A (very small) corner of the policy world got excited Monday afternoon: the Biden Administration announced its picks for top international religious freedom positions. This is an area I've worked in for over ten years alongside my academic work, but it's one that few...
Today is President Putin’s inauguration day and even Avengers couldn’t stop it, as evidenced by the arrested raccoon in the center of Moscow on Saturday during the unsanctioned rally ““He's No Tsar...
Tom Nichols, he of Death of Expertise fame, raised a few hackles over the weekend when he said marches really hadn't achieved anything since the Civil Rights Movement. News flash: You're not John...
This is a guest post by Lucas Dolan, a PhD Student at American University’s School of International Service. His research deals with the transnational coalition-building of right-wing populist...
This past week I was invited to speak as an expert at the United Nations Informal Meeting of Experts under the auspices of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW). The CCW’s purpose is to limit or prohibit certain conventional weapons that are excessively injurious or have indiscriminate effects. The Convention has five additional protocols banning particular weapons, such as blinding lasers and cluster bombs. Last week’s meetings was focused on whether the member states ought to consider a possible sixth additional protocol on lethal autonomous weapons or “killer robots.” My...
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...
Each time her sex is butchered with the pretext of purity...three million of our sisters face this violence each year... In his new song "Tomber la Lame" or "Drop the Blade," Burkina Faso hip-hop artist Smockey has an amazing call to end the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM), a procedure that remains widespread in parts of Africa and the Middle East that removes a piece of a girl's genitals with a knife so that she won't experience sexual pleasure as an adult and, so the logic goes, be less likely to stray from her husband. It's a horrifying practice, but one that foreign groups...