Having never read this book, I don’t pretend to understand how the nominations process for Academy Awards really works. But this year’s rankings mystify the heck out of me. (Arianna Huffington’s make sense, though.) Here’s what I don’t get. How in heaven does a film like District 9 – disturbing, disgusting and cliche – get […]
Author: Charli Carpenter
The Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has become an iconic figure in urban Kenya. Or at least so says Scott Baldaug, reporting from Nairobi. Aside from getting Mr. Moreno-OcampoR
The best event I attended at ISA this year wasn’t the panel on pirates, nor the panel on war law, nor the panel on blogging, nor the gender and security discussion group, but Saturday morning’s pa
David Axe at War is Boring critiques the latest Navy strategy document for conflating piracy, terrorists and national insurgents. There are no proven links between Somali pirates, based in northern Somalia, and the major, “terroristic” insurgent groups operations based in southern and central Somalia. Anyway, Shabab and pirates are separate, even conflicting, entities. Shabab even […]
As Rob mentioned already, I spoke at an ISA panel on blogs and the academy last week. Key questions included whether or not blogs matter for policy, to what extent academic blogging is reshaping the p
Among events I attended last week at the International Studies Association Annual Conference: an informal discussion on the relationship between IR feminist theory and security studies, organized by m
Some initial tidbits from conference papers I read or heard presented while AWOL: 1) At a panel on pirates: Isaac Kamola: The recent securitization of Somali piracy is a pretty big mystery given how few vital interests are at stake. Peter Andreas pointed out that it’s therefore also a mystery that no major IR journal […]
Apologies for the long absence during my foray to the wireless-dead-zone of the New Orleans Riverside Hilton. Brainier post-ISA posts to arrive as soon as I’ve settled back in with the kids and deal
Blogging will be light over the next week while I and many colleagues descend upon the city of New Orleans for the International Studies Association Annual Conference – or, as I explained cheekily t
Finally had a look at the 2010 QDR on the plane to New Orleans yesterday. I don’t mean to poke fun of our defense establishment’s hard work. I promise I’ll have some kind of substantive comment on the human security dimensions of the QDR once I’ve fully digested it. But until then, I can’t help […]
Google is backpedaling amid the buzz about Buzz, apologizing for its premature launch and the privacy issues it created, and promising to make Buzz more like other social networking sites, where users
The HSR study I mentioned before on the declining toll of war has attracted a number of criticisms. Les Roberts at Making Sense of Sudan argues that their result is an artifact of the way in which the