Violence in Kenya following the disputed 2007 elections left more than 1,300 people dead and more than 500,000 internally displaced. Last month, Kenya's Commission of Inquiry into Post-Election Violence released a 527-page report -- the Waki Report -- that concluded much of the violence was planned and organized by members of Kenya's security agencies, business leaders, politicians, and government officials. ...
Going forward I need to remember that if I'm ever looking for a quick topic about which to blog, I just need to take a look at the latest developments from the UK on surveillance. First there was using ubiquitous surveillance to make art. Now there's surveillance imitating art...
While the attention of the international news is fixed on the Mumbai attacks, I just want to pause to note that there is a growing tide of sectarian violence in Nigeria, which has claimed another 300 lives in the past few days. The strife in Nigeria provides a window into the types of complex ongoing conflicts that combine ethnic tensions,...
Georgetown Security Law Brief blog has a super-useful roundup of what a wide variety of people have said about what to do about detainees at Guantanamo. It goes backwards by date, with op eds, articles, blog posts, all sorts of stuff, including stuff from here at OJ. If you want to know what the state of discussion is as of...
Well, not really Stendhal on Thanksgiving. Stendhal never visited the United States, but that did not inhibit him from expressing a great many opinions about the place (mostly negative observations in the 'nation of shopkeepers' vein), particularly in the entire chapter devoted to love in the United States in that curious book-length essay, On Love. Stendhal was highly skeptical...
Both pretty and pretty fascinating. See this post at Catholicgauze and this one at Gene Expression. Also, tdaxp relates this map to a deflation of Russian power....
Further to Chris's post below, I wanted to announce that Complex Terrain Lab will be hosting, in addition to the event just passed that Chris mentions, an online blog discussion of Antoine Bosquet's The Scientific Way of Warfare, between Friday, December 5 and Monday, December 8. It will feature a number of guest bloggers, including me, and, having read most...
Coming Anarchy has this post on the possibility of Greenland becoming an independent country, noting that Greenland this week voted with a supermajority of more than 75% to receive greater autonomy from Denmark. This may even lead to independence for this enormous island of just 56,000 people. For more on "arctic nationalism," including recent events in the Faroe Islands, check out the...
I just came across (a little late I'm afraid) this notice for a program that the Complex Terrain Lab had in London called "BattleSpaces: Feral Cities and the Scientific Way of Warfare." The speakers were Geoff Manaugh of the excellent BLDGBLOG (he has a post on the event here) and Antoine Bousquet, lecturer on international relations at Birkbek College. The...
Edward Lucas has an essay in The Economist on political philosophy and the (r)evolution of central and eastern European politics centered on 1989. His essay begins: They gripped the world, but left political philosophers yawning. According to Jürgen Habermas, a German philosopher, the revolutions that overturned decades of totalitarian rule in central and eastern Europe in 1989 were marked by a...
I will be spending most of the next two months in Europe, with the following itinerary: Vienna, December 7-17 Leuven, December 17-20 Vienna, December 20-26 Rome, December 26-January 1 Amsterdam/The Hague, January 1-February 1 If any OJ readers in those cities -- students, academics, activists, etc. -- would like to meet for coffee or a drink, please don't hesitate to contact me: k.heller@auckland.ac.nz....
(Professor Martin Scheinin, whose mission and report on the US and counterterrorism and human rights I discussed below, was kind enough to post a substantive response to my earlier post, "Try or Release." Particularly since I was quite critical of that report, let me move Professor's Scheinin's response up to its own post. Apologies for not noticing it earlier -...
