My Final Word to Dan Drezner On Zombies

For those who were unable to squeeze into the packed room for Stephanie Carvin's "Zombie Holocaust" panel at ISA, here is the video blog version of my remarks on Dan Drezner's new book Theory of International Politics and Zombies.

This panel, by the way, was voted among the "Top 20 ISA Panels of All Time" by a "senior academic sitting in audience" via Twitter. My post-ISA content analysis of the conference Twitter hashtag also shows that 'zombies' was the fifth most commonly tweeted word - beaten only by '#isa2011', 'rt,' 'panel' and 'http', and surpassing the words 'power,' 'libya' and even 'bitly' as well as references to the IPad contest being thrown by Routledge Press. What this suggests about the state of IR as a discipline one can only wonder, but Steve Saideman has a few choice thoughts.

The Limits and Future of R2P

Small Wars Journal published a longer version of my argument about the criteria associated with the R2P doctrine and why the "If Libya Why Not Bahrain" argument is specious.

However, particularly in light of evolving events, I think it's important to qualify this argument by emphasizing that I'm describing an existing (and limited) set of standards, not necessarily endorsing it as currently constituted. In fact it would surprise me if Operation Odyssey Dawn does not result in some slightly revisited normative understandings regarding R2P, and indeed perhaps it should. (The rest of this is a thinking aloud post, so please take my ruminations in that context.)

The Infected Zone

UK Movie Poster for "Monsters" (2010). Source: Wikipedia.

The post-9/11 generation sci-fi film "Monsters" (Gareth Edwards, 2010) is a kind of "Cloverfield" for the US-Mexican border (or if you're a real film buff, it is a "Sin Nombre" journey film with real aliens, i.e. gigantic extra-terrestials). But this is more than just a monster flick.

The film takes the notion of a militarized zone and an alien invasion along the US-Mexican border quite literally, but it is set six years after the invasion or infestation. Thus, Mexico is transformed into a late-Occupied Iraq or Afghanistan and Texas into a kind of post-Katrina wasteland. The militarization of the landscape is eerily too familiar. In fact, the power and realism of the film stems from the idea that people acclimate to militarization; horror becomes mostly mundane. At one point, the American protagonists ask a Mexican driver why he and his family live so close to a dangerous area, the response is simply that they have nowhere else to go and they think they can manage the risks.

Theses on Consistency and Intervention

 Since Stephanie has quoted me on the subject, I thought I’d share some thoughts on intervention and consistency.

1.     Consistency is a virtue – but it isn’t the only virtue. Sometimes good judgement points us in the direction of inconsistency; this is so in personal life as well as domestic and international politics. We (most of us) overlook failings in our friends which would upset us in our enemies.  In the realm of sexual politics, we (most of us) cut some slack for Bill Clinton in a way that we wouldn’t, and didn’t, for Clarence Thomas. We (most of us) were prepared to see force used to expel Saddam from Kuwait, but looked the other way when India took Goa or Tanzania overthrew Idi Amin. These are judgements that involve inconsistency but they are, I think, easily defensible on other grounds.

2.     The only consistent approach to intervention is ‘don’t intervene’.  Those with the capacity to act can’t act everywhere and there is no algorithm that will tell us which of the numerous bad things going on in the world deserve the attention of the well-meaning powerful, and which don’t. If consistency is crucial, the only way to achieve it is by not acting.

3.     Many people are happy with the idea of universal inaction; after all, that way there is no collateral damage from enforcing no fly zones, no accidents that have to be apologised for, no need for an exit strategy and so on. But bystander status doesn’t give us clean hands. If those who have the power to act sit and watch while atrocities are committed which they could have prevented then they share at least some of the responsibility for what takes place.

Grand Doctrine and Very Large Strategy

-- Sir Thursday, Garth Nix

I'm tired of demands for an articulated "Obama Doctrine."

Don't misunderstand me. I think it would be nice if the Obama Administration had an overarching vision for US foreign policy. It might even be a good thing if it could produce something resembling a coherent document on the subject instead of the stream-of-consciousness bureaucratic filler it tends to publish.

What I emphatically reject is the idea that Obama ought to, in effect, retcon Libya by articulating an ex post facto grand strategy that makes sense of his decision to intervene.

Morality, R2P, the nature of conflict and the emerging "Obama Doctrine"

There’s been some really interesting posts here on R2P in the last few days. At the risk of kicking a dead horse – although I hardly think this horse is dead - I’d like to raise a few points. (I've actually been writing this post over the past few days, and was going to post it later in the week, but Obama's speech tonight made me want to post it earlier. You know, because hasty blogging is always a good thing.)

Most of my thinking has been on the issue of consistency/inconsistency with regards to R2P. I think I agree with Charli, there is no consistency requirement when it comes to R2P. For better and for worse, the case presently being made for R2P in Libya is that the international community is acting where it can when it can. The better part of this is that it’s relatively easy to protect civilians from conventional military forces (tanks, planes, etc) and this is why I think we see the action in Libya. Boots on the ground are not required, and if they were, it's clear that they're probably not coming. As Obama said tonight, boots on the ground would entail a situation where the "dangers faced by our men and women in uniform would be far greater. So would the costs, and our share of the responsibility for what comes next."

The worse part of this, as implied by Obama's speech, is that it is still very hard to end civil wars/ethnic strife (such as that of Rwanda – which provoked so much soul-searching about humanitarian intervention in the first place). And this is why we aren’t really seeing any intervention in Côte d’Ivoire – because everyone knows it would be a hot mess.

More On the Gap Between Feminist IR and Gendered Foreign Policy Debates

Foreign Affairs has published a longer version of my original remarks about the so-called "Lady Hawks" who supposedly "ball-busted" our presumably lily-livered president into a war ostensibly "not of his choosing."

We'll see how he deals with all this, among other things, tonight at 7:30 EST - (my guess: with his own brand of tough-and-tender masculinity) - but in the meantime, here's the capsule version of my scholarly take translated into Belt-Way-ese:

Commentators are falling over themselves to explain the “gender divide” among Obama’s staff, particularly the apparently astonishing fact that several key pro-intervention voices came from women... These discussions reveal far more about gender misconceptions among foreign policy journalists than about the preferences or influence of Obama’s female foreign policy staff. Avlon, Dowd, Dreyfuss, and others apparently subscribe to the classic gender myth that women are generally more diplomatic and opposed to war than men...

But systematic social science studies have shown that the 'women and peace' myth is partially correct at best. Evidence suggests that it is not sex but gender ideology that correlates with more pacifist views... Political scientists Marc Tessler and Ina Warriner found that both men and women who generally value gender equality also generally value non-violent resolutions to international disputes such as the Palestinian conflict. And Mary Caprioli... has found that a higher level of gender inequality within a country yields a greater likelihood of militarized international disputes, even when controlling for democracy.

But gender trends are only probabilities: they have very little to say about what policies an individual woman or man would prefer once in power, or about the extent to which she or he will succeed in pursuing those preferences. And fixation on the sex of the pro-intervention voices in this case overlooks a far more fundamental difference between the hawks and doves on the Libyan issue: in the hawks’ view, the national interest included both human and national security...

Ultimately, it does not matter whether a political actor is male or female; it matters whether social expectations about gender roles shape or frame policy choices. It is unlikely that the sex of these policymakers alone determined their preferences, and it is unclear if it influenced their authority in briefings with the president. It is, however, apparent that gender expectations -- based on myths and stereotypes -- have influenced the interpretation of these events. And if such spin damages Obama’s credibility in the eyes of U.S. allies or adversaries, the responsibility is on the spin doctors, not the policymakers.

Check out the whole thing here.

[cross-posted at Lawyers Guns and Money]

Truth Will Win

For those keeping score on where the revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East are headed and how to understand it all, it is worth noting that today marked the 30th anniversary of Solidarity's first national warning strike. On March 27, 1981, more than 12 million Poles took to the streets in a peaceful protest action and in defiance of the Communist regime -- a testimony of the power of non-violence. At the time, it was the largest protest action in the Soviet bloc history. The Poles did not have the internet, or Facebook, or Twitter -- but they were still able to mobilize on an unprecedented scale. They had antiquated hand crank mimeograph machines (and red ink-stained hands) and an extensive informal network of laborers, students, and intellectuals that distributed posters throughout the country. This was the main poster plastered around the country on March 27, 1981 (the caption reads: "Truth Will Win"):






After the strike, the government never really did regain its footing -- it moved back and forth over the next eight years from periods of excessive coercion (Martial Law) to accommodation looking for some recipe to reclaim popular support, revitalize a corrupt economic system, and restore its legitimacy. It couldn't.

While coercion may keep the threatened regimes in the Middle East and North Africa in power in the short/medium term as happened in Poland (the Poles had to endure 19 months of Martial Law from Dec. 1981 to July 1983), I don't see how these corrupt autocratic regimes will be able to reclaim public support, manage collapsing economies and restore legitimacy. OK, so 1989 probably is an oversimplified (and overused analogy) -- I get it. But, I still think these regimes will eventually fall...

Since there is nothing else going on in the world, let’s talk about Canada!

International politics is such a bore these days, right? Good thing we have Canada to spice things up for us!

There were two interesting developments yesterday for those living in the northern end of North America. First, it was announced that a Canadian, Maj. Gen. Charles Bouchard, will be heading up the NATO mission in Libya. My first thoughts about this were that the choice represents an interesting compromise. Canada, the (French?) vanilla ice-cream of the Western alliance (normally boring, but safe and reliable) represents a non-American and non-European choice. Yet, since the Americans clearly did not want a high-profile position on the mission, this seems to have settled a rivalry between the UK and France. I suppose Bouchard, who represents a country of both English and French sensibilities (and an ability to speak both languages) was an even better compromise then.

Will R2P Survive?

So here's a question: How do we evaluate whether or not a humanitarian intervention is successful? The obvious difficulty is that the intervention alters history and we are left with running various counterfactual thought experiments.

Here's the Obama administration's take on what would have happened in the absence of intervention. According to Laura Rozen, Dennis Ross and Derek Chollet told reporters that:

“We were looking at ‘Srebrenica on steroids’ —the real or imminent possibility that up to a 100,000 people could be massacred, and everyone would blame us for it,” Ross explained, according to one attendee, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the administration is trying to keep its consultations private.

Russ Douthat dismisses the claim:

This is an audacious claim, to put it mildly. By way of comparison, in the Kosovo conflict, so often cited as a precedent for our Libyan intervention, the Serbian ethnic cleansing campaign may have claimed 10,000 lives, while the widely-respected Iraq Body Count projects suggests that between 100,000 and 110,000 civilians have been killed in the eight years since we invaded in Iraq.

Err, well, no. The Libyan counterfactual (i.e., what might have happened without international intervention) can not be evaluated "by comparison" with two cases of international intervention/war. The Serbs killed thousands after the NATO bombing began -- if we're going to use Kosovo, we have to evaluate it in light of the counterfactual: how many more might have been killed if Serbs had launched a full-on effort to retake Kosovo without NATO airstrikes?

We're Sorry

We're sorry...

• That some of our soldiers publicly refer to your people in derogatory and racist language.
• That some of our soldiers shoot your unarmed civilians at random, defile their corpses, and cut off body parts to keep as trophies.
• That some of our soldiers killed the cousin of your head of state. We didn't even know we were in the hometown of the President, how could we have known he was a Karzai? Oh, right.. we're very sorry.
• That our helicopter pilots slaughtered your children while they are out collecting firewood.  That argument we made about how using attack helicopters instead of fighter jets would prevent civilian casualties because the pilots could make a visual confirmation of militants ... eh, err... we were wrong.  Sorry about that too.
• That we had to completely raze your village to the ground. You understand that we had to destroy your village to save it, don't you? Good luck getting that vineyard to grow back...

Tenure for Teachers

The official justification for tenure is that it allows scholars to "speak truth to power" without fear of losing their jobs. There's obviously something to that, but I've always looked upon tenure as a form of non-salary compensation. Most college professors make less than they would in other sectors. Tenure compensates us with much greater job security.

I'd never thought about it in these terms, but the same reasoning might also apply to teachers in primary and secondar education. It turns out that while direct evidence for schoolteachers proves difficult to come by, data on New Jersey superintendent pay suggest some truth to the tenure-as-substitute-for-pay hypothesis.

Global Governance and the Worst Case Scenario: Theorizing the International Relations of a Zombie Holocaust

ISA 2011 featured a book panel on Daniel Drezner's Theories of International Politics and Zombies.

Stephanie Carvin created, animated, moderated, and even presented on the roundtable. Other participants included Robert Farley (of LGM), Jeremy Youde, myself, Charli Carpenter, and, of course, Dan D. Topics included:

• The results of zombie-apocalypse simulations;
• The global health regime and flesh-eating ghouls;
• Post-Zombie IR theory;
• The laws of war meet reanimated corpses; and
• The cyborg menace.

For those of you who missed the panel, we now have a podcast available. Recording quality is uneven -- Rob, despite being roughly the size of a hill giant, has trouble switching his voice to any setting other than "mellow." Charli's presentation simply isn't the same without the mashed-up film she played in the background. I did not include Q&A, because I lack permission from the audience to broadcast their comments. But despite these failings, the podcast is well worth your time.

Download here, or indirectly via Kittenboo.

“Manning Up” and Making (the Libyan) War

Women are supposed to be those innocent of war, protected by chivalric warriors. The Trojan War was made over Helen. G. W. Bush justified the invasion of Iraq with the platitude that “violence against women is always and everywhere wrong.” Yet Maureen Dowd, in the New York Times Op-Ed Section, notes that the story of the Libyan no-fly zone is one of “a group of strong women swooping down to shake the president out of his delicate sensibilities and show him the way to war.” A number of others have been framing this in terms of gender as well.

Dowd notes that “we have come a long way from the feminist international relations theory two decades ago that indulged in stereotypes about aggression being ‘male’ and conciliation being ‘female.’” This is a misreading of feminist international relations theory, and the misreading leads to a misinterpretation of the events surrounding the decision to go to war in Libya.

Rather than indulging in gender stereotypes, feminist international relations theory has always pushed back against gender essentialism. The argument that Dowd misreads is actually that aggression is often associated with masculinity (and thus expected of men) and conciliation is often associated with femininity (and thus expected of women), despite neither sex holding those characteristics naturally or essentially. It is the expectation of masculinity (rather than the presence of men, or their inherent manliness) that shapes (especially security) politics.

Quacking about an award

Since Dan is entirely too modest to blog this himself, I thought I'd do it myself:

International Security Studies Section Best book Award to: Daniel H. Nexon (Georgetown University) for The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009).

Yes, that's right: our very own Dan Nexon won the best book award from the International Security Studies section of the International Studies Association for this year. I did see that they gave him a nice plaque, but I was not quick enough with my camera to snap a photo for posting.

Congratulations to Dan! Richly deserved recognition for an excellent book.

Libya and the Responsibility to Protect

I see there’s some naysaying about the use of force to protect civilians in Libya. Among various refrains is the claim that “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) doctrine lacks moral strength if applied selectively: the
international community can’t legitimately go after Qaddafi if it won’t/can’t also go after every other dictator.

So just a reminder that the doctrine, as laid out by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty and acknowledged as a legal principle in several multilateral documents, actually promotes military force for civilian protection not in every case where it might be merited, but rather only in limited circumstances mapping roughly onto just war theory.

Of Lords and Flies

The release of the first three of a reported 4,000 photos and videos from an American "kill team" in Afghanistan threatens to become the next "Abu Ghraib."  The horrific images of civilian corpses being photographed with grinning American troops raises important questions about the American military's ability to maintain professional standards and discipline; soldiers' (racialized) understanding of and ability to engage with foreign societies; and the underside of military culture. In other words, contrary to the military's spin machine, these images are not an aberration or simply the product of one "rogue" unit. Moreover, the central issue is not how to manage the "fall out" of (righteous) Muslim rage but how to encourage Americans to take a hard look at military culture in a time of unrelenting affective militarism.

Libya and ‘the shadow of Iraq’

At the beginning of every war, journalists must quickly find a frame that makes the new violence intelligible to their audiences. It is often convenient to compare new events to old events, to see what looks similar and what looks different (journalists routinely follow the principle of comparison earlier articulated by Sesame Street). In 2006, during the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq War, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman employed the Vietnam template in an op-ed: ‘in time we’ll come to see the events unfolding — or rather, unraveling — in Iraq today as the real October surprise, because what we’re seeing there seems like the jihadist equivalent of the Tet offensive’ (here, subscription required). The White House rarely responds to op-ed columns. Perhaps alarmed by possible parallels – afraid of the “quagmire” analogy – it responded directly to Friedman’s claim (here).

Libya and Feminist Peace Theory

At the Daily Beast John Avlon gestures quizzically at the presence of women among those influencing the Libyan intervention:

The Libyan airstrikes mark the first time in U.S. history that a female-dominated diplomatic team has urged military action. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joined with U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and the influential Office of Multilateral and Human Rights Director Samantha Power to argue for airstrikes against Libya. Their advice triggered an abrupt shift in U.S. policy, overturning more cautious administrations' counselors. In the end, that a female-led diplomatic team argued for war will be a footnote in this conflict as it unfolds. But it is historically significant. And that it seems almost unremarkable to contemporaries is a small mark of our constant evolution toward a more perfect union, even within our civilian-led military

What may be true about this statement (I need to check more carefully) is that this is the first time the foreign policy apparatus has been quite so female-dominated at a time that a President was urged to take military action. What is more obviously less true is Avlon's implication that female diplomats have not pushed for war in the past or wouldn't generally do so. Easy counter-examples come to mind. Condoleeza Rice pushed for war in Iraq. Madeline Albright pushed, along with a significant American feminist lobby, for intervention in the Balkans. Jeane Kirkpatrick was not known for her pacifist views.

Avlon may think this week's events are "historically significant" due to the myth that women are generally more diplomatic and opposed to war than men. This myth has been pushed in particular by Foreign Affairs Magazine in essays by Fukuyama, Hunt and Coleman and by the Hunt Alternatives Fund as well as by a variety of NGOs. Of course there's plenty of counter-vailing anecdotal evidence, but the real question is what are the general trends? Surveys by Richard Eichenberg conducted at the start of the Iraq war found that it depends on the type of war: women tend to oppose war more than men in general, but the relationship reverses when it comes to waging wars to protect civilians in other lands.

In other words, Condoleeza Rice was the outlier: Powers, Clinton and Susan Rice represent more or less what feminist IR theorists would predict - both in their preference construction and their ability to convert their critical mass into policy influence when push came to shove. This will indeed be historically significant - the outcomes of war waged by the world's largest military usually are - but it is hardly surprising.

[cross-posted at Lawyers, Guns and Money]

Things I Learned at ISA

In descending order of seriousness but not necessarily importance:

1) According to a study presented at this workshop by Helen Turton (a whip-smart student at Exeter) the most commonly used methodological approach in the field is not quantitative analysis but rather interpretivism. Also (this from preliminary findings by Daniel Maliniak and Ryan Powers - I look forward to the published version): the most widely cited papers in the discipline of international relations are not the big boys of the theoretical canon [oh, yes, they're all apparently boys, except Marty Finnemore] but rather a very specific set of niche studies on the democratic peace. The working paper is still in the vault pending revisions, but click here for their current web appendix with an absolutely *stellar* network visualization (click to enlarge).

2) Judging by the standing-room-only attendance at Stephanie Carvin's zombie panel (plus subsequent bar-room talk and tweets), a comparable cult of niche studies on zombies appears to be in the works. Jesse Crane-Seeber's work is one example from the "zombie mainstreaming" school.

3) Sake apparently isn’t as hard on my system as tequila. This bodes well for future conferences.

4) Poker is more fun if you a) use Small Arms Survey playing cards, and b) make sure someone present actually knows how to manage a game properly. (Thanks Keith and Rob.)

5) Not that correlation is causation, but IR professionals and foreign policy bloggers apparently can’t go off the grid en masse for a few days without all hell breaking loose. I’m just saying…

[cross-posted at Lawyers, Guns and Money]

Saudi and Emirati Intervention in Bahrain

Saudi APCs and Emirati troops are now on the streets of Bahrain attempting to squelch what was formerly a non-violent, secular, youth-led, economically rooted, democracy movement as America does little other than urge restraint from its allies. Such mealy mouthed statements toward a regime which is using live ammunition against unarmed protesters and then denying the victims of its rampage access to medical facilities indicates that the US foreign policy establishment has failed to adapt its posture toward authoritarian client regimes since the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. Consequently, the monarchists' narrative explaining the democratic demands of the protests in sectarian terms and foreign influence appears to be becoming self fulfilling.

The situation reveals the paralyzing contradictions in American foreign policy, economic interests, and political ideology, but perhaps more importantly the failure of the Obama administration to decisively restrain Saudi and Emirati intervention may threaten regional stability. The Iranian republic has already called on the monarchies to leave Bahrain "immediately." There have been popular protests in Iraq, Iran, and Kuwait against the crackdown in Bahrain.

Despite the regime's attempt to erase the memory of the protests, Manama is not pacified. If the underlying reasons for the unrest are not addressed quickly and substantively, a wider escalation could eventually involve the US.

"There is no such thing as constructivism"

I was fortunate enough to participate in an ISA panel yesterday morning entitled "The Third Generation of Constructivist Thought: Boundaries, Distinctions, Limits -- Social Theory, Philosophy, and Constructivism," organized by Benjamin Herborth and Oliver Kessler. I decided to take the opportunity to deliver a little sermon on the counterproductive enterprise of trying to sharply define "constructivism" as a single coherent theory of anything, let alone a single coherent theory of world politics. Podcast here; the basic summary of my claim, along with my replies to some audience questions and the ensuing discussion, is below the fold.

Libya: R2P or Regime Change?

On CNN this Saturday morning, the day after the United Nations Security Council voted for Resolution 1973 (2011) to authorize a "no-fly zone" in Libya, the debate has centered around whether or not the United States and its allies want regime change in Libya. After all, a few days ago President Obama said "It's time for Qaddafi to go." Similarly, British Prime Minister David Cameron has declared: "It is almost impossible to envisage a future for Libya that includes him. Gaddafi must go, he has no legitimacy."

Yet, to me, this seems like a very odd and unhelpful framing of the situation.

The Rebels and Foreign Supporters

With the UNSC approval of the NFZ+ and the announcement of a cease-fire by the Libyan government, a slaughter in eastern Libya may have been averted. I don't want to weigh in on the NFZ+ as other Ducks are much more qualified to discuss the potential strategic and diplomatic challenges ahead. 

I did however want to flag a few scattered items about the rebels themselves and purported links with foreign patrons which some readers may have missed and which might inform a discussion of the conflict which is still far from over...

Nuclear Disarmament: Looking Back at Reykjavik

I've been looking at some of the documents in "The Reykjavik File" at the National Security Archive. This coming October will mark 25 years since Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev almost completed a startling nuclear disarmament deal.

Had they been successful, both superpowers would have been disarmed 15 years ago!

The US proposal at Reykjavik was fairly startling, as reported in the Memorandum of Conversation, Reagan-Gorbachev, Final Meeting, 12 October 1986, 3:25 p.m. - 4:30 p.m. and 5:30 p.m. - 6:50 p.m., October 16, 1986. Document 15 (or see this archive for educators):

"Both sides would agree to confine themselves to research, development and testing, which is permitted by the ABM Treaty, for a period of 5 years, through 1991, during which time a 50% reduction of strategic nuclear arsenals would be achieved. This being done, both sides will continue the pace of reductions with respect to all remaining offensive ballistic missiles with the goal of the total elimination of all offensive ballistic missiles by the end of the second five-year period. As long as these reductions continue at the appropriate pace, the same restrictions will continue to apply. At the end of the ten-year period, with all offensive ballistic missiles eliminated, either side would be free to deploy defenses."

Obviously, the US was interested in the possibility of researching and testing anti-ballistic missile (ABM) systems during the offensive disarmament period and then potentially deploying the systems after a 10 year period.

This is the somewhat different Soviet counterproposal (as reported in the same document), which also aims at disarming offensive arsenals over a 10 year period. However, it includes somewhat tougher language about research and testing limits under the 1972 ABM Treaty:

"The USSR and the United States undertake for ten years not to exercise their existing right of withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, which is of unlimited duration, and during that period strictly to observe all its provisions. The testing in space of all space components of missile defense is prohibited, except research and testing conducted in laboratories. Within the first five years of the ten-year period (and thus through 1991), the strategic offensive arms of the two sides shall be reduced by 50 percent. During the following five years of that period, the remaining 50 percent of the two sides strategic offensive arms shall be reduced. Thus by the end of 1996, the strategic offensive arms of the USSR and the United States will have been totally eliminated."

Sadly, nuclear disarmament was blocked by a fairly narrow difference over a pipe dream technology.

For a U.S. government analysis of the negotiations, written in the first person and signed by Ronald Reagan, see Document 25: National Security Decision Directive Number 250, "Post-Reykjavik Follow-Up," 3 November 1986, 14 pp.

No Nukes: Arms Division

In February, Bill Clinton's second Secretary of Defense, William Perry, spoke at Harvard's Belfer Center and continued his ongoing campaign against nuclear weapons. With former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger and former Senator Sam Nunn, Perry has for many years been seeking a "world free of nuclear weapons."

After describing his personal experience working behind the scenes during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Perry recounted another nuclear scare:

16 years later, when he was Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. He was awakened at 3 a.m. by a phone call from the watch officer at North American Aerospace Defense Command.

“The general got right to the point, telling me that his computers were indicating 200 missiles were on the way from the Soviet Union to the United States. I immediately woke up, “ Perry said. “The computer alert of course was a false alarm. The general was calling me in the hopes that I might help him help him figure out what the hell had gone wrong with his computers so that he’d have something to tell the president the next morning.”

Perry said that was one of three false alarms he knows of in which Soviet missiles were thought to be screaming toward the United States, “and I don’t know how many more might have occurred in the Soviet Union.”

“So I had a close personal experience with the possibility of a nuclear catastrophe that could have resulted in no less than the end of civilization,” Perry said. “And to this day, I believe that we avoided nuclear catastrophe as much by good luck as by good management.”

In other words, Perry does not apparently believe that nuclear deterrence had much to do with the "long peace" of the cold war.

I've previously blogged about my academic work in this area. In my view, these former US officials are acting as norm entrepreneurs, contesting the norm of nuclear deterrence by calling for nuclear disarmament. Perry's Harvard address specifically asks if "we" have "reached the nuclear tipping point."

That's norm life cycle-talk 101.

Multiple meltdowns?

Most of the members of the Duck are at the ISA conference in Montreal this week.

Meanwhile, Japan is trying to deal with a horrific series of nuclear accidents, triggered by natural disaster -- the 9.0 earthquake and resultant tsunami.

I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on nuclear engineering or physics. However, I can recommend some writing by specialists who are closely following the situation and describing the events in understandable terms.

First, I always turn to the Arms Control Wonk for nuclear-related issues. Jeffrey Lewis was in Japan when the earthquake hit and he's been following the situation closely. Likewise, All Things Nuclear, a blog of the Union of Concerned Scientists, is a very valuable read. Finally, Robert Alvarez of the Institute for Policy Studies and former deputy assistant secretary for national security and the environment (1993 to 1999) has been writing useful pieces for the Huffington Post.

As for the politics -- I think it is safe to say that nuclear power is taking a serious hit as a potential future energy source, which many have been touting lately because it does not produce greenhouse gases. Germany, which was considering the life extension of 17 nuclear plants, has delayed that decision and turned off 7 nuclear plants while safety issues are reconsidered.

The Conduct of Inquiry: part the first of my contribution to a symposium

About a month ago, the symposium on my book over at The Disorder of Things that I mentioned in an earlier post reached a critical stage: posts by Paul, Joe, Nick, and Meera were up, and it was now my turn. And then life intervened, and lo and behold it's been almost a month and I haven't put up a reply. I finally got a chance to start work on a reply this weekend, but it's grown so large in conception that I am going to have to split it into three parts. The first part is below the fold in this post; the second and third parts will follow shortly, depending -- in all honesty -- on how much time I get on the plane (and waiting in airports for connecting flights) to and from Montreal for the ISA this week. There are themes I introduce in this first part that I will take up again in subsequent parts, so bear that in mind.

Exercises in Futility

Four days ago I suggested that time is running out in Libya. With news that Brega has now fallen to pro-Gaddafi forces, it seems more likely than not that the end is nigh for the rebels. And yet France and the UK are still trying to build support for a no-fly zone, now with a major assist by the Arab League.

The problem: a no-fly zone isn't going to save the rebellion. An air campaign against Libyan forces, combined with indirect assistance to the rebels might be enough. But that would be a heck of a lots less "sanitary" than advocates of a no-fly zone are hoping for.

This makes all of the "big picture" questions surrounding external intervention rather urgent. It also throws a continuing reality of the contemporary world order into stark relief: the US is still the only player in town when it comes to world-wide power projection. If anything, Europe's defense cutbacks have exacerbated its dependency on US security provision.

Consider that the United States is currently engaged in two major military operations and yet it has significant forces converging on the Libyan coast and on Japan. Puts John Quiggin's insistence that the US is now one of a number of major powers into perspective, but not necessary in a way that speaks well of current US budget priorities.

"Also, It Turns Out Mubarak is a Cylon." #BSG #Egypt @RT "So Say We All!"

I was fascinated to learn while working on my Battlestar Galactica "research project" that Adama's quote from the scene above was floating around the Internet for some time during the Egyptian Revolution. The statement "This quote now applicable to Egypt" appeared in a Reddit thread, was reposted on at least one Facebook site, quickly attracting 6,000 likes and over 1800 comments, while like-minded tweets exploded across cyberspace. This one was featured at the Huffington post:Here are some other fun examples.

The book editors for whom we're developing this working paper asked us to look at the "intertext" between the series and political understandings in the actual world, so for our paper it was sufficient to acknowledge this phenomena.

But as a qualitative analyst I decided to take a closer, more systematic look at a sample of these comments and tweets. I was interested in the extent to which BSG metaphors engendered useful political commentary on civil-military relations - precisely what you would hope if Jutta Weldes is correct in arguing that "state action is made common-sensical through popular culture."

I discovered something more nuanced: the answer to that question seems to depend greatly on which new media tool the data came from.

Feminist IR 101, Post #6, War and Security (In Practice)

(after a long hiatus, which you don't even want to know about)

When we last visited "Feminist IR 101," we were talking about the ways that gendered lenses reformulate the way(s) we think about what security is and how it is practiced (empirically and normatively) in the global political arena - and I promised to put gendered lenses to work to talk about a "real world" security problem - what Feminist Security Studies might look like in practice.

The usual caveats apply - theory is practice, the "real world" as IR theorists see it is overdetermined by and co-constituted with IR theory's orthodoxies; there are many feminist approaches that don't all converge on the same issues; and there are many levels on which feminisms can engage the "real world" however conceived. Above and beyond that, feminisms have critiqued the field's assumption that the personal and the political/international are separable, which extends to questioning whether we can analytically separate the world "out there" and the world "in here," wherever that is.

Those caveats aside, the question "do what does feminist theorizing say about [insert news story here?]" is compelling to explore. So, what "what does feminist theorizing contribute to thinking about the continued U.S. military presence in Iraq?"

Libya: West Running Out of Time?

If recent reports are correct, NATO is running out of time if it wants to use a no-fly zone to tilt the balance in favor of the rebels. The Russians and Chinese may eventually agree to a United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolution authorizing a no-fly zone, but efforts to secure their agreement will take time. And it is not at all clear that a no-fly zone will prove sufficient to overcome Gaddafi's better-trained and equipped forces.

Thus, the debate over NATO (or NATO member-state intervention) needs to explicitly include the following issues:

• Should NATO implement a no-fly zone in the absence of UNSC approval?
• If it should, at what point does the cost of delay outweigh the value of UNSC approval?
• If a no-fly zone cannot save the rebellion, what further measures should NATO be willing to undertake to oust Gaddafi?

I don't know the answers to these questions. I haven't seen a slam-dunk argument for or against various forms of more pro-active NATO intervention. But I have seen a lot of arguments against intervention that should embarrass their sources. i.e., that do not frame the moral context in terms of a tyrant attempting to eradicate a popular uprising against his regime. There are many good reasons to still reject any form of foreign intervention given that context, but arguments that implicitly rely on deferring to the popular sovereignty of the Libyan people number not among them.

ISA blogging

Steve Saideman has some good advice and useful resources for those unfamiliar with Montreal.

International Women's Day Film Fest: The lady characters helping and hindering the cause.

The 15th Century take on Shrek

A friend of mine linked to a fabulous post by Lindy West at the Guardian “The Five Most Pathetic Female Film Characters of All Time”. Okay, not the most inspiring International Women’s Day post. But if I’m honest with you, I think she’s spot on with her list (although I haven’t seen Twilight so I can’t really judge that... but it seems to confirm everything I’ve heard about Bella.)

There is nothing worse than a horrible female companion/character/lead in a film. I find it like being on a long car ride with a whiney companion. And that’s the very least damage they do. At worst, they confirm stereotypes and just simply send the wrong message to young girls or women about what they need to do to be saved by some moronic hero.

At the end of her post West invites readers to list the characters that are letting down the female gender. So I thought that I would make a quick list (in no particular order) in between marking essays. Since I think today needs to be about empowerment, I’ve also listed those women at the end that I think are relatively kick-ass and do their thing for the cause.

It's an interesting thought experiment (or at least a fun distraction) to think about what makes a good female character. I'm not sure I have a definitive list, but I would certainly want a certain degree of self-reliance, an ability to think under pressure (and not, say, faint), an ability to work well and communicate with others and not be overly whiney. I don't think women have to be violent in order to be awesome, just have some witty talk and a normal freaking brain.

Also - I’m sure I could come up with more on both sides, but here are a few that pop into my mind (from the world of film at least - I'm well aware that several Duck contributors would find the lack of Buffy on this list to be disturbing.) I would be interested in hearing other people’s lists. Or perhaps other ideas of what makes a good female role-model.

New Executive Order on Detainees: Guantana-No, but action on the 1977 Additional Protocols (kinda)

Not so much.

Lawfare blog has a post on today’s Executive Order on Guantanamo Bay. (Link to the Obama administration's fact sheet PDF here). Lawfare tends to be more conservative than most international law blogs, but it’s excellent and an absolute must-read for keeping up-to-date on all things law, national security and the war on terror. (Or as I like to call it, Saturday night!) There’s some good commentary on the refusal of Congress to help fund any progress on Guantanamo and some discussion of the return to military commissions.

More interesting for me is the section at the end of the Fact Sheet titled, “Support for a Strong International Legal Framework”. In it, the administration is basically stating that it is going to push for ratification of the 1977 Additional Protocol II to the 1949 Geneva Conventions and that it formally sees Article 75 of Additional Protocol I as customary international law. (Article 75 lists the “fundamental guarantees” in the Protocol for those "persons in the power of a party to a conflict".)

The section says:

Brief Questions Concerning Possible U.S. Responses to Libyan Civil War

Is NATO headed for all the attendant risks (via) of a Libya no-fly zone, but with implementation after it would prove most effective?

Also, at what point does a Civil War last long enough that it is okay for a third party to start directly arming its preferred side?

"As An Educator It is My Responsibility to Turn You In To Your Professor. Thank you For Your Cooperation. Good Luck With Your Studies."

To me, the high point of academic blogging is putting out a request for insight to readers on a specific problem and crowd-sourcing a wealth of useful feedback that helps me be better at what I do than I would have been had I gone with my gut. Sometimes these blegs are about research and sometimes about teaching, and sometimes about how to wade through the backwash of scholarly life without getting too dirty.

I want to thank everyone who weighed in on my "famous, dumb student" how-to-deal-with-a-suspected-cheating-student-not-from-my-own-institution-who-happens-to-be-public-figure thread. Thanks to you, I was able to slow down and consider the situation from many angles. Below the fold you'll find the update on how this situation was resolved, but first I wanted to emphasize a few things in response to some of the comments:

1) Nothing about a situation like this is fun or entertaining, particularly when it interferes with an otherwise sacred writing day. And public spectacle should never be the overriding impetus for writing about these matters: I agree with Dan and Siva that the goal here should not be entertainment or humiliation but rather a) teaching a student to do better and b) teaching others by example. The question I have been struggling with for the last two days is how best to do that.

2) I do not believe that either laughing it off, pulling a Susie Derkins maneuver, or gently chiding students constitutes an appropriate response to these kinds of incidents. The first assumes that this stuff is just part of the academic culture these days, and there's nothing you can do about it; and it allows the student, as SEK pointed out, to simply email someone else. The second actually validates the practice and the student is likely too dumb to ever even realize they were tricked: all they learn from this is that they can get away with what they did. The third naively assumes students will respond to gentle chiding, which I have learned is not usually the case - though this should always be the first step, it should never be the last.

I would go so farther to suggest that professors who deal with things in these ways are probably doing as much damage to the norms of academic integrity as the students who break them or friends who don't turn them in. We have a greater responsibility than that: to our colleagues in the profession, and to the academy as a whole, in order to protect the academic environment for others. Norms only matter to the extent that we act as if they should matter when we see people violating them. We have an ethical if not a legal responsibility as academics to act as if academic honesty is important, and that means more than being honest ourselves: it also means helping one another to police the dishonest.

At a minimum, this means turning students in to their professors (at a minimum) when we suspect academic dishonesty, even if it costs us time and energy. Whether we have a responsibility to do more than that I'm still not sure (as I discuss below), and until I'm sure I would never take those steps, though I may post more ruminations on this again later as things develop.

For now, here is how things played out yesterday, since so many of you are interested:

Open Thread on Responding to Academic Dishonesty by Celebrity College Students Not At One's Own Institution

So this email arrived my mailbox yesterday:

Hi Mr. Carpenter,

I am a fourth year college student and I have the honor of reading one of your books and I just had a few questions... I am very fascinated by your work and I am just trying to understand everything. Can you please address some of my questions? I would greatly appreciate it. It certainly help me understand your wonderful article better. Thank you very much! :)
Sincerely,

[NAME REDACTED]

The "questions":

1. What is the fundamental purpose of your article?
2. What is your fundamental thesis?
3. What evidence do you use to support your thesis?
4. What is the overall conclusion?
5. Do you feel that you have a fair balance of opposing viewpoints?

My initial response (naturally):

Dear [NAME REDACTED],

If you've read my article, you should have answers to the first four of your questions. Why don't you tell me what you think the answers are and if you've misunderstood in any way I'll let you know.

Regarding your fifth question, I guess I need to know more about what you consider "fair balance" and "opposing viewpoints," as it relates to my article.

Also, could you tell me a little more about your own research project?

Thanks.

Dr. Carpenter

I didn't really expect a reply, but I actually got one!

Hi Dr. Carpenter,
Oh, the questions I had were out of my curiosity. English is a second language for me and I was just trying to understand your article. Thank you for your help.

Sincerely,

[NAME REDACTED]

Now at this point it occurs to me this student's professor is probably someone I know (who else would assign this article?), and that I should try to figure out who s/he is (though the student didn't give an institution or the prof's name). Lo and behold identifying said student turned out to take all of three minutes once I started looking, because the individual with this particular name and email address is actually a public figure (at least in the state of which s/he is a resident). One who, incidentally, grew up in the US and certainly reads English - though obviously not all his/her college assignments.

Question to readers: what are my ethical responsibilities as a member of the academy in this matter?

Cause and Effect in the "War on Terror?"

 It is impossible to know at this point whether there is any connection between these two disturbing events reported yesterday:  NATO forces’ mistaken killing of nine boys gathering firewood in Afghanistan; and, a few hours later, the killing of two American soldiers at Frankfurt airport, apparently by a Muslim man of Kosovar origin.   We do know that other terror suspects have stated that they acted in response to U.S. policies in the GWOT, in particular the frequent killings of innocent civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.  It would therefore not be surprising if this were true in the German case.  And it is at least possible that the impetus was in fact the horrific NATO shootings in Afghanistan just hours before.  

This raises yet again the question of what is cause and what effect in the “war on terror.”  Are American policies, which predictably result in large numbers of civilian casualties no matter how great the military’s precautions, in fact reducing the number of terrorists?  Do our heartfelt apologies in the wake of such wholly foreseeable errors in fact have any effect on the families of the victims, let alone on the small number of angry and extreme--but not yet violent Muslims--elsewhere in the world?  The answer seems likely to be, No.  The GWOT is a self-perpetuating policy that increases the amount of terrorism in the world, even as it enriches military establishments, COIN bureaucracies, and all manner of private suppliers of questionable anti-terror services and technologies.  (Read the prior article--an amazingly depressing story of yet more waste, fraud, and gullibility in the GWOT.)

My question for Duck readers is:  How does such folly come to an end?  On the surface, when cause becomes effect, there would seem ample, rational basis to change policies.  And there have been any number of additional reasons to halt it recently too:  the obvious marginality of al-Qaeda in the massive popular upheavals that have rocked the Middle East and North Africa; recent statements by American officials that the number of al-Qaeda fighters is vanishingly small; Robert Gates’s tacit admission last week that the Afghanistan and Iraq wars should never have been fought; and reports that the military is propagandizing U.S. politicians and thereby citizens to believe that the wars are succeeding.  (This article too is worth a full read to see both how some in the military confuse the "mission" with their own ambition--and, a ray of hope, how others sometimes stand up against them). 

Any suggestions from Duck readers about literature on this kind of conundrum?  How are senseless but self-perpetuating policies, backed by hugely vested interests, ever brought to a halt?

UN Routinely Overlooks Male Rape Victims... And Female Perpetrators

Adam Jones and Augusta del Zotto made this case years ago, and so have I. Glad to note the New York Times has finally taken notice by publishing Lara Stemple's excellent op-ed:

UNSC Resolution 1970: Wait, did the UN just kinda do what it was supposed to?

United Nations Security Council Resolution 1970 is a pretty amazing document. Over the last few days I’ve found myself trying to decide if this a rare example of the UN Security Council doing what it was originally designed to do – or an example of an international organization working because there is a relatively powerless state with no allies involved. I suspect it’s probably both.

Still, I’ve been following The Multilateralist blog over at Foreign Policy and I think David Bosco has it just about right:

Last night, the UN Security Council passed unanimously a resolution imposing an asset freeze and travel ban on Libya's ruling elite, and also referring the situation to the International Criminal Court. None of these measures is unprecedented: the Council has used asset freezes and targeted sanctions with increasing frequency in recent years, and it referred the case of Sudan to the ICC in 2005. But the scope, speed and unanimity of the resolution are remarkable.

I think this last line is a very significant point – even if it’s about a relatively straightforward situation in Libya, 1970 is a comprehensive resolution that was passed quickly and unanimously. Even more remarkably, China, Russia and the United States voted for it (no abstentions) even if it has the power to potentially put Gaddafi on trial at the ICC – an institution they’re not all entirely chummy with.

Clearly this will not solve all of the problems in Libya, but I also don’t believe it is merely an impotent angry-worded letter that critics often speak of. And there are a few things in here that I think are interesting and worth highlighting...

Tinariwen, pt. 2

For those interested, Tinariwen was profiled in Steve Chandra Savale's six-part documentary on Music of Resistance that aired on AlJazeera English back in 2009. It provides a brief history of the Tuaregs and of the band: