Josh Busby
With the semester coming to an end, time to hit the Internets and start blogging more regularly. I've been meaning to write one for months about the poaching crisis. It's coming. In the meantime, here is yet another story on the corrosive effects on governance by Sudanese elephant poachers in the Central African Republic.
Elsewhere, it's not been a good week for the Obama Administration but good news for team O, the media agree that the Benghazi mess has been overblown:
- David Brooks on the scapegoating of State Department hand Victoria Neuland
- Jeffrey Goldberg concurs that Susan Rice was not to blame
- Read the emails for your self
Here is your Thursday Morning Linkage, starting with some energy and environment links:
- Illegal fish trade costs $10 billion to $23 billion in global losses each eyar
- China's coal mining companies and coal burning power plants accounted for 15% of the country's total freshwater withdrawals
- China leading the United States on climate change?
- Charles Mann on the perils of petro-energy abundance (Drezner dissents)
In other news, Syria is heating up in the news with Israel's strikes over the weekend putting pressure on the Obama administration to do more:
Continue reading
Here is your Thursday Morning Linkage. Back on the Africa theme from a couple of weeks ago, here are some good reads from the week:
- More reports on the elephant poaching crisis in CAR
- Last rhinos in Mozambique killed by poachers with the help of park rangers; time for Kruger fences to come back up
- Alex de Waal trolls celebrity activists like Enough, Kony 2012, faults them for insufficient consultation with local actors on the ground
- Nigerian military over-reacted and killed a bunch of citizens in the north: Boko Haram recruitment advertisement
- Abuamerican, American jihadi gone to Somalia, apparently about to be dead because of a falling out with Al Shabab
- Zuma, ANC, and Mandela's family cashing in on Madiba in a highly distasteful way
- Estimate of 2011 Somalia famine deaths is 260,000, half 5 and under
- Hey, CGD mapped subnational income levels for everywhere, except most of Africa
e-International Relations asked me to write a piece about doing policy-relevant research. I thought I'd cross-post it here, especially timely given recent posts on this blog along with Ronald Rogowski's screed that our work is too policy-relevant but policymakers just don't want to hear what we are saying (HT: The Monkey Cage). Here is the full post:
During graduate school, the community of up and coming scholars who wanted to do policy-relevant research seemed a bit like Fight Club. It was something each of us secretly wanted to pursue but were reluctant to talk about in public. We found each other at those few conferences and workshops that were designed for folks like us such as SMAMOS, New Era, and even IQMR. More recently, as junior faculty, like-minded academics would come across each other at IPSI, the Next Generation Project, and Term Member gatherings of CFR.
Does it get better? For years, we have seen warnings and lamentations by some of our senior colleagues about the policy-academic divide (see here, here, here, here, here, here). Some attribute it to a rise in statistics and later game theory, others suggesting it has to do with the professional incentives that encourage scholars to eschew grand theory for more targeted, esoteric work in semi-obscure peer-reviewed outlets.
If last's week Thursday morning linkage was Africa-themed, this week's links are China-related and inevitably harken back to the events in Boston:
- Laurie Garrett, as she is wont to do, wonders if this recent bird flu outbreak in China is "the big one"
- Beijing air is so bad they are canceling recess, kids at grave risk
- Oh, and Shanghai air sucks too
- China's shale gas revolution has yet to begin (Armond Cohen thinks it will take too long to take off)
- Japanese tree die-off blamed on air pollution from China
- New bilateral effort between U.S. and China to address climate change
- Chinese demand for fish bladder for soup
On this awful news week, I'm feeling like some Thursday Morning Linkage needs a little opening joy before launching into the useful reads of the week:
Here are some useful Africa-centric readings on this awful, awful news week:
- Cullen Hendrix examines the links between food price rises, regime type, and subsidy policies in Africa
- Jennifer Bussell researches why some African governments are more able to prepare for and respond to potential natural disasters
- Jennifer Hazen's new book What Rebels Want drawing from substantial fieldwork in West Africa explains how rebel movements that lose their options for obtaining weapons and other resources may turn to negotiation
- Caitriona Dowd examines the rise of Islamist rebel and milita movements across Africa
- Idean Salehyan and Christopher Linebarger find that elections increase the risk of conflict during civil wars and under authoritarian systems
Here is your Thursday Morning Linkage!
- Algal bloom kills 240 of Florida's 5000 manatees (cause of death: natural toxin)
- Madonna smacked down by Malawi government after her recent visit
- Shale gas and methane leaks, greener than coal but by how much?
- Obama tells donors that the politics of the environment are hard, hints at what he might do on Keystone XL pipeline
- BP is beyond "Beyond Petroleum," sells wind power interests
- Nicholas Lemann asks: what happened to the environmental movement?
Robert Farley's post last week about how long the journal publication process is struck a chord. One of my journal articles took three years from submission to appearance and was gated (I had to get my own piece through inter-library loan since it came out and the library didn't have a subscription for the most recent issues). I have often felt as Farley does:
Continue reading
Arriving in the middle of the International Studies Association annual meeting, here is your Thursday morning linkage...
- Man tries to smuggle 10% of endangered Madagascan tortoise population into Thailand
- DRC military facilitating poaching and pillaging in UNESCO world heritage site
- Just when the French thought it was safe to go home: suicide bombers in Timbuktu
- Bad Chinese air killing 1.2 million Chinese every year prematurely
- Chinese government study says pollution costs 3.5% of gross domestic product
- Dude, where are half of China's rivers?
Here is your Thursday Morning Linkage with some categories for helpful reading...
Global Economy
- Cyprus and EU avert financial catastrophe but EU looks like "gang that can't shoot straight"
- Krugman recommends Cyprus exit from the Euro
Energy and the Environment
- Wildlife returns to Guyana
- CFR hosts joint event with Conservation International on the mainstreaming of environmental security
- Trevor Houser flags EIA report on U.S. energy consumption
- John Romankiewicz questions whether shale gas is actually changing the country's energy trajectory all that much
Africa
- Central African Republic experiences a coup (only #19 on Jay Ulfelder's list of places most likely to have a coup)
- Manta rays and sharks get new protections, CITES closes on a hopeful note
- Yet new slaughter of elephants in Chad
- Black market for sea cucumbers in Mexico, driven by demand in China
- Oh yeah, Senate passes measures restricting NSF funding for study of democracy (cuz that's not important), NSF can only fund study of issues germane to national security so we're okay (just kidding)
Here is your Thursday morning linkage:
- Breakthrough in the ongoing CITES meeting on the trade in endangered species, five shark species are listed, providing greater protection as shark finning for wedding soups in Asia threatens many species of shark with extinction
- Vietnam and Mozambique are warned at CITES meeting to curb their consumption and poaching of rhino horn respectively or face trade sanctions
- White House petition on behalf of Omid Kokabee, University of Texas graduate student I blogged about a couple of weeks ago
Naazneen Barma, one of the authors of the "Mythical Liberal Order," responded to my post of last week with a reply to my critique. With her permission, I'm posting her message here and my response. Readers, we'd love for you to weigh in with your views.
Last week, Naazneen Barma, Ely Ratner, and Steven Weber offered "The Mythical Liberal Order," a provocative update to their earlier article on the world without the West. They sought to puncture certain mythologies about the strength of the liberal order, that it never was a strong as defenders thought: its decline is much exaggerated since there was not much to begin with. Moreover, they seek to offer more convincing and significant evidence that non-Western countries are "routing around" the West through currency swaps and discussion of a new multilateral bank and other actions.
Both that article and their earlier one are part of a liberal order pessimism that captures the current zeitgeist but may look dated in a few years. I'd put in that category Charlie Kupchan's book No One's World, Ian Bremmer's G-Zero world in Every Nation for Itself, and perhaps Kishore Mahbubani's new book The Great Convergence, if his past writings are any indication [though the first chapter is surprisingly supportive of making the current global order better].
While there is a lot about this piece I like, especially the focus on problem-solving through "coalitions of the relevant," I wonder if Barma, Ratner, and Weber are underestimating the resilience of the liberal order and created a straw man version of it as well.
Continue reading
Here is some Thursday morning linkage action:
- In time for the CITES meeting on the trade in endangered species, scientists released a study that showed a 60% decline in the small forest elephant species in Africa in the last TEN years
- Meanwhile, news accounts reported on the shadowy networks of criminals involved in the trade of endangered species (see here as well)
- Scientists reported that they were able to cure a little girl infected with HIV by giving her large doses of a triple cocktail of antiretrovirals at birth; this is only the second reported case of someone known to have the HIV virus to be "cured" in some capacity
- Another HIV clinical trial or pre-exposure prophylaxis (where people at risk take drugs before infection) failed because of low adherence
- Here are some reported figures on the effects of sequestration on the foreign aid and humanitarian budget
- The New York Times shuttered its Green blog and the Washington Post moved its Enviro reporter over to the White House
- Obama admin picks for EPA and Energy may do some heavy lifting on policy in this admin (here, here)
- State Department report suggests that Keystone XL pipeline won't have much additional climate impact since oil sands will be exploited regardless
- The EU emissions trading scheme is in need of an overhaul: low economic activity means firms have needed fewer permits than available, serious oversupply means low prices
- Dan beat me to the punch on the "Call Me A Hole" mash up so I've posted this link to and embedded playlist for my SXSW 2013 Spotfiy playlist of bands that I'd like to and may see next week
I'm going to be filling in with some morning linkage in the coming weeks/months, so you'll probably see some posts with a smattering of U.S.
Continue reading
My frequent collaborator Jon Monten and I have a guest post on the new Chicago Council on Global Affairs blog Running Numbers. As our readers likely know, the Chicago Council runs periodic surveys about public attitudes towards foreign affairs and has historically run a number of important surveys of elite opinion. I'm cross-posting our piece here.
Omid Kokabee is a University of Texas PhD student from the Department of Physics who was arrested in 2011 when he returned home to Iran over the winter break to visit his family.
Though he is by all accounts apolitical, Omid was sentenced to 10 years for conspiring with foreign governments and given additional time in jail after he earned some money teaching other prisoners foreign languages and physics. His fellow students in the UT Physics Department have launched a campaign to try to free him. They asked my wife, also a political scientist, about what they should do. Can we learn anything from international relations about how to free Omid? What do you think?
Continue reading
With the Oscars fast approaching, one documentary How to Survive a Plague is a likely winner (though may lose out to my second favorite documentary of the year Searching for Sugar Man). How to Survive a Plague is, as I described in my earlier review, an emotionally redolent account of ACT UP's mobilization to move the U.S. government and the pharmaceuticals industry to bring life-extending AIDS drugs from the labs to market and into bodies. Josh Barro makes the case that the reason why ACT UP succeeded is because they made concrete demands, which echoes the argument Ethan Kapstein and I make in our forthcoming book on global AIDS treatment advocacy, AIDS Drugs for All: Social Movements and Market Transformations, available this fall from Cambridge University Press.
Among our main contentions is that movements need to unite around a common "ask" and that divided movements tend to dissipate their efforts and influence (for a couple of chapters from the book, go here. Comments most welcome!). Barro's comments struck a chord and he drew some parallels with the relative failure of the Occupy Wall Street movement:
I gave a guest lecture for undergraduates on the state of global climate negotiations yesterday for a law school colleague here at the University of Texas. In light of the president's strong but ambiguous comments in the State of the Union last night threatening executive action if the Congress doesn't act, I thought I'd share my notes here and would welcome comments from others about whether I've done justice to the arc of negotiations. My aim was to bring a group of 20 year olds up to speed so that they could understand how we got from the 1992 Framework Convention to last year's negotiations in Doha.
Recent comments