The Duck of Minerva

Jay Ulfelder

Jay Ulfelder is a Carr Center Fellow at Harvard University. Jay Ulfelder has two decades of experience working at the intersection of social science and data science, with a particular focus on protest, collective action, human rights, democracy, and forecasting.

Recent Posts

The Trouble with Combining, or Why I’m Not Touting the Global Peace Index

by Jay Ulfelder | 12 June, 2012 |

 The Institute for Economics and Peace is making a big splash today with the release of the 2012 edition of its annual Global Peace Index (GPI)---"the world's leading measure of global peacefulness," according to its web site. The launch event for the 2012 edition included several people whose work I respect and admire, and the Institute identifies some of the heaviest hitters in the global fight for peace and human rights---Kofi Annan, Desmond Tutu, and the Dalai Lama, for crying out loud---as "endorsers" of the GPI.I really want to like this index. I'm a numbers guy, and I've spent most of...

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There Are Two Kinds of Countries in the World: ____ and _____

by Jay Ulfelder | 25 May, 2012 |

This is a cross-post from my solo blog, Dart-Throwing Chimp.A few days ago, Sean Langberg blogged about a subject that's long been a pet peeve of mine: how we classify countries when we try to talk about the international system, and the labels we apply to the resulting groups. I thought I'd take the cue to air my grievances on the topic and make a couple of simple suggestions.Taxonomies require organizing principles, and the kernel of the classification system Americans usually use in international politics comes from modernization theory. Modernization theory's core idea is...

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In Defense of Particularism in American Foreign policy

by Jay Ulfelder | 20 February, 2012 |

[This is a cross-posting from Dart-Throwing Chimp.] I've just finished reading John Lewis Gaddis's terrific biography of George Frost Kennan, a towering figure in American foreign policy after World War II whom Henry Kissinger described as "one of the most important, complex, moving, challenging and exasperating American public servants." Apart from recommending to the book, which I do without hesitation to anyone with an interest in world affairs, I wanted to talk about how Gaddis' distillation of Kennan's ideas helped me clarify some of my own thinking on the conduct of foreign...

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Libya’s Chicken-and-Egg Problem

by Jay Ulfelder | 1 November, 2011 |

On October 23, Libya's Transitional National Council (TNC) declared the country liberated and the transition to a post-Gaddafi state officially underway. Over the following week, we've seen the first of what I expect will be many stories about tensions and conflict among the groups over whom the TNC is claiming authority. Here's the opening to one such story, from today's Washington Post:Libya has emerged from its civil war with more than 300 militias and no political consensus on forming a national army, raising concerns that irregular, gun-toting groups could become entrenched and pose a...

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“Magic Democracy Words” Don’t Tie Their Speaker’s Hands

by Jay Ulfelder | 29 September, 2011 |

 In an August 30 piece for BBC News, Shashank Joshi, a graduate student at Harvard University and associate fellow at a major U.K. think tank, argued that strong statements from American officials about Syrian president Assad's loss of legitimacy would help advance the Syrian revolution by committing the U.S. to stronger courses of action. Joshi writes (emphasis added):The Syrian revolution of 2011 could also have been one more of those many abortive uprisings whose blood flecks the history of the modern Middle East, yet could not change its course. Things are no longer so clear. The outside...

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On Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and the Construction of a Liberal International Order

by Jay Ulfelder | 17 September, 2011 |

Debate over NATO's military intervention in the Libyan civil war has reinvigorated discussion among observers of international relations on the merits (or demerits) of the United Nations's Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine. You can find links to important entries in the current debate at the end of this post, but I'm going to react here to one part of it. In a rejoinder to her critics, including IR student and Slouching Towards Columbia blogger Dan Trombly, Princeton University's Anne-Marie Slaughter casts R2P as an instrument for positive change in the international system, a wrench...

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