Monthly Archives: June 2013

Links: Big data, Climate policy, Filibuster, Germany

Texas Senate (Public domain via Wikimedia)
“The Senate Chamber of the Texas Capitol” Source: Wikimedia (public domain)

Today’s links somehow focus on U.S. politics. But all of the topics matter globally, so please bear with me. Also, we’re pleased to announce that the Economist is as unhappy about the lack of German strategic thinking as we are.

  • Evgeny Morozov on the perils of Big Data: “there is an immense—but mostly invisible—cost to the embrace of Big Data by the intelligence community (and by just about everyone else in both the public and private sectors). That cost is the devaluation of individual and institutional comprehension, epitomized by our reluctance to investigate the causes of actions and jump straight to dealing with their consequences.
  • Obama didn’t really talk about climate policy in his Brandenburg Gate speech, but he did so yesterday. The excellent Duck of Minerva covers the main points and adds interesting links with further information.
  • By now everyone must have heard of the filibuster in Texas, right? For a nice summary and an appreciation of the crowd in the Senate building, check out The Monkey Cage.
  • Fun fact: Did you know that all U.S. states except Nebraska have upper houses?
  • Bonus fun fact: In Nebraska, the unicameral state legislature is called Legislature, but the representatives call themselves … Senators! (Wikipedia)

In line with our negative assessments of German strategy and leadership in the last weeks (ex. 1, ex. 2), please make sure to check out the Economist’s recent special report on Germany, the “reluctant hegemon”:

“On the euro, Germany’s competitiveness agenda is insufficient, and based on a distorted reading of the country’s own history. And Germany’s energy policy is less an example of bold leadership than of an ill-planned unilateralism that illustrates the country’s deep reluctance to think strategically about international challenges.”

Don’t worry, there are some more positive bits in there. The whole thing is available through the navigation on the right hand side of their website.

Social Media for Academics

Some in the audience were applying lessons on-the-fly... #wzbhypo
Some in the audience were applying lessons right away…

This morning, I went to a talk (#wzbhypo) by Mareike König and Sascha Förster – who are involved in the European blog portal hypotheses.org – about social media for academics: How can we use Facebook, Twitter and blogs?

The session covered some introductory stuff about social media as well as concrete tips for academics seeking more exposure online. I will focus on those points that were new to me. Obviously, we share the general opinion that more academics should consider blogging, tweeting etc.!

  • Germany is a developing country when it comes to producing content online, but also with regard to using social networks and blogs as a source of information. (Yes, there was a #neuland joke.)
  • König convincingly argued that beginners should consider joining an existing portal like hypotheses.org, scilogs.com or scienceblogs.com, since those will help you find readers. (Yup, it’s really hard to build an audience from scratch!)
  • Instead of using a couple of platforms half-heartedly, focus on one or two! You should consider, however, that Google+ might increasingly matter for Google web search. (Addendum: Did you know that you can ‘claim’ your Google scholar page?)
  • This is not really news, but: Twitter accounts that do little more than post links to their own stuff will have a hard time attracting followers. Human interaction is key. (We’re working on it.)
  • Some data on German-speaking academics on Twitter: There are (at least) two interesting sources of data in that regard. Marc Scheloske has a list of academics and institutions, and Beatrice Lugger collects data on institutions and media covering scientific topics. Both were last updated in 2012. (I’m working on a list of German IR/polisci scholars…)
  • Depending on the topic and the selection committee, you might not get invited to a job interview if you have no professional social media “fingerprint”…
  • On Twitter, links that are positioned in the middle of a tweet apparently achieve more clicks/attention than links at the end. I did not know that but will give it a try!
  • Even if the visitor and commnets count is low, don’t give up: It’s very likely that some people will comment on your contributions once you meet them in person, and reaching the right audience is more important than ‘big’ numbers…

Overall, it was a stimulating session. You can find Mareike König’s slides online (in German). I was glad to see a very interested and mixed crowd at the event. Many thanks to the WZB press people for organizing it, and of course you should all follow @WZB_news, @mareike2405 and @sascha_foerster!

Security Saturday: The A-Word

German observation team in Afghanistan (By John Scott Rafoss (090121-M-6058R-004) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons”)
Last week, I was reminded of an exceptional issue of the German newscast heute journal a couple of years ago. Before talking about his next topic, anchorman Claus Kleber had directly addressed his audience: “Please do not switch now. Because we know that if I now utter the words conflict, Israel, and Palestine, we will immediately lose some ten thousand viewers.”

I often have a similar feeling when it comes to discussing the Western involvement in Afghanistan. Basically, no one wants to talk about it anymore. The prevailing mood – at least in Berlin – seems to be: Let’s just get out of that far-away country and forget it as soon as possible.

Continue reading Security Saturday: The A-Word

“The Euro will never succeed, and it will never fail.”

"Please find me the most generic euro image you can think of!" Source: Wikimedia
“Please find me the most generic euro image you can think of!” Source: Wikimedia

On Friday, Benjamin J. Cohen gave a talk at FU Berlin. Cohen, who is a professor of International Political Economy at UC Santa Barbara, is probably most famous for his work on the Geography of Money. He was invited by the KFG and the International Research Training Group “Between Spaces” to talk about the future of the euro as an international currency.

As the somewhat pessimistic title of the lecture – “The Euro Today: Is There A Tomorrow?” – suggests, this was not meant to be a pep talk for worried Europeans. In fact, Cohen’s short answer to his own question is: No, the euro will not bounce back from its current crisis, but instead face a “long, lingering slide into marginality”.

First, some preliminaries: Cohen was not talking about the future of the currency as such, but specifically about the euro’s role as an international currency: To what extent will it be used by non-members of the eurozone – not as a substitute domestic currency (“dollarization“), but for international purposes? More technically, the question is about the use of a currency as a unit of account, store of value, and/or medium of exchange.

To put it short, the argument here is that the euro is nowhere close to the dollar both in scope (which functions it fulfills) and in domain (where / by whom it is used).

Continue reading “The Euro will never succeed, and it will never fail.”

FAQ: The PRISM leak & Edward Snowden

PRISM slide 4

OK, now that some of the dust has settled: What exactly is this PRISM program? Apparently, the idea is to collect information on patterns of communication (who talked to whom), and then look at potentially interesting contents (who said what). For metadata you only need a subpoena, for the contents you need a court order. The features look very impressive / scary:

With a few clicks and an affirmation that the subject is believed to be engaged in terrorism, espionage or nuclear proliferation, an analyst obtains full access to Facebook’s “extensive search and surveillance capabilities against the variety of online social networking services.”

According to a separate “User’s Guide for PRISM Skype Collection,” that service can be monitored for audio when one end of the call is a conventional telephone and for any combination of “audio, video, chat, and file transfers” when Skype users connect by computer alone. Google’s offerings include Gmail, voice and video chat, Google Drive files, photo libraries, and live surveillance of search terms. (Washington Post)

What I don’t fully understand is the targeting: In theory, this is aimed at non-U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism, nuclear proliferation and the like. But “incidental” collection of information about Americans is tolerated. And what about data protection treaties with other nations? The EU and Germany are not amused – but might have been informed and compliant to some degree.

A piece by ProPublica suggests that a lot of details are “unclear”:

Has the NSA been collecting all Americans’ phone records, and for how long? It’s not entirely clear. (…)

What surveillance powers does the government believe it has under the Patriot Act? That’s classified. (…)

Has the NSA’s massive collection of metadata thwarted any terrorist attacks? It depends which senator you ask. And evidence that would help settle the matter is, yes, classified. (…)

How much information, and from whom, is the government sweeping up through Prism? It’s not clear. (…)

So, how does Prism work? (…) The Post quotes a classified NSA report saying that Prism allows “collection managers [to send] content tasking instructions directly to equipment installed at company-controlled locations,” not the company servers themselves. So what does any of that mean? We don’t know.

Please do read the whole article. Dan Drezner’s initial response from last week puts the leaks in perspective: What the NSA does is probably legal and backed by both Republicans and Democrats. So what we should really worry about is the U.S. Congress, not the NSA: More and more secret laws have been created and cannot be publicly debated.

So much for legal details and party politics. But there are even broader things to consider: For one, (perceptions of a) surveillance state undermines trust in the government as a whole, which is an issue for leaders of any political affiliation. Second, secret organizations per definition work very differently from those that rely on accountability, transparency and oversight. Putting ever more competencies in the hands of, well, spies is problematic because these mechanisms don’t work for them. A functional equivalent might be “a strong organizational culture and powerful professional norms”, but in his latest post on the issue Dan Drezner suggests that we should not rely on these in the case of the NSA.

OK, enough of this complicated stuff – what about Edward Snowden, the PRISM whistle-blower?  Continue reading FAQ: The PRISM leak & Edward Snowden

Links: European floods, Middle East, NSA, Game of Thrones

Flood disaster in Central Europe

Central Europe has to bear with a lot of water as the rivers Danube, Elbe, Saale, Inn, Mulde, and several more tributaries are swollen up to the upper limit. The video* above shows dyke watches in Central Germany (in the city of Schönebeck). That’s how pretty much every place around these rivers looks like while the dams are about to burst – and if they have burst, it’s just worse. Railways hat to be closed and thousands of people are evacuated from these masses of waters. While in some places the clearing work has started by now, the worst is yet to come for Northern Germany and Hungary. The Danube river alone affects 10 countries.

This has happened before, of course, but those record surges are unknown of and they happen at the same time in several countries across Europe (for instance, Germany, the Czeach Republic, Slovakia, Austria and Hungary are flood-affected). Some people link the floods to consequences of climate change and sealed surfaces. I am wondering just why the dyke building has not advanced as much as it should have after the 2002 and 2005 floods in Germany. And, what about transnational cooperation in river management / flood control / disaster management? Has anyone come across some piece that is taking up the coordination between e.g. Czech and German officials?

* The video is from a small local newspaper in Saxony-Anhalt and I wanted to promote it here. Continue reading Links: European floods, Middle East, NSA, Game of Thrones

Conference advice from an assistant’s viewpoint

tl;dr: ~1600 words

Over at the Duck, Stephen Saideman presented some great ideas of belated conference proposal advice for the International Studies Association 2014. It’s more of a general piece which is equally helpful for other conferences. His four main points are

(1) do organize panels if you can – they are more coherent. Have a mixed crowd on the panel; do not submit the individual paper(s) as well
(2) have short and clear abstract– keep it simple, do not give too much detail, have a clear and exciting title (see also Leanne Powner’s abstract-writing worksheet)
(3) you do not need to link your submissions to the theme by all means – ISA sections have panel allocations independent of the theme or may issue separate calls
(4) make sure to send your submission(s) to the right section(s)

While these points are worthwhile, I think that Steve is too rigorous on some other points. I started off writing a comment given my experience working for last year’s ISA conference but quickly realized that I would have quite a long list of additional points which go beyond a mere “comment”. So, I will  spell these out in more detail. And, following Megan MacKenzie’s ISA survival guide and Steve’s proposal advice, I would add some points regarding the months in between so that we have covered the whole ISA cycle. Continue reading Conference advice from an assistant’s viewpoint

Security Saturday: Who cares about Syria?

By Voice of America News: Scott Bob report from Azaz, Syria. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
In his speech at the Freie Universität Berlin, Peer Steinbrück (SPD) made clear he opposed any arms transfer to the Syrian opposition. As is the case with the German government, he did not offer any alternative policy options. German politicians have long warned of an escalation of the conflict, but few have come up with specific proposals what the country could do to avoid it. As Markus Kaim (SWP) argues in an interview with the newspaper Südkurier, Germans are particularly good at telling others why their ideas won’t work, while not coming forward with an alternative. But is this enough for a country that size? Continue reading Security Saturday: Who cares about Syria?

Steinbrück’s Missed Opportunity

Peer Steinbrück at FU Berlin
Peer Steinbrück at FU Berlin – June 4, 2013

Peer Steinbrück, the Social Democratic challenger to chancellor Angela Merkel in the upcoming election, gave a speech at Freie Universität Berlin on Tuesday. You can watch it online (in German). This was not meant to be a typical campaign talk, but a speech on the “guidelines of social democratic foreign and security policy”.

The speech was disappointing. For people familiar with the issue area, in particular the first half of the speech seemed very much rooted in the general wisdom, or rather, the commonly shared worries about the state of the world. Steinbrück failed to clearly distinguish his position from vague and all too familiar boilerplate statements. Europe is important for Germany and a historic achievement that should be cherished. International law and the UN Security Council must be considered in decisions about employing the German army. Drones that kill people are undesirable. Oh my, who would have thought?

Steinbrück was unable to clarify how and why his positions represent social democracy, let alone an alternative to Merkel-style realpolitik. His dismissive response when asked about this weakness: “If a social democrat gives a speech, than this a speech about social democratic positions.” Well, what might these positions be? Continue reading Steinbrück’s Missed Opportunity

Links: Keep calm and carry on?

Protests in Turkey
A whirling sufi wearing gas mask in 2013 protests in Turkey in Gezi Park (2 June 2013) –  CC-BY-SA “Azirlazarus”, Wikimedia Commons

The biggest news over the last week of course has been the events in Turkey, and speculation about the movement – “Occupy Gezi” or the “Turkish Spring” – is everywhere. So, are we witnessing the beginning of a revolution, or will these protests go the way of Occupy and fizzle out over the coming months?

According to some at Foreign Affairs, the protestors are primarily “peevish elitists” and “anti-capitalist Muslims” and, with 50% of voters behind him, Erdogan doesn’t need to worry (especially given Turkey’s recent economic success).

Or, it could be that Erdogran’s conservative cultural agenda, which places restrictions on alcohol consumption and access to abortion; tensions over urban development; and his proposed move from a parliamentary to a presidential system with extensive new powers for the president, has sufficiently worried the other 50% of the population that didn’t vote for him.

Either way, it’s important to know that, while the Arab Spring was tweeted, whatever’s going on in Turkey is going to be “Vined” (is that something we’re going to have to say now?)

For more on Turkey, here’s a post from The Monkey Cage with links to some interesting details not being widely reported. Also note this data on Twitter usage in the protest.

Continuing with a regional and thematic focus, while the Arab Spring unrest has apparently made Dubai even richer Tunisia’s president says the country’s progress is jeopardized by persistent poverty.

Meanwhile, Egypt is passing legislation that strengthens government control over NGOs, potentially denying them domestic and international funding says Human Rights Watch.

It’s not all bad news though – while the Chinese government likes to censor any mention of the June 4th Tiananmen Square massacre, some clever people have found an ingenious way around that.