Charli Carpenter

Web 2.0 and the IR Profession

by Charli Carpenter | 9 August, 2010 |

Dan Drezner and I have a new essay in International Studies Perspectives on the ways in which user-generated technologies are impacting the discipline of IR. Here's the abstract:The International Relations (IR) profession has not fully taken stock of the way in which user-driven information technologies—including Blogger, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Wikipedia—are reshaping our professional activities, our subject matter, and even the constitutive rules of the discipline itself. In this study, we reflect on the ways in which our own roles and identities as IR scholars have evolved since...

Lessons in Globalism from Patong

by Charli Carpenter | 6 August, 2010 |

Current Intelligence has published some ruminations of mine from my trip to Phuket last month. Lead paragraph follows:Though I definitely passed through customs and back, it’s hard to know whether I traveled to a country called Thailand these past two weeks or whether I was actually just in one of those many outposts of globalization where a multi-national cacophony of Western tourists connect superficially with caricatures of a place’s pre-globalized culture. At the invitation of an old friend who largely controlled the itinerary, I found myself on beaches and in bars, on dive boats and in...

Good Norms, Bad Norms

by Charli Carpenter | 4 August, 2010 |

I am reading a fascinating new addition to the literature on the influence of transnational advocacy networks in world politics: Mark Lawrence Schrad’s The Political Power of Bad Ideas. Essentially a history of the prohibition movement, his broader theoretical point is that transnational advocacy networks not only influence governments into doing what they should (like banning landmines and the recruitment of child soldiers) but also, sometimes, into making bad policies. His book is interesting because most case studies of advocacy networks focus on worthwhile campaigns that succeeded –...

Wikileaks and “War Crimes”

by Charli Carpenter | 1 August, 2010 |

Last Monday, Julian Assange told reporters in London that the Afghan War Diaries reveal war crimes in Afghanistan, and reiterated this statement on Democracy Now! midweek. The claim has been widely reported and is being reported as fact by some sources. This installment in my series on the Wikileaks story will evaluate this claim and correct a few conceptual inaccuracies circulating in the press coverage.But first, here's what this post is not arguing. I am not arguing that no evidence of war crimes exists in the war logs. Actually, it would surprise me if there are not some genuine...

“An AQ/Taliban Executioner’s Dream.”

by Charli Carpenter | 29 July, 2010 |

Quoting an anonymous former military intelligence officer, that is how Adam Swerer described the Wikileaks' archive published Sunday in an op-ed earlier this week. Joshua Foust concurred in a PBS essay:If I were a Taliban operative with access to a computer — and lots of them have access to computers — I’d start searching the WikiLeaks data for incident reports near my area of operation to see if I recognized anyone. And then I’d kill whomever I could identify. Those deaths would be directly attributable to WikiLeaks. Even with the names removed from these reports, you know where they...

What I Ended Up Reading in Between World Cup Matches Abroad

by Charli Carpenter | 20 July, 2010 |

Last month during the Greece/South Korea World Cup game, my eight-year-old son noticed the players speaking to one another in English, and asked me: “Mom, is English the official language of soccer?” As with so many of his astute little queries, I didn’t know the answer at the time. But while in Asia, I read three fabulous books that kept bringing me back to this question and finally not only answered it, but helped me see why it matters.First: How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization by Franklin Foer: sort of an empirical, if anecdotal, validation of FIFA’s claim...

What I’ll Be Reading on the Plane to Thailand

by Charli Carpenter | 30 June, 2010 |

I'll be mostly off the grid traveling for the next two and half weeks, and I want to thank readers for their many suggestions as to what I should take with me. I probably won't flesh out my entire reading list until I get to the airport Barnes and Noble, but I have decided on one book I'm definitely taking with - and it's not even a paperback: Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do by Albert Laszlo Barabasi.Barabasi first captured my imagination with his book Linked, a lay person's guide to network science, and his new book is said to extend his analytical vision through time as...

What Exactly is a “Human Security Perspective” Anyway?

by Charli Carpenter | 28 June, 2010 |

I use that term a lot, and I've been realizing that it's unclear to many people what that actually means. As Roland Paris pointed out years ago, the term means different things to different people; in fact my own empirical research suggests as much. So as I think ahead to teaching a course on this subject in the Fall, I thought it might be useful to nail down what the term generally means to me when I use it. My first stab at doing just that is now posted at Current Intelligence. A teaser:To me, a "human security perspective" is a set of propositions and analytical assumptions about the...

Beach Book Blegging

by Charli Carpenter | 24 June, 2010 |

At the invitation of an old friend, my daughter and I will be traveling to Thailand the first two weeks of July, and I've been commanded to bring only vacation reading. It's been awhile since I did any of that and I could use suggestions for humorous, smart, non-war-crimes related non-fiction or other good beach reads.In the past I've enjoyed humorous science writing like Mary Roach's Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers; funny, twisted memoirs like Augusten Buroughs' Running With Scissors or Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle or social-science-for-laypersons books like More Sex is...

Free at Last

by Charli Carpenter | 24 June, 2010 |

I am happily in receipt of a letter from University of Massachusetts' Chancellor Holub informing me that I have been awarded tenure. Of course you know what this means: the days of keeping my outside-the-box ideas to myself are gone like the Twelve Colonies. Yep, I just cannot wait to write something controversial or unpopular using my newly acquired academic freedom.

The Duck of Minerva