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

On Why There is No International Law Against Using Very Large Rocks in Battle

by Charli Carpenter | 15 February, 2011 |

I have a new article in the journal International Organization entitled "Vetting the Advocacy Agenda." It tries to explain why some issues get noticed by transnational campaigners and others don't, using weapons advocacy as a focal point of study. Key argument: it matters which organizations take up the issue; the global agenda is as much a function of structural relations within advocacy networks as of relationships between advocacy groups and states. You'll need an institutional subscription to access the article online, or you can read the proofs version here. Abstract below. While a...

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Battlestar Blegging

by Charli Carpenter | 9 February, 2011 |

This scene from the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica pilot - the first in which Commander Adama and President Roslin meet - is emblematic of three politically significant conversations underpinning the series. First, what is the appropriate role of the military with respect to the society it presumably exists to serve? Second, who decides? Third, what are the means by which that role is to be executed? All these conversations map broadly onto what Peter Feaver has called the “civil-military problematique;” and they cut across an emerging conceptual distinction in security studies between...

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Dan Drezner, Postmodernist

by Charli Carpenter | 7 February, 2011 |

Adam Weinsten has written a delicious appraisal of my friend Dan’s newest book, Theory of International Politics and Zombies. I think he’s mostly spot-on, particularly his genealogy of Dan’s position in the discipline and his implication that TIPZ represents Dan having the last laugh on the Chicago Department of Political Science and its stale, antiquated notions of what matters in statecraft:This is the university that gave us supply-side economics, Straussian neconservativism, and David Brooks. It is, in short, a haven for very smart people who live to confound undergraduates, worship...

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Light Reading in Genocide Studies

by Charli Carpenter | 27 January, 2011 |

If you're looking for something to read for International Holocaust Remembrance Day, let me humbly suggest Adam Jones' volume Evoking Genocide, which has won a 2010 Outstanding Academic Title Award by the American Library Association's Choice Magazine. Here's their review:This compilation has a simple yet fascinating premise: ask leading human rights scholars and activists to reflect on the art and literature that most influenced them. The result –60 two-to-three page essays mediating on a wide variety of sources, from the essential (Elie Wiesel’s Night, 1960) to the unexpected (Star...

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The Promise and Perils of Book TitlesBecause I’m Way Too Busy With the Start of the Term to Blog About Anything Useful.

by Charli Carpenter | 25 January, 2011 |

Thanks to Erik Voeten, I have just discovered a fabulous blog, Better Book Titles:This blog is for people who do not have thousands of hours to read book reviews or blurbs or first sentences. I will cut through all the cryptic crap, and give you the meat of the story in one condensed image. Now you can read the greatest literary works of all time in mere seconds!Some of my other favorites from the site:blinkthe curious incident of the dog in the nighttimethe very hungry caterpillar, andthe elements of style.And both Erik and Jeff Ely have a little more to say about the political economy of...

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Our Carceral State

by Charli Carpenter | 12 January, 2011 |

Vesla Weaver and Amy Lerman have published a study in the American Political Science Review on the relationship between contact with the US criminal justice system and disaffection from US government and politics. They find that even after controlling for other important factors, contact with the criminal justice system is a significant predictor of civic and political disengagement and mistrust of government.Contact with the criminal justice system is greater today than at any time in our history. In this article, we argue that interactions with criminal justice are an important source of...

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Causation, Correlation, Aggression, and Political Rhetoric

by Charli Carpenter | 10 January, 2011 |

John Sides at the Monkey Cage weighs in with some social science on the relationship between militant metaphors in political speech and individuals' willingness to engage in actual political violence against government officials. The findings he cites: an experimental study has shown there seems to be no effect on the overall population of exposure to "fighting words" in political ads, but there is an effect on people with aggressive tendencies. Moreover:This conditional relationship -- between seeing violent ads and a predisposition to aggression -- appears stronger among those under the...

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Actually, We Don’t Know How Many Civilians Are Dying in Drone Strikes.

by Charli Carpenter | 6 January, 2011 |

Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann at the New America Foundation are keeping one of the most useful datasets on drone strike fatalities that I know of. They've been tallying reports of strikes since 2004. They limit their data to those reported by:"news organizations with deep and aggressive reporting capabilities in Pakistan (the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal), accounts by major news services and networks (the Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse, CNN, and the BBC), and reports in the leading English-language newspapers in Pakistan (the Daily Times,...

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Information Doesn’t Want to be Free, People Do.

by Charli Carpenter | 3 January, 2011 |

Clay Shirky has the lead article in this month's Foreign Affairs on social media and world politics. Although both governments and activists both seem to be assuming that the effects are a boon to civil society, Shirky begins by pointing out that the record of such effects on political mobilization is a mixed bag:"The use of social media tools - text massaging, email, photo sharing, social networking and the like - does not have a single pre-ordained outcome... the safest characterization of recent quantitative attempts to answer the question 'do digital tools enhance democracy?' is that...

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