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

Museum of Science Fiction To Open in DC

by Charli Carpenter | 15 May, 2015 |

Here is a project worthy of interest by those Duck readers who are simultaneously politics and science fiction nerds: a non-profit effort to build a Museum of Science Fiction in Washington, DC. The mission of the Museum of Science Fiction is to create a center of gravity where art and science are powered by imagination. Science fiction is the story of humanity: who we were, who we are, and who we dream to be. The Museum will present this story through displays, interactivity, and programs in ways that excite, educate, entertain, and create a new generation of dreamers. Even more exciting is...

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FRIDAY NERD BLOGGING: Call for ISA Proposals on “Star Wars and International Security”

by Charli Carpenter | 8 May, 2015 |

Last Monday, on May the 4th, citizens around the globe celebrated International Star Wars Day. In honor of this important event, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and I are pleased to announce an International Studies Association 2016 Conference panel on Star Wars for next year's meeting. We seek paper abstracts examining the relationship between the Star Wars franchise and socio-political dynamics in the area of international security, broadly defined. In other words, this panel focuses specifically on the inter-relationship between pop culture ideas and “real-world” security-seeking processes and...

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The “Future” of “Global” “Security” “Studies”

by Charli Carpenter | 4 May, 2015 |

Last Friday, I had the great pleasure to attend a workshop on "The Future of Global Security Studies" at University of Denver's Sie Center for International Security and Diplomacy. The event brought together authors for the inaugral special issue of ISA's new journal, the Journal of Global Security Studies, which promises to showcase new research and new thinking in security studies, but also to bring diverse perspectives into dialogue. As such, the workshop was one of the most engaging I've ever attended: realists, big data proponents, feminists, and securitization scholars all in the same...

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Friday Nerd Blogging

by Charli Carpenter | 27 March, 2015 |

What? No "pirates?" Ironic, since the Season 4 finale set a new piracy record and now at 18.5 million viewers is the second most watched HBO show in history. What does this mean for mass understandings of foreign policy? Maybe nothing. Maybe something.

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Belated ISA Recap: Norms in IR, Norm Violations in IR, Pop Culture in IR and Junior Scholar Panels

by Charli Carpenter | 19 March, 2015 |

So I'm a wee bit late to the post-International Studies Association Annual Conference blogging ritual, but better than never right? Let me begin with a first-time experience for me at ISA that I truly enjoyed and highly recommend: participation on a Junior Scholar Symposium Panel. If you've never done this, here's how it works: You read four papers by emerging scholars, but instead of a regular panel format the papers are discussed in combined poster/workshop format at one of several round-tables in a big ballroom. Authors bring poster versions of their papers, and everyone reads in advance....

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Reversing the Gun Sights, Revisited

by Charli Carpenter | 15 March, 2015 | ,

In about a month, High Contracting Parties to the United Nations Convention on Conventional Weapons will again consider the humanitarian and ethical problems posed by fully autonomous lethal weapons. As I've written before, this issue in on the UN agenda due to a savvy and well-organized network of "humanitarian disarmament" NGOs. This coalition is keen to reconstruct governments' interpretation of how to balance military utility with humanitarian concerns when it comes to emerging technologies of violence. Yet with the landmine and cluster munitions campaigns considered some of the landmark...

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Call For Applications: Guest Ducks

by Charli Carpenter | 11 March, 2015 | ,

As part of the new Duck, we have revamped our guest blogging policy. The old policy, dating from way back when Dan and Patrick were slowly expanding the blog: The procedure for bringing on guest bloggers is one of those “salami factory” things… and strangers just aren’t very likely to make it through the process. In other words, guest blogging happened by invitation only. At first it happened sort of ad hoc and accidentally. We would scout new talent in the blogosphere and offer upcoming bloggers a place to build a profile. Or we would reach out to those in our social networks we wanted to...

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What Would Nature Say About Ecological Warfare?

by Charli Carpenter | 5 March, 2015 | ,

I thought of this incredible eco-ad campaign, NatureisSpeaking.org, when I read Bronwyn Leebaw's fascinating article "Scorched Earth: Environmental War Crimes and International Justice" in Perspectives on Politics.  This is a much-overdue analysis of the place of the earth and environmental damage in the laws of armed conflict - two issues areas rarely studied by political scientists. Leebaw examines representations of the natural environment in laws of war as they have evolved in four stages: under Grotius, a conception of Nature as Property, with protections articulated in the same way...

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Counting on the Media: A Reply to Mack and Pinker

by Charli Carpenter | 20 January, 2015 |

It's always nice to read good news. And it's nice to read evidence-based arguments in the popular press. Over the holiday, Andrew Mack and Steven Pinker offered a little of each over the holidays in their article "The World Is Not Falling Apart." Therein, they marshal of human security indicators upon indicators - number of rapes reported, number of civilians killed, number of wars breaking out, number of homicides -  to argue that at the global level the trendlines are mostly pointing downward. In championing "an evidence-based mindset on the state of the world," the authors place the blame...

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