Last week, Steve Saideman kicked off a debate after the International Studies Association’s Executive Committee proposed to adopt a policy that would ban editors of the ISA’s official journals from blogging. Several people involved in blogging and/or official ISA business have commented at Steve’s blog. (Nobody called it “lex Nexon”, though.)
Here is another post on why banning blogs is a bad idea. Burcu Bayram has a post on how blogging is useful for young scholars in particular. As immediate reaction to the “ignorance about social media and its role in 21st century IR scholarship and teaching” expressed in the proposal, Steve and others are now planning to create the ISA Online Media Caucus.
Meanwhile, it seems that the ISA’s Governing Council will not implement a ban:
If a vote was held today on the initial proposal, I am pretty sure that we would win. Of course, if I felt that there would be such a vote, I would do some more work to be sure of it.
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The 50th Munich Security Conference is over now, but you can watch many videos of the panel discussions on the conference website (just scroll down past the “highlight” clips).
I agree with Tobias Bunde and Wolfgang Ischinger that U.S. and European members of parliament should cooperate to curtail NSA surveillance and other violations of civil liberties.
Our colleagues at Bretterblog have collected some links [in German] with critical comments on the MSC as well as new developments in German foreign policy.
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In other news, I recommend the following items from the (IR) blogosphere:
- On how perceptions matter: How would we [Americans] cover the Super Bowl if it were in another country?
- On more or less plausible “non-deterministic genetic arguments”: Are there genes that lead men to enjoy fighting?
- Brian C. Schmidt on The End of Great Debates (in International Relations)
- How to measure/estimate the size of black markets after an arms embargo was implemented…
- Again, how perceptions matter: Which African countries have the best (and worst) websites?
- Jay Ulfelder on “The Arab Spring and the Limits of Understanding”