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SISAW - Speaking International Security at Warwick
SISAW is home to impact-facing projects and events related to the study of international security at
Operating as usual
This may be of interest.
It is part of a special issue co-edited with Brent J. Steele on 'Ontological Insecurities and the Politics of Contemporary Populism' that is coming out very soon with Cambridge Review of International Affairs.
The power of Trump-speak: populist crisis narratives and ontological security (2019). The power of Trump-speak: populist crisis narratives and ontological security. Cambridge Review of International Affairs. Ahead of Print.
Making sense of terrorism: a narrative approach to the study of violent events (2019). Making sense of terrorism: a narrative approach to the study of violent events. Critical Studies on Terrorism. Ahead of Print.
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/news/?newsItem=8a17841a5d7a0bda015d9e34ff0c657c
New research shows benchmarking is bad science New research published in the European Journal of International Relations – one of the leading journals in the field of political science and international relations – by researchers from the Global B…
Many have shared Judith Kelley’s commentary in the Washington Post, which is based on her new book 'Scorecard Diplomacy' that explains US policy on human trafficking in extensive empirical detail.
Alexandra Homolar, Andre Broome and Matt Kranke have recently highlighted the wider ‘Bad Science’ inherent in global benchmarking practices in a forthcoming piece with EJIR. (This is related to our Global Benchmarking project with Joel Quirk.)
Links to all:
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/…/cs…/benchmarking/bad-science.pdf
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/…/researchcent…/csgr/benchmarking/
http://www.warwick.ac.uk/globalbenchmarking/database
https://www.washingtonpost.com/…/the-state-department-jus…/…
Database Cite as: Global Benchmarking Database, v1.9, Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation, University of Warwick. Available at: www.warwick.ac.uk/globalbenchmarking/database.
SISAW Networks in World Politics Workshop
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/research/researchcentres/csgr/events/networks-in-world-politics
Networks in World Politics Workshop How networks shape political processes and outcomes has become a major focus of contemporary International Relations and International Security scholarship. At the same time, network analysis methods have gained substantial appeal among a new generation of scholars and established scholars who seek…
WHY BORROW WORDS?
"But there’s one way in which Russia and the United States are getting closer. It’s how Russian officials are waging a war of words. They’re using the language of American politics to do it.
Take “fake news” (feik nyus ), an expression that regularly appears in the denunciation by Russian officials of American and European news reports. There are plenty of ways to express “fake” in Russian — obman, falshivka, poddelka, utka — depending on whether you’re talking about a hoax, a falsification, a counterfeit or a canard.
But none of those quite captures the modern phenomenon of an industry of made-up websites, tweets and other social media posts that are created by someone and distributed by bots..."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/russians-are-fighting-the-war-of-words-against-the-us-with-american-words/2017/04/25/7021c396-239e-11e7-836b-e91b113bf060_story.html?utm_term=.4fd903146b1d
Russians are fighting the war of words against the U.S. with American words How “feik nyus” went “meinstrim” in Russia.
THE POWER OF GIBBERISCH. "Without language, there is no accountability, no standard of truth. If Trump never says anything concrete, he never has to do anything concrete. If Trump never makes a statement of commitment, Trump supporters never have to confront what they really voted for. If his promises are vague to the point of opacity, Trump cannot be criticised for breaking them. If every sloppy lie (ie: “Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower … This is McCarthyism!”) can be explained away as a “generality” or “just a joke” because of “quotes”, then he can literally say anything with impunity."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/25/trump-100-days-gibberish-weaponised-white-house-language-presidency?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Tweet
100 days of gibberish – Trump has weaponised nonsense | Lindy West The Trump White House approaches language with the same roughshod entitlement he’s applying to the presidency. His sloppy lies and vague promises must not stop us holding him to account
POOR VOCABULARY.
"Translators around the world reported that it’s a struggle to accurately interpret Donald Trump’s speeches, statements and interviews – a challenge which shows no signs of abating as the dominant newsmaker assumes the world’s most influential office."
http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2017/01/24/translators-are-struggling-interpret-donald-trump
Translators are struggling to interpret Donald Trump Run on sentences and disjointed syntax have created an ethical dilemma for interpreters.
Upcoming deadline for proposals!
Call for proposals:
CSGR/SISAW Conference on Global Security and Diplomacy
4-5 May 2017 at the University of Warwick
Local people (Coventry, Warwickshire & surroundings) interested in Brexit, GLOBE is hosting an event on 'Trade and Investment in a Post-Brexit World: Regaining Control or in for a Ride? on Tuesday, 1 November 2016, 5.30pm - 7pm at the University of Warwick. Speakers are Dr James Harrison & Markus Wagner, trade law experts at the Warwick Law School and Dr Gabriel Siles-Brugge, trade policy expert at the Department of Politics & International Studies (PAIS). Chaired by Professor Fiona Smith, Warwick Law School & trade and commercial law expert. Discussion followed by drinks reception. No charge but please register on website:
Trade and Investment in a Post-Brexit World: Regaining Control or in for a Ride? Following the UK’s vote to leave the European Union, questions remain as to what shape its trade and investment relationship with the EU and the rest of the world will look like. Does a brave new world of trade and investment deals beckon? Or will Britain be constrained by its lack of negotiating ca...
Call for proposals:
CSGR/SISAW Conference on Global Security and Diplomacy
4-5 May 2017 at the University of Warwick
Adam Quinn's reaction piece on the first presidential debate for The Conversation UK:
"By the end of the debate, it was clear Trump had been defeated. First he was knocked off balance by a simple recitation of the facts of his own past, then he was provoked into a total loss of composure on live TV while applying for a job in which calm judgement is the absolute prerequisite. And finally, he was buried by a reminder of his rank sexism and racism. Clinton performed skilfully, but in the final analysis, he did it to himself."
https://theconversation.com/trump-stumped-in-first-debate-with-clinton-will-it-cost-him-65706
NOT CHEAP TALK
"Speaking this summer on the 75th anniversary of the Soviet Information Bureau, Mr. Kiselyev said the age of neutral journalism was over. “If we do propaganda, then you do propaganda, too,” he said, directing his message to Western journalists.
“Today, it is much more costly to kill one enemy soldier than during World War II, World War I or in the Middle Ages,” he said in an interview on the state-run Rossiya 24 network. While the business of “persuasion” is more expensive now, too, he said, “if you can persuade a person, you don’t need to kill him.”
A Powerful Russian Weapon: The Spread of False Stories Using both conventional media and covert channels, the Kremlin relies on disinformation to create doubt, fear and discord in Europe and the United States.
PUBLICATION BIAS....
"...is the name of a well-known but hard to solve problem in academic research. A paper with a striking new finding is much more likely to be accepted at a top journal than a paper that says, "I investigated an interesting hypothesis, but it turned out to be wrong." This means that spurious findings — statistical coincidences and such — make it into the published literature, while boring null results don’t. This gives a distorted picture of reality simply because everyone is trying to be interesting.
Similarly, the AP’s basic reporting project here seems like it was worth a shot and probably also fairly time-consuming. But it did not come up with anything. Clinton tried to help a Nobel Prize winner. She went to the Kennedy Center Honors. She had a meeting with the head of the charitable arm of MAC Cosmetics about a State Department charitable initiative.
There’s just nothing here. That’s the story. Braun and Sullivan looked into it, and as best they can tell, she’s clean.
Unfortunately, there’s a financial incentive to lean in the other direction. NBC News found that one major Clinton Foundation donor was a for-profit college whose interests Hillary Clinton has utterly failed to champion, so NBC turned it into a hypocrisy story.
The real news here ought to be just the opposite: Donors to the Clinton Foundation may believe they are buying Hillary Clinton’s political allegiance, but the reality is that they are not. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is someone, somewhere whom Clinton met with whom she wouldn’t have met with had that person not been a Clinton donor of some kind. But what we know is that despite very intensive media scrutiny of the Clinton Foundation, we don’t have hard evidence of any kind of corrupt activity. That’s the story.'
The AP’s big exposé on Hillary meeting with Clinton Foundation donors is a mess The story is that there is no scandal.
POST-TRUTH POLITICS.
"Well, people have been complaining about the corruption of political language since political language existed. Confucius warned that a ruler should use the correct names for things, or social catastrophe would result. Orwell lamented that political language in his time was “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”. And the era of the “war on terror” gave rise to a whole new constellation of what I call Unspeak: carefully engineered phrases designed to smuggle in a biased point of view and shut down thought and argument – like “war on terror” itself."
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/aug/13/political-lies-donald-trump-post-truth-politics
How we let the phoneys take control and debase the language of politics From Donald Trump to the Brexit campaign, outrageous untruths are now almost a matter of course. How did we reach the point where ‘falsehood flies’?
TALKING LIES?
https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/mormonliberals/pages/703/attachments/original/1468809038/Who_Lies_More.png
DEADLINE THIS FRIDAY
University Academic Fellow: Security Studies at University of Leeds View details for this University Academic Fellow: Security Studies job vacancy at University of Leeds in Northern England. Apply now on jobs.ac.uk...
STORYTELLING PRIMATES:
"It may well be that some of our uniquely human intelligence is grounded in our capacity for understanding and constructing stories."
www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2016/06/13/481827994/are-stories-a-key-to-human-intelligence
Are Stories A Key To Human Intelligence? To get a handle on the potential role of stories in human intelligence, it's especially illuminating to consider how they've cropped up in artificial intelligence, says psychologist Tania Lombrozo.
WORDS vs ACTIONS? ISLAMOPHOBIA and LGBTQ ALLIES
"Ask yourself, who is really the friend of women and the LGBT community. Donald Trump with actions or Hillary Clinton with her words. I will tell you who the better friend is. And some day I believe that will be proven out bigly."
http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2016/06/13/trump_says_clinton_can_t_be_an_lgbt_ally_if_she_supports_muslims.html
Trump Says Clinton Can’t Be an LGBTQ Ally If She Supports Muslim Immigrants. What? In a lengthy speech Monday afternoon, Donald Trump exploited the horrific violence of the Orlando anti-LGBTQ massacre to launch a major offensive again ...
BENCHMARKING VIOLENCE: THE COST OF CONFLICT
"The estimated cost of conflict to the world's resources in 2015 is a tabulation based on military spending, the damage caused by conflict, and losses from crime and interpersonal violence. The report stresses how disproportionately greater such security spending is compared to global efforts to build and preserve peace."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/06/09/the-world-lost-more-than-13-trillion-last-year-because-of-war/
The world lost more than $13 trillion last year because of war New study also finds a staggering decline in peace around the world over the past decade.
ALL ABOUT THE LOOKS?
Clinton: "He is not just unprepared. He is temperamentally unfit to hold an office that requires knowledge, stability and immense responsibility. (...) He says he has foreign policy experience because he ran the Miss Universe pageant in Russia.”
Trump on Twitter. “Bad performance by Crooked Hillary Clinton! Reading poorly from the telepromter [sic]! She doesn’t even look presidential."
ESSAY CONTEST.
"Start thinking and writing now. Submissions will be accepted starting in May and the competition will be open until August 5, 2016.
The first- and second-place winners will get a trip to Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, later this year to present his/her ideas at an awards ceremony to representatives of the U.N. Security Council and will receive awards of $2,000 and $1,000, respectively, from the Washington Foreign Law Society. Additional honorees may participate via audio/video and will receive $500 awards. The Stimson Center will publish the top essays. The universities and professors of these top students will also be recognized at the awards ceremony and in the publication. Click below for more information."
http://www.stimson.org/content/unscr-1540-international-student-essay-contest
UNSCR 1540 International Student Essay Contest | Stimson Center
EXTENDED DEADLINE.
http://www.us-foreign-policy.com/ #!conference/c1bc4
US Foreign Policy | CONFERENCE The US Foreign Policy Working Group hosts the annual US Foreign Policy Conference, the largest gathering of US Foreign Policy experts outside the United States.
METADATA INSIGHTS.
"The results highlight the extraordinary power of telephone metadata – the number called, when, and for how long – particularly when it is paired with public information available from services such as Google, Yelp and Facebook. The value of the data, which is not subject to the same legal protections as the content of people’s communications, has long been recognised by the security services. As Stewart Baker, the former general counsel at the US National Security Agency put it in the aftermath of Edward Snowden’s revelations: “Metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life.”"
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/may/16/even-basic-phone-logs-can-reveal-deeply-personal-information-researchers-find
Even basic phone logs can reveal deeply personal information, researchers find Stanford study shows how details gleaned from telephone ‘metadata’ by National Security Agency pose a threat to privacy of ordinary citizens
POWERFUL CONTRADICTIONS.
"From the standpoint of classical logic and mathematics, what’s bad about a contradiction is that it leads to absurdity. You can derive any proposition you wish from a contradiction in a few simple steps. Yet that’s precisely what makes them so useful from the point of view of political psychology — indeed, the more blatant the contradiction the better. (...)"
"Blatant contradiction puts the responsibility back onto the shoulders of the listener. If I simply deny what I earlier affirmed and act as if nothing has happened, then you are left having to decide what I really meant. And psychology, as well as common sense, tells us that human beings are prone to “confirmation bias.” That is, we tend to interpret evidence so that it conforms to what we already believe."
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/opinion/sunday/trump-truth-and-the-power-of-contradiction.html
Trump, Truth and the Power of Contradiction Why are all other candidates held to higher standards by their followers?
ONTOLOGICAL SECURITY AND THE EVERYDAY.
BIAS BLIND SPOT.
"Surely, though, if you tell people you’re giving them biased information – if you specifically draw their attention to the risk of being led astray by bias – they’ll begin to question their own objectivity? Nope: even then, they’ll insist they’re reaching an unbiased conclusion"
http://www.theguardian.com/news/oliver-burkeman-s-blog/2014/feb/28/bias-political-psychology-burkeman-blog
You're more biased than you think – even when you know you're biased Nobody’s political opinions are just the pure, objective, unvarnished truth. Except yours, obviously
WARS OVER WORDS.
"Pohantun (Pashto) or daneshgah (Persian), which of the two should be used as the word for “university” in Afghanistan?" [...]
"It is not uncommon for nationalist leaders to promote a specific language as the “national language” for their own political ends. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, Afghan nationalists have seen Pashto as the unifying factor."
http://thediplomat.com/2016/05/afghanistans-war-of-words/
Afghanistan’s War of Words Tensions are rising over the use of Afghanistan's two official languages.
MASTER OF WORDS.
"Rhodes is a storyteller who uses a writer’s tools to advance an agenda that is packaged as politics but is often quite personal. He is adept at constructing overarching plotlines with heroes and villains, their conflicts and motivations supported by flurries of carefully chosen adjectives, quotations and leaks from named and unnamed senior officials. He is the master shaper and retailer of Obama’s foreign-policy narratives, at a time when the killer wave of social media has washed away the sand castles of the traditional press."
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/magazine/the-aspiring-novelist-who-became-obamas-foreign-policy-guru.html?_r=1
The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru How Ben Rhodes rewrote the rules of diplomacy for the digital age.
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