Case Posed: But Can the Prosecution Rest?

Julie Flint and Alex de Waal have published a damning article about the ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo which reads, by extension, as a trouncing of the entire institution. I’m not in the loop with the court’s day-to-day politics well enough to offer an informed counter-argument, so instead, by way of playing devil’s advocate, let me agree for argument’s sake with a number of the authors’ claims, hyperbolic and partisan though they sound at places, and then (again for argument’s sake), push back on the assumptions the authors make about the implications of those claims

Cursing Cambodia

Joel Brinkley has written a heartbreaking piece in Foreign Affairs about Cambodian society thirty-five years after Pol Pot. We are presented with anecdote after anecdote about historical trauma, corruption, and poverty. It’s a depressing picture, and an important country case to have on the US’ foreign policy radar screen

Response to Mark Danner’s “The Red Cross’ Torture Report: What it Means”

Danner’s NY Review of Books treatise on torture calls our attention to many significant issues, but in his key argument he is critically wrong

Lost Causes: Agenda Setting and Agenda-Vetting in the Global Issues Networks

Carpenter will speak on human security networks and the role of agenda-setting.  Her research centers on the role of network structure in norm development, and contributes to the growing engagement by International Relations scholars with network theory as a theory, rather than as a metaphor for alternate forms of governance. She is particularly interested in how changes in information technology are both enhancing and also constituting networked forms of governance in the human security area. Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security Studies

Civilian casualties and public support for military action: Experimental evidence

In contrast to the expansive literature on military casualties and support for war, we know very little about public reactions to foreign civilian casualties. This article, based on representative sample surveys in the US and Britain, reports four survey experiments weaving information about civilian casualties into vignettes about Western military action. These produce consistent evidence of civilian casualty aversion: where death tolls were higher, support for force was invariably and significantly lower. Casualty effects were moderate in size but robust across our two cases and across different scenarios. They were also strikingly resistant to moderation by other factors manipulated in the experiments, such as the framing of casualties or their religious affiliation. The importance of numbers over even strongly humanizing frames points towards a utilitarian rather than a social-psychological model of casualty aversion. Either way, civilian casualties deserve a more prominent place in the literature on public support for war

‘Women and Children First’: Gender, Norms, and Humanitarian Evacuation in the Balkans 1991–95

Of all noncombatants in the former Yugoslavia, adult civilian men were most likely to be massacred by enemy forces. Why, therefore, did international agencies mandated with the protection of civilians evacuate women and children, but not military-age men, from besieged areas? This article reviews the operational dilemmas faced by protection workers in the former Yugoslavia when negotiating access to civilian populations. I argue that a social constructivist approach incorporating gender analysis is required to explain both the civilian protection community s discourse and its operational behavior. First, gender beliefs constitute the discursive strategies on which civilian protection advocacy is based. Second, gender norms operate in practice to constrain the options available to protection workers in assisting civilians. These two causal pathways converged in the former Yugoslavia to produce effects disastrous to civilians, particularly adult men and male adolescents.This project was supported in part by a Jane Grant Fellowship through the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of Oregon. I am indebted to the availability and engagement of all those at the ICRC and UNHCR during the interview process; particular thanks to David Harland, Mark Cutts, and Charlotte Lindsey. Adam Jones provided the insight that led to this empirical study. I am also grateful to Ronald Mitchell, Robert Darst, Lars Skalnes, Dennis Galvan, Anita Weiss, Wendy Weber, Julie Mertus, Alyson Smith, Smail Cecic, Helen Kinsella, Debra DeLaet, Michael Barnett, Lisa Martin, Kristin Williams, Valerie Sperling, Jordan Salberg, and Stuart Shulman for encouragement and helpful feedback.

Studying Issue (Non)-Adoption in Transnational Advocacy Networks

Why do some issues but not others galvanize transnational advocacy networks? To gain insight into this question, I studied how advocates in the human rights sector think and talk about an issue that has received little advocacy attention to date: stigma against children born of wartime rape. Focus groups with humanitarian practitioners were coded and analyzed for evidence of a variety of explanations for issue adoption drawn from the literature on advocacy networks. The analysis suggests that the conditions for issue adoption are constituted by dynamics across, rather than primarily within, issue networks.This project was supported by National Science Foundation Grant No. SES 0432488 and by a Hewlett Research Grant from University of Pittsburgh s University Center for International Studies. I am deeply indebted to Stuart Shulman and University of Pittsburgh s Qualitative Data Analysis Program for assistance with Atlas.ti software, and to Laurel Person, Abbie Zahler, Betcy Jose-Thota, Vanja Lundell, Rachel Helwig, and Justin Reed for assistance in coding and data analysis. Vera Achvarina, Lisa Alfredson, David Bearce, Clifford Bob, Daniel Chong, Jack Donnelly, Michael Goodhart, John Mendeloff, Joel Oestreich, Simon Reich, Stephen Rothman, Ben Rubin, Nita Rudra, Laura Sjoberg, Dan Thomas, and participants in Yale University s Genocide Studies Seminar Series provided helpful feedback on earlier drafts. I am solely responsible for any remaining errors.