This is a guest post by Theo McLauchin (@TheoMcLauchlin), Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Université de Montréal When is a norm not a norm? I ask this question when I read Colin Elman and Arthur Lupia’s vigorous defense of the Data Access &...
I confess that I am a World Bank junkie. There is nothing (well, very little) that perks my intellectual interest more than an in-depth discussion on the internal and external politics of the Bank....
I really like the posts from Vikash and from Chris and at the risk of a bit of overkill on the topic (and upsetting Bill's stomach further), I'll add one more angle. This is from my monthly column...
Earlier this month, the Associated Press reported that the Obama administration has fully disclosed decades worth of data about the size of America's nuclear arsenal: America's official nuclear...
In every episode of the classic 1960s television series "The Prisoner," Number 6 and Number 2 had this exchange: Number 6: Where am I?Number 2: In the Village.Number 6: What do you want?Number 2: We want information.Number 6: Whose side are you on?Number 2: That would be telling. We want information... information... information.Number 6: You won't get it.The lack of information is a problem widely recognized by international relations scholars.Face it, we study a field marked by secrecy and imprecision. The central unit of analysis is the state, with interests (or motives) that are...
In the June 15 dead-tree version of The Nation (online since May 27), Jonathan Schell writes that the Iraq war was produced by torture. Everyone knows that the "war on terror" and the Iraq war produced torture, but few have focused on the reversed causal arrow. And we are still learning details of the prominent and apparently unprecedented role Vice President Dick Cheney played in approving torture and promoting war.To document his charge, Schell references a remarkable blog post at The Washington Note penned by Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, former chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin...
Much of my academic scholarship is concerned with the idea of deliberative democracy. Nayef Samhat and I have argued, for instance, that norms of transparency (or openness) and participation (or inclusion) promote public deliberation.By contrast, secrecy and exclusion distort public debate.Today, the Union of Concerned Scientists, together with the Government Accountability Project, told a House Committee about their survey of nearly 300 government climate scientists. The results, as reported by AP, are far from ideal for those interested in deliberation: At the House hearing, two private...