Duck of Minerva

Time 2020-09-13 15:04:20

Web Name: Duck of Minerva

WebSite: http://duckofminerva.com

ID:45153

Keywords:

Duck,of,Minerva,

Description:

Black Lives Matter has spearheaded a massive reckoning of race relations in the US and around the world, but not so much in Russia. The discipline of IR may have started a bit earlier than this year’s protests: there have been a number of interventions that have brought the issue of race to the forefront of teaching and research – even though it should have always been there at least since DuBois. Not everyone is happy though: right-wing media cry “cancel culture” and debates on the merits of critical approaches somehow make national news. Russian mainstream IR community has been slow in embracing this problematique – even though Russian IR itself has been often considered as one of the examples of non-Western IR. A recent piece in “Russia in Global Affairs” by Dr. Alexander Lukin seems to make a point similar to a lot of critical scholars and scholars from the Global South: “It is necessary to correct the West-centric bias … by gradually introducing more information about the non-Western world into the teaching of history and international relations”. Fair point? Yes, absolutely. Alexander Lukin argues further that “a new all-encompassing totalitarian theory is approaching us, according to which all social and historical phenomena will need to be analyzed from a racial point of view, just as the Marxists analyzed them from the point of view of the class struggle. ”. How do you like them apples?I m working on a new project about the use of religion in power politics (part of which I ll be presenting at APSA this week). I m finding good evidence, but the framing is tricky. Religion as a power political tool happens, and matters, but it rarely works out the way the wielders intended. Is this an example of ideas mattering in international relations, or an example of their limits? The fact that I feel forced into such a binary reflects a broader issue in the sub-field.As we all learn in Intro to IR, the study of ideas revolves around constructivism. With the emergence of neorealism and neoliberalism in the 1980s, IR became overly rationalist and materialist. Constructivism developed as a reaction to this, producing numerous studies on the way intersubjective beliefs guided and shaped state behavior. After the paradigm wars faded, constructivist-y studies continued, with important work focusing on the role of rhetoric and practices in international relations.Eric Van Rythoven (PhD) is an Instructor in the Department of Political Science at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. His research focuses on the intersection between the politics of emotion, International Relations, and security. His articles have been published in the Journal of Global Security Studies, the European Journal of International Relations, Security Dialogue, among others and he is the co-editor (with Mira Sucharov) of Methodology and Emotion in International Relations (Routledge, 2019). You can learn more about his research and writing at his website.How should we approach discussions of race and racism in the classroom? Increasingly, issues of race are receiving more attention in the field of IR. Whether it is through a series of high-profile articles discussing why race matters in IR, or why the field remains blind to racism, debates about race and racism are taking a more prominent place in the field. Yet comparatively less attention has been given to how to teach race in the classroom. This mirrors broader patterns of intellectual life in IR where the “published discipline” dominates scholarly attention and the “taught discipline” appears as an afterthought (Ettinger, 2020). But if we take calls to think about the taught discipline seriously, how then should we approach teaching race in the classroom?This post contributes to the conversation by discussing the results from a brief survey on student views on teaching race and international politics in a Canadian classroom. The survey (n=100) was supported through Carleton University’s Students as Partners Program (SaPP) where faculty can offer paid experience to undergraduate students to help develop curriculum and teaching resources. Respondents were primarily students from IR courses, but also included those studying Canadian Foreign Policy.As part of our project we wanted to hear students’ views on teaching race in the classroom, including what topics they are interested in learning about, as well as what they see as some of the barriers to learning. Situated in a diverse city in a unique national context, it is important to caution against generalizations. Yet in what follows we highlight some of the main findings and bring them into dialogue with the broader pedagogy literature on race and IR.Jen Evans (Twitter: @Jen_L_Evans) is a PhD student at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies and a Project Lead at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for International Futures. Her research focuses on resource rights, cooperation, and conflict.On 30 June, House Democrats released a climate plan aimed at eliminating the U.S. economy’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The plan mandates sweeping shifts towards clean and renewable energy, with U.S. automakers transitioning to solely electric vehicle production and electric utility providers operating as net-zero emitters, all in the name of making America’s economy more sustainable.The plan unveiled by Democratic policymakers follows widespread public support for renewable energy. Some 70% of consumers believe that, in the near future, 100% of electricity should be produced via renewable sources such as solar, wind, and hydropower. More than half of consumers are willing to increase their electric bills by 30% just to facilitate this transition. And corporations have been quick to jump on the renewable energy bandwagon, with 71 of the Fortune 100 companies having published sustainability targets as of 2017.Renewable energy proclaims to do everything from creating jobs to reducing dependency on imports. The main benefit of renewable energy, though, lies in its apparent ability to replace the burning of fossil fuels, which currently accounts for 62% of electricity production and 95% of transportation sector power in the United States. The damage and risk associated with this longtime dependency on fossil fuels is significant and potentially catastrophic. In addition to the well-documented impact of fossil fuels on climate change, the use of fossil fuels contributes to environmental degradation associated with the surface mining of coal, health and environmental risks of drilling for oil and natural gas, and economic and foreign policy implications related to reliance on oil imports that are often sourced from unstable regions at high risk of conflict.It would appear, then, that renewable energy represents a comprehensive solution not only to carbon emissions associated with the burning of fossil fuels, but also to many environmental, economic, and security concerns related to extracting traditional energy resources. Yet, in discussing the many benefits of renewable energy, we often disregard a critical element: Our flashy devices, the factories that manufacture them, and the vehicles that deliver them to us do not inherently absorb the sun’s rays and spring to electrified life. Rather, producing accessible renewable energy requires technologies such as solar panels and wind turbines; technologies that are constructed using familiarly controversial extraction processes.This past weekend, two European capitals witnessed large-scale protests. Both of them protested against the government, both carried the flags that once symbolized their state, in both cases the police was involved, and during one of them the crowd was chanting “Putin! Putin!”. If you think the latter happened in Minsk you are sadly mistaken: the crowd in Belarus is much more creative than the Neo-Nazi conspiracy theorists in Berlin. The 38,000-strong crowd in Berlin was doing yoga against German Covid containment policies and tried to storm the Reichstag, while the 100,000 Minsk crowd has been protesting for weeks now against mass-scale election fraud and brought a cardboard cockroach as a present to the still clinging to power Alexander Lukashenka. For the record, if you need to wear a bulletproof vest and give a rifle to your underage son, that does not sounds like you have 80% popular support.  While Putin is not going to save the Berlin protesters from wearing a mask on the train, he can still play a role in the Belarus protests, at least Lukashenka thinks so: they already spoke 5 times on the phone and right now the de facto president of Belarus seems to be on the way to Moscow. Why does Putin care? For the same reason that he cared about the Orange Revolution and Maidan in Ukraine. For once, he is afraid that might happen to him. And secondly, as Alexander Baunov notes, Russian politics suffers from geopolitization of any domestic political action. That means that elections are not about an internal transfer of power, not about feedback between the population and the government, but an act of foreign policy defense, and their results should be treated accordingly. The same applies to freedom of assembly, press, doping investigations, Eurovision, movies, monuments, you name it.  On top of it, 20 years of Putin have significantly eroded public faith in organic protest. For the past four Putins and 1 Medvedev all Russians heard on TV was the same conspiratorial regime change narrative. Orange Revolution – it’s the West! Georgian revolution – it’s the West! Arab spring – it’s the West! Maidan – it’s the West! According to Levada, 39% of Russians are sure that the mass protests were provoked by “foreign forces” and almost 50% believe the elections in Belarus were mostly fair. Yes, those elections where you had polling workers climbing out the windows with the protocols so the observers don’t catch them falsifying. The protesters in Belarus, unlike those in Berlin, hope that Russia does not interfere, because by the looks of it, Putin can only be on the one side, and it is not the side that is being tortured in Okrestina police station. Really, the Berlin protestors could really learn a thing or two about governmental oppression from the brave people in Belarus. Russians have also been protesting electoral fraud for years now, but it seems that Putin and his cronies either sincerely believe that every single precinct in a city can have exactly the same numbers or they don t care that the results are cooked. Luckily, citizens of Belarus care and hopefully, they manage to send their dictator into a long overdue retirement. David C. Kang is Maria Crutcher Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California, where he also directs the Korean Studies Institute. His latest book, coedited with Stephan Haggard, East Asia in the World: Twelve Events that Shaped the Modern International Order, will be published Cambridge University Press next month.This summer, the graduate students in our Ph.D. program here at USC, and the undergraduates as well, called for an end to the Eurocentric curriculum in our department. They noted that there are twice as many classes devoted to Europe as there are to any other region of the world; if we add in classes on American politics, there are easily 3x as many classes.I absolutely support our students in their call to be aware of a Eurocentric curriculum and scholarship, and to our colleagues to think much more widely about, and be open to, ideas and cases that might be much more vivid and lively than they suspect, and have much more to teach us than we originally thought.In this case, what’s politically important and socially conscious is also scientifically sound. The basic problem of Eurocentric scholarship is selection bias If we care about social science, and if we want to understand anything about the world, we need to define concepts in generalizable ways. We all suffer if the field is parochial: our concepts are narrow, our cases are truncated, and the true richness and possibility of what international relations actually is can be overlooked.I want to point out what that means in practice using three examples. I will conclude this post with a few possibilities for both young scholars, and the way we pursue research and publish.Whether scholars embed policy recommendations in their work is a flawed measure of whether work is policy-relevant.Across a series ofarticles andbook chapters,Michael Desch andPaul Avey have argued international relations scholarship is declining in policy relevance, with IR scholars falling into what Stephen Van Evera has called a “cult of the irrelevant”: a hermetically-sealed professional community that values technique and internal dialogue over broader societal and political relevance. As evidence, they cite data demonstrating a marked decline in the frequency with which articles in top IR journals provide policy prescriptions.This is a guest post byWilliam Akoto, a postdoctoral researcher jointly appointed at theSié Chéou-Kang Center for International Security Diplomacy at the Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver, and theOne Earth Future Foundation. In the fall, he will begin a tenure-track appointment at Fordham University.Universities are underincreasing pressure from politicians, funders and the public to demonstrate the broader social value of their work. In response, many have taken an active role in highlighting the impact of their research, with increased investment in public engagement that showcases the significance of scholarship at universities. These efforts are aimed at policymakers, journalists and activists who can help turn scholarship into policy-relevant action, but also at the public at-large. Such public engagement serves as a powerful reminder of the value of universities to society, especially in light of rising tuition costs anddeclining public funding for higher education.This is a guest post by Jeffrey C. Isaac, James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. You can follow him at his blog at Democracy in Dark Times.Democracy is a central and arguably the central theme of contemporary American political science research and teaching. This is certainly true in the “subfields” conventionally designated as “Comparative Politics,” “American Politics,” and “Political Theory.” And even where it is not the central theme, as in most “International Relations” inquiry, it is an important theme.By far the most broadly influential endeavor in U.S. political science—the teaching of “Introduction to American Politics,” a staple of undergraduate teaching at virtually every academic institution in the U.S.—centers on the dynamics of the U.S. political system, the nature of its constitutional democracy, and the complex dynamics of public opinion, party organization, political campaigning and competitive elections. Most of this teaching is not emphatically normative. But it is normative nonetheless, as a perusal of most syllabi or prominent textbooks will attest. The 2015 Brief Edition of Keeping the Republic: Power and Citizenship in American Politics, written by Christine Barbour and Gerald C. Wright, for example, leads with a chapter on “Power and Citizenship in American Politics” that centers on the distinction between liberal democracy and authoritarianism. Without some such discussion, what sense is to be made of American political institutions?This is a guest post from Alexander R Arifianto (Twitter: @DrAlexArifianto), a Research Fellow with S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research focuses on contemporary domestic politics and political Islam in Indonesia.Nearly six months after the first case of coronavirus was first diagnosed in Indonesia, the country is in the midst of its largest public health crisis in history. As of August 3rd, about 113,000 Indonesians are confirmed to be infected and 5,300 have died from the illness. Indonesia is currently ranked the 23rd country with the most COVID-19 cases worldwide. A model developed by Sulfikar Amir, a sociologist based at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, predicts COVID-19 cases in Indonesia will reach 200,000 cases over the next two months.Indonesia’s 270 million population marks it as is the fourth largest country in the world measured by population size. It is also the largest Muslim-majority country and the world’s third largest democracy. Lastly, it is the largest economy in Southeast Asia and is widely considered as a rising middle power in Asia. In a region where most countries have managed to mitigate the pandemic with varying success rates Indonesia’s failure to effectively contain the virus is puzzling to international observers.In this post, I argue that Indonesia’s lackadaisical and half-hearted pandemic response has its roots in its pre-existing historical legacy that affects how Indonesian policymakers formulate their COVID-19 mitigation policy. These include an incompetent yet insulated bureaucracy that does not value policy advice from external experts and a power-sharing arrangement among members of its political elite that emphasizes short-term political calculations over taking coherent, coordinated, and decisive actions.In less than a month, I ll be teaching Introduction to International Relations for the first time in over ten years. As luck (for certain values of luck ) would have it, this means I m building a 100-200 person course from scratch and teaching it online. But where some might see a yawning black pit of despair, I see a yawning black pit of despair and opportunity. Why not experiment a bit?I know a lot of professors are thinking this way, so at the start of the summer some of us talked about working together to produce shareable content. We had plans! We had pants to match! And massive coordination problems.So about a week ago, as I looked down into that black pit, I decided screw this, I m going to email lots of friends and see if they ll record interviews with me. I ll make it more appealing by putting the results online in an archive. That way anyone can download interviews and integrate excerpts from them into their lectures, class videos, or whatever. Shockingly enough, it turns out that academics and practitioners generally like to talk about their work, as well as their career paths. I ve recorded something like 12 interviews over six days, and have a lot more scheduled. But it s been a haphazard process, driven in no small measure by my specific needs for my class. And all that video is useless to anyone else if it s not processed, and useless to me if I don t have time to put the course together. So I ve been teaming up with people, gotten help from an RA, and come to the conclusion that this is the kind of project that works best if it s crowdsourced. Enter this post, which serves to announce The Interviews for Teaching World Politics Project. (It s the worst title I ve ever used for anything, and believe me, that s a very high bar to cross). Below is a version 1.0 of the project summary. You can also read it via this link, where you will also be able to navigate to the archive and see the two sample videos we ve got up.“The Interviews for Teaching World Politics Project” aims to develop a large database of video interviews – currently conducted on Zoom at 720p in .mp4 format – with international-relations scholars and practitioners.The interviews are supposed to be suitable for use in introductory or advanced undergraduate classes, and are conducted not to produce a seamless “lecture” but rather excerpts that can be incorporated into prerecorded class videos or lectures.In addition to scholars and practitioners talking about their areas of expertise, some interviews will contain discussions of what it’s like to work in various areas of applied international relations. Some videos include biographical information on how participants wound up in their present positions.The archive consists of folders that are entitled with the name of the interviewee and the core topic under discussion. Each folder contains a video and a text file with a rough index to the video. The videos themselves have title cards related to the index, so it is possible to scroll through the video to find sections that might be useful to you.All videos in the archive are under an Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license. At minimum, your videos or lectures must identify the name of the interviewee. Preferred citation includes the name of the interviewee, the date of the interview, and some reference to the “Teaching World Politics Project” so that other people can find the archive.We currently only have a small number of samples up, and it will take a while to even process what we already have.As of now, all of our interviewing, recording, and production work is being done by three people – one of whom is a serious introvert – and we could really use help. There are two ways to help:Editing and indexing videos. Each video should take 1.5-2 hours to complete, depending on your skill level. Videos are currently being processed this way in iMovie or Final Cut Pro X, but any software is fine so long as the video output isn’t downsampled. Contact Dan Nexon if you’re interested. We are happy if people are willing to do only one or two videos – indeed, we’d prefer that to anyone taking on more than they can realistically complete in relatively short order; no one wants to be pestering volunteers.Recording interviews. We’d love for people to volunteer to interview other scholars or practitioners, and the neat thing is that you can interview pretty much anyone you want. The only restriction on our end is that the interviewer must be someone currently teaching IR at the college or university level, or an advanced PhD in International Relations/International Studies. There is, or will soon be, an access-restricted spreadsheet to track the effort. This will help us a) to avoid pestering those who have already agreed or turned down a request and b) to try to ensure adequate methodological and demographic diversity in the pool of videos.Instructions for Zoom: when recording, keep your interface set to speaker view (you’ll notice that our first two videos were in gallery view, and that’s… not great).General instructions for recording:You and your subject should use headphones, and make sure that all your computer sound is routed through those headphones. Both you and your subject should do their best to remove other sources of noise, such as mobile phones.If you do get interrupted or the subject wants to start over, make sure that they back up to a point where it will be easy to edit (so at the start of the idea).There are plenty of resources online that cover best practices, but keep in mind that our interviews are supposed to be informal.Do not split screen your interview. The interviewee will be edited out of the archived video.Keep in mind that our videos are supposed to be informal.Important: as you’re interviewing have a timer going and keep a real-time index of key subjects or anecdotes. This will make it much easier to process the video later.Volunteering to be interviewed. If you’d like to be interviewed, email Dan and he’ll put you on a list. You should include your name, best email address, position(s), and subject-matter expertise. Note that because 1) we don’t have a lot of labor hours and 2) volunteers are likely to be focused on collecting material for their immediate teaching needs, we cannot guarantee when or if an interview will actually take place. But we do appreciate your willingness to do one and, if this project continues for the next year, we really hope that we can get to you.There are a ton of informal efforts by professors to recruit other experts and scholars to speak to their classes, because COVID-19 and remote learning. There are terrific resources that you can and should use to break the constraints of social capital and find potential speakers. If you re like me, though, and you re an introvert, it takes enormous energy to approach even one person you don t know for this kind of favor. Thus, over on Facebook I pitched the idea of maintaining a spreadsheet where people could volunteer as speakers. It s called the Yes, I would be happy to chat remotely with your class! list, and if this appeals to you check it out (I ve entered my name both as an example and also because, yes, indeed, I would be happy to chat remotely with your class!). I ve put instructions there for how to get your name added.The other thing that I think would be useful to crowdsource is a list of resources. The Carnegie Endowment is doing great work making video and audio resources available. There are podcasts that might be suitable for specific classes. That kind of thing. If there s interest, I m happy to host something that as well.This is a guest post from Jennifer Mustapha and Eric Van Rythoven. Mustapha is an Assistant Professor at Huron University College in London, Ontario and studies the politics of the War on Terror, globalization and development, and Southeast Asian regional relations. Rythoven teaches International Relations and Foreign Policy at Carleton University, Canada.  His work has been published in Security Dialogue, European Journal of International Relations, and Journal of Global Security Studies, among others. For many observers America’s catastrophic response to COVID-19 is a far-off spectacle rendered all the more inscrutable by the country’s power and position. For Canadians however, the experience is more akin to watching a close friend spiral into a crisis of shockingly irresponsible behaviour. Not only is their tragic circumstance a threat to the safety of others, but we face the added grief of knowing that someone we care about has chosen such a destructive path.We write this because America occupies an invaluable place in the Canadian political imaginary. It is the ubiquitous ‘other’ that haunts almost every thought and conversation in Canadian politics – and it is failing in a way that has stunned the Canadian public and policymakers. But America is also our kin – a bigger “sibling state” that we live in perpetually close proximity to –and Canadians are struggling to reconcile our familial relations with its increasingly rapid descent into darkness. In this blog post we offer some preliminary thoughts on what this failure looks like from a Canadian perspective. We organize our discussion around three sentiments – love, loathing, and loss – that summarise the conflicting, and often contradictory, feelings Canadians are experiencing from this side of the border.Guest post by Sandor Fabian is a PhD candidate at the University of Central Florida and instructor of record at the NATO Special Operations School. His research is in security studies with a focus on new concepts of conflict, U.S. foreign military aid, and counter hybrid warfare. Follow him at @SandorFabian2 and Doreen Horschig is a PhD candidate and teaching associate at the University of Central Florida. Her research is in nuclear security with a focus on public and elite opinion on nuclear weapons and norms of weapons of mass destruction. Follow her at @doreen__hThis is a guest post from Elif Kalaycioglu, who is an assistant professor at the University of Alabama. Her research is on international relations, world order and global governance with a focus on UNESCO’s world heritage regime, global cultural politics and the impact of cultural diversity on the international order and its institutions.On Friday, June 10th 2020, the highest administrative court in Turkey annulled the 1934 cabinet decree that transformed Hagia Sophia from a mosque to a museum. UNESCO’s press release, lamented the decision concerning the world heritage site and urged Turkey to protect its universal value as an architectural masterpiece and the symbol of interaction between Europe and Asia. Speaking shortly after the court decision, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared that as a mosque, Hagia Sophia will remain the common heritage of humanity in “a much more sincere way.”This is not the first status change for Hagia Sophia. It began its life as a cathedral in the Byzantine imperium. It was converted into a mosque after the conquest of Istanbul by the Ottomans in 1453. Following the founding of the Turkish Republic, a 1934 cabinet decree transformed it from a mosque to a museum.This post analyzes the two most recent status changes of Hagia Sophia guided by the key insight of heritage studies that heritage is adjudicated from a present political vision, draws selectively upon the past, and projects this vision into the future. Both status changes entail particular conjunctions of domestic and international political presents. Specifically, Friday’s decision demonstrates and reproduces a long-standing domestic turn away from the Republic’s earlier orientations towards secularization, modernization and the West. Taken in a context of economic woes and policy disillusionment, it reminds Erdogan’s constituency that the country is still on the path to this desirable future. Internationally, it takes place at a time when the universalist visions of the post-WWII order, including that of UNESCO’s world heritage, are under increased strain.This is a guest post from Phoebe Donnelly (@PhoebsG86), a Visiting Fellow at the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University and a Women and Public Policy Research Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School.The UN’s International Day for the Elimination of Conflict-Related Sexual Violence (CRSV) passed without much recognition on June 19. However, CRSV has not disappeared during the global pandemic and victims of different forms of CRSV face additional hurdles to accessing services and support. Certain survivors in particular, those in forced marriages with members of rebel groups, may face even more challenges in escaping cycles of violence because of the ways in which forced marriage binds them to their partners and rebel groups. Due to the increased challenges for survivors of CRSV, it is a useful time to understand one common and less visible form of CRSV: forced marriage.My own research on forced marriage finds that rebel groups perpetrate this form of CRSV to help them build their strength and promote their belief systems. Understanding forced marriage is not only essential for understanding CRSV, but also for studying rebel groups strategy, hierarchy, division of labor, and propaganda. Additionally, there is a spectrum of coercion within forced marriages that accounts for the different experiences of wives in rebel groups globally.This is the third post in our series on Race IR.This is a guest post from Carla Norrlöf and Cheng Xu. Carla Norrlöf is an associate professor at the University of Toronto. Her research is in international relations and international political economy with a focus on US hegemony, great power politics and liberal international order. Follow here at @CarlaNorrlof Cheng Xu is a PhD student at the University of Toronto. His research is in international relations and comparative politics with a focus on insurgencies and civil wars. He’s a veteran of the Canadian Armed Forces with over nine years of service.George Floyd’s murder was another in a long series of acts of police brutality against black men. His death upended complacency, silence, and fatigue about racism, propelling people to protest against discrimination in the middle of a deadly pandemic. The Black Lives Matter movement may be the largest in US history.The conversation about racism has reached academia with hashtags such as #Blackintheivory. This moment has spurred scholars to ask trenchant questions about the links between foreign policy and militarization of police forces. Many scholars have pointed to the racist legacy of IR theory and the way it informs how we study IR today. This dialogue is important and political scientists certainly recognize it as such.We also see scholars in other disciplines shining a bright light on discriminatory practices, raising questions of how the discipline itself contributes to systemic racism. They ask white scholars to do their own work to become anti-racist and to stop gaslighting scholars who have the courage to spotlight racist practices. Prominent social scientist Lothrop Stoddard debates the cultural equality and intellectual possibilities of Black people compared to other races, part of a racist history of the discipline that is rarely taught to social science students. Source: Chicago Forum Council This is the second installment in our series on Race IR.This is a guest post from Ebby L. Abramson who is a Doctoral student in the political science program at the University of Ottawa and a research associate and editor for Endangered Scholars Worldwide. His current research systematically investigates counterterrorism policies in Europe and the United States, examining how these policies account for and impact their respective society. Abramson has worked for the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs, the New School, Cardozo School of law, and The George Washington University Elliot School of International Affairs where he specialized in Law of Conflict, International Human Rights Law, terrorism, and illicit arms trafficking. He holds a master’s degree in international affairs from the New School in New York City. He is a contributor to IRPP (Policy Options). Follow him at @EbbyAbramsonThe Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement is an ineffective advocacy group because the organization is fighting for an imaginary cause— stopping systemic racism and discrimination against Black people, neither of which exist. The narrative that unarmed Black people aremore likely to get shot and killedby the police due to policy brutality is nothing but an overexaggerated delusion.The alleged racism by law enforcement against Black people does not play a role in arresting, shooting, and killing them. These are among the multiple outrageous claims that I have seen in students’ essays and within classroom activities over the course of my career.I was living in New York City when Eric Garner was murdered on Staten Island, and at that time I wrote an opinion piece pleading with the academic community to take sides. I argued that all academics who stay silent about police brutality against Black people are culpable in perpetuating racism in our society. When I started working toward a doctoral degree at a Canadian university in 2018, I was under the impression that Canada was more progressive and had been taking active steps to address racism—an understanding that faded away in just a few short weeks. Courtesy of US Navy, used under Creative Commons license.This is a guest post byWilliam Akoto, a postdoctoral researcher jointly appointed at theSié Chéou-Kang Center for International Security Diplomacy at the Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver, and theOne Earth Future Foundation. In the fall, he will begin a tenure-track appointment at Fordham University.As people have become consumed with concern about the coronavirus, organized cyber criminal groups are actively exploiting uncertainty, doubt and fear to target individuals and businesses in a variety of ways. Reports of cyber phishing attacks using coronavirus themes started appearing in early February 2020, but these attacks have since become widespread. The explosion of coronavirus-related scams, range from fake storefronts hawking fake vaccines to sophisticated phishing scams that take advantage of the uncertainty around the pandemic. For instance, Google s threat analysis groupreported in late April 2020 that they find an average of 18 million malware and phishing messages per day related to COVID-19. This is in addition to more than 240 million COVID-relateddaily spam messages that are automatically deleted by Gmail spam filters.Analysis by industry experts show that a significant portion of these attacks are carried out by state-sponsored hackers, some of whom are targeting coronavirus-related research. Responding to these state-sponsored attacks poses a significant challenge to targeted states as they seek to navigate the foreign policy and international relations implications of retributive action. While technical solutions provide the best bet for responding to these attacks, government policy could play a crucial supporting role. In this post, I review modalities of COVID-19 themed cyberattacks and outline some options available to governments as they seek to deal with them.This is a guest post from Aniruddha Saha, a PhD student at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. His research examines India’s nuclear policy using a constructivist approach and is currently being funded by a King’s International Postgraduate Research Scholarship. He has also recently published with Strategic Analysis, OpenDemocracy, Eurasia Review and The Quint. With the killing of 20 Indian soldiers by the Chinese army along the disputed Line of Actual Control (LAC) on June 16, several dimensions of the violent border skirmishes between India and China have come to light. Research has shown that the brewing Sino-Indian crisis since early May remains unprecedented ― since at least a decade. More recently, Clary and Narang have argued in ‘War on the Rocks’ that in the backdrop of the current COVID-19 crisis, the response options of the Modi-led Indian government to the Chinese threat “range from bad, to worse, to truly ugly.”However, the current responses taken by the Indian administration to the crisis seems to contradict the direct confrontational actions that it has recently taken in response to other threats, notably from Pakistan. Therefore, the more pertinent question to ask is: Whether this high degree of apprehension of the Modi government (and the moral compromise of its own retaliatory standards) to deal with the Chinese translates to ‘defeat’ in the absence of a full-blown conventional war?

TAGS:Duck of Minerva 

<<< Thank you for your visit >>>

Hot Websites