Dealing with Retrenchment

by David Ucko 20 July 2010

A running theme among actors and institutions involved in ‘managing’ war-to-peace transitions is that they typically struggle to meet the requirements of the job. Inadequately supported, struggling with vague mandates, or lacking in capability and capacity, there does not seem to be one institution particularly well configured or able to undertake the difficult challenges of [...]

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IR as psychology

by Kenneth Payne 19 July 2010

I see the discipline of International Relations increasingly as just one of several branches in the social sciences that more properly ought to be a sub-discipline of psychology. When I read economics as an undergraduate, the rational actor model was depressingly ascendant. It probably still is, though it was shaking even before the current recession. [...]

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No Narrative in Helmand Campaign

by John Mackinlay 16 July 2010

I visited 1st Royal Gurkha Rifles in March just before they left for Helmand. The local photographer was there taking the officers mess photo on the lawn, the sun shone obligingly, and they sat and stood with a great deal of laughter as exuberant young people do, when they come together wearing their medals and [...]

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What’s the point of theory?

by Kenneth Payne 14 July 2010

We revisited an old chestnut this week, during a KCL colleague’s fascinating seminar on Kenya during the Mau Mau revolt: what’s the point of using theory in an essentially historical account? In an interdisciplinary department, this is always good for a laugh. I was heavily outnumbered by historians, who, you’d think, would have learned by [...]

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Which Way of War?

by Thomas Rid 13 July 2010

This blog has a small but loyal readership in Israel. If you happen to be in the country right now: I’m giving a talk tomorrow in Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan by Tel Aviv, at the BESA Center, one of Israel’s finest strategic studies institutes, headed by the impressively prolific Efraim Inbar. At 5pm, here’s [...]

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20 Things To Do in Kabul and the state of US civil-military relations

by The Faceless Bureaucrat 9 July 2010

Seems like there are some people out there who have this Afghanistan thing cracked.  Two of them, conveniently, have their reasons condensed neatly into packages of ten points.  Let’s have a shufti, shall we, Dear Readers? First, from Victor Davis Hanson, a list of “ten considerations that suggest that Afghanistan is hardly lost”.  For the [...]

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State of the War, Volume Something or Other: The Blind Leading the Blind?

by David Betz 6 July 2010

Apologies KOW readers for coming over all-Biblical in my first post for weeks but the debate over the war of late has me thinking of a line from Matthew 15:14 ‘Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch.’ There’s a famous illustration [...]

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Mind over matter

by Kenneth Payne 6 July 2010

I always wondered why social scientists were so confident about the conceptions of human behaviour that underpinned their models. Typically, either the structure of whatever social system you were considering would bear the weight of explanation, so you wouldn’t need to worry too much about the internal motivations of actors; or alternatively, you would go [...]

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The Russians Are Coming!

by Rob Dover 29 June 2010

Or perhaps not… A foreign intelligence agency caught in trying to gain information shocker… Yes, we were greeted with the amazingly surprising news that a foreign power (not known for keeping its intelligence gathering modest) had been running sleepers in the US. These alleged spies (because whilst they’ve been charged, they’ve not been convicted… I [...]

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No Way Out

by Thomas Rid 28 June 2010

Recently The New York Times had a number of thought-provoking columns on the war in Afghanistan, triggered by the MacArthuring of McChrystal, as Frank Rich put it in a usually biting piece yesterday. Today, Ross Douthat has a piece on Afghanistan, “One Way Out.” He’s the Times‘s token conservative, often with quite refreshing ideas, who came in [...]

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