer in the actual...

What/When/Where is “War”?

by Charli Carpenter | 13 April, 2011 |

I learned quite a few new things about military law and the rules of war at the Cornell Bombing Workshop I attended last weekend (political scientists who study war law often do when sitting down with actual military practitioners and international law professionals). A short round-up of additional insights will follow, but this one merits a slightly longer post: the International Law Association has released an expanded report on the definition of armed conflict that, if it is picked up on in war law jurisprudence, may change how we think about the legality of things like targeted killings...

“I Don’t Care What You Believe In, Just Believe In It.”

by Charli Carpenter | 12 April, 2011 |

Although reports that he is insufficiently feminist appear to have been exaggerated, Joss Whedon does appear to be insufficiently Browncoat. Or so it would seem since he recently blocked the first fan-based effort to acquire the rights to a television series by nixing Unstoppable Signals’ movement to revive Firefly, the one-season hit space western whose film sequel Serenity just beat out The Empire Strikes Back for Best SciFi Film of All Time at io9. (If you need more background on the show and its connection to post-9/11 global political culture, start with this and follow the links.)This...

Bombs. Away.

by Charli Carpenter | 8 April, 2011 |

I will be a attending a workshop at Cornell University on bombing norms for the next few days. (Presumably after I get back, I'll never again bomb anything I'm not supposed to.) On this note, readers may be interested to have a look at this new memorandum Stephanie mentioned from Human Rights Watch on incendiary weapons, which follows up on an earlier report by HRW's Arms Division. The campaign I've been tracking for the paper I'm presenting is on a slightly different problem, "explosive weapons," (their latest report is here) but I'm happy that HRW is outlining the specific issues with...

Dan Drezner Denies Being a Cylon, Professes Love for Mainstream IR

by Charli Carpenter | 5 April, 2011 |

We also talk about Libya, R2P, Wikileaks, gender, and why Dan should give critical theory a second chance despite how they left things. I do feel compelled to explain the weirdness around 21:20. We had a tech fail (I blame the Cylons) and fixing it disrupted my original plan to cite my co-blogger Vikash Yadav on some very important insights in this post. So I asked Sang Ngo at BHTV to splice in a clip I recorded afterwards, making the shout-out. He obliged me, though despite his techno-wizardry it didn't turn out quite as I'd hoped only because I was rather more sloshed at the end than in...

Posner, Dunlap and Lawfare

by Charli Carpenter | 4 April, 2011 |

Eric Posner had a recent piece in The National Interest on the concept of "lawfare," in which he appears to define "lawfare" as efforts to undermine powerful states' foreign policy goals by holding them accountable to international norms (he lumps Wikileaks and Human Rights Watch together as two such entities), then to say that NGO activity in this area isn't really "lawfare," (well duh) and then goes on to say (conflating NGO activity with lawfare) that actually, the non-state sector is so powerless that really, states like the US shouldn't worry too much about all this "lawfare."Lawfare is...

My Final Word to Dan Drezner On Zombies

by Charli Carpenter | 31 March, 2011 |

For those who were unable to squeeze into the packed room for Stephanie Carvin's "Zombie Holocaust" panel at ISA, here is the video blog version of my remarks on Dan Drezner's new book Theory of International Politics and Zombies.This panel, by the way, was voted among the "Top 20 ISA Panels of All Time" by a "senior academic sitting in audience" via Twitter. My post-ISA content analysis of the conference Twitter hashtag also shows that 'zombies' was the fifth most commonly tweeted word - beaten only by '#isa2011', 'rt,' 'panel' and 'http', and surpassing the words 'power,' 'libya' and even...

The Limits and Future of R2P

by Charli Carpenter | 31 March, 2011 |

Small Wars Journal published a longer version of my argument about the criteria associated with the R2P doctrine and why the "If Libya Why Not Bahrain" argument is specious. However, particularly in light of evolving events, I think it's important to qualify this argument by emphasizing that I'm describing an existing (and limited) set of standards, not necessarily endorsing it as currently constituted. In fact it would surprise me if Operation Odyssey Dawn does not result in some slightly revisited normative understandings regarding R2P, and indeed perhaps it should. (The rest of this is a...

More On the Gap Between Feminist IR and Gendered Foreign Policy Debates

by Charli Carpenter | 28 March, 2011 |

Foreign Affairs has published a longer version of my original remarks about the so-called "Lady Hawks" who supposedly "ball-busted" our presumably lily-livered president into a war ostensibly "not of his choosing." We'll see how he deals with all this, among other things, tonight at 7:30 EST - (my guess: with his own brand of tough-and-tender masculinity) - but in the meantime, here's the capsule version of my scholarly take translated into Belt-Way-ese:Commentators are falling over themselves to explain the “gender divide” among Obama’s staff, particularly the apparently astonishing fact...

Libya and the Responsibility to Protect

by Charli Carpenter | 23 March, 2011 |

I see there’s some naysaying about the use of force to protect civilians in Libya. Among various refrains is the claim that “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) doctrine lacks moral strength if applied selectively: the international community can’t legitimately go after Qaddafi if it won’t/can’t also go after every other dictator.So just a reminder that the doctrine, as laid out by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty and acknowledged as a legal principle in several multilateral documents, actually promotes military force for civilian protection not in every case...

The Duck of Minerva