Chasing Dragons

Doctoral Studentships in Politics at Newcastle University

North East Doctoral Training Centre ESRC Funded Studentships in Politics

Politics at Newcastle University is pleased to announce the availability of ESRC funded PhD studentships as part of the North East Doctoral Training Centre. We are seeking high calibre candidates interested in doctoral study who have clearly defined research projects and wish to be considered for these awards.

The studentships will be allocated on a competitive basis and include 1+3, +3, 3.75 and 2+3 awards. The deadline for approaching prospective supervisors is 27 January 2012. The deadline for submitting completed applications is 24 February 2012.

Preliminary inquiries can be directed to Dr. Kyle Grayson until 30 January, 2012 and to Dr. Martin Coward after that time.

Further details:

The following studentships are available to UK citizens and EU nationals:

• 1+3 awards: targeted at students with or nearing completion of first class undergraduate degrees to undertake an MA in research methods followed by PhD study.
• +3 awards: targeted at students with or nearing completing of MA degrees with ESRC recognised research methods training and who wish to commence PhD study
• +3.75: targeted at students wishing to undertake a PhD with an MA that does not include research methods training. The .75 will allow the applicant to complete research methods training.
• 2+3 awards: targeted at students considering a two year language based MA degree followed by PhD study

Politics at Newcastle University enjoys a strong international reputation. In the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) Newcastle Politics consolidated its position with a very strong research output profile and excellence in terms of research environment and esteem. The RAE Panel noted that: "Research outputs were predominantly of internationally recognised quality" and the "Research environment was predominantly of internationally recognised quality ... (including) a large school of PhD students, with good completion rates". Politics has enjoyed strong growth in staff numbers in recent years indicating excellence in its research and teaching and the overall strength of the programme. Incoming students will be able to fully participate in our program of research related activities and active graduate community.

We offer research supervision expertise in:

International Politics

• Security, human security, critical security studies, biosecurity, European security and defence policy
•  Area specialisation in the Americas, East and Southeast Asia, Russia, European Union
• International political thought and philosophy
• Globalisation and global governance
• Urbicide, cities and war
• Terrorism and Counter-terrorism
• Geopolitics and critical geopolitics
• Ethnic nationalism
• Genocide
• International political economy with specialist focus on work and labour and development
• Popular culture and world politics including music, film, electronic games
• Global justice and ethics
• The arms trade and disarmament
• Post-colonialism

Political Philosophy and Political Theory

• The ethics and politics of climate change
• Environmental citizenship
• Ecological space and global justice
• Legal philosophy with specialist focus on punishment
• Moral philosophy
• Multiculturalism, toleration, recognition
• Rights and freedoms
• Liberalism
• Democracy in divided societies
• Justice and ethics

Governance and Political Organisations:

• Party Politics
• Elections and electoral politics
• Area specialisation in the Americas, Italy, Japan, France, Germany
• Transitional justice and reconciliation in divided societies
• Interest groups
• Social capital
• Participation and non-participation
• Civil Society
• European security
• Political ideologies
• EU integration policies
• European environmental policy and policy making
• European public policy and policy making
• International environmental organisations

Further details on how to apply can be found here.

Further information about postgraduate research in Politics at Newcastle can be found here.

Key Deadlines:

Formation of a supervisory team for the 2012-13 competition: 27 January, 2012

Submission of a completed application for the 2012-13 competition: 24 February, 2012

Weekend Reading Roundup v. 136

This weekend in the reading roundup:

• 'The Social Utility of Art and Scholarship' by Clare O'Farrell at refractedinput

• 'Top 50 Multimedia Packages of 2011' by Tracy Boyer Clark at innovativeinteractivity.com

• 'What It Takes to Open a Bar in Baghdad' by Joshuah Bearman at atlantic.com (apparantly being a mercenary is a good start...)

• 'Stealth Tech, Facebook Revolutions, Shadow Wars: The Most Dangerous Year Ever' by Spencer Ackerman and Noah Shachtman at dangerroom

• 'Photographs of the Year 2011' by Homa Khaleeli, Rob Fearn, Amy Fleming, Sarah Phillips, and Paula Cocozza at guardian.co.uk

• 'The Struggle for the Open Web: Putting "Piracy" In Perspective' by David Campbell at david-campbell.org

• 'I'll Tell You Why Movie Revenue is Dropping' by Roger Ebert at rogerebert.com (hint, it's not piracy...)

Happy New Year!

Photo credit: feileacan

Popular Culture and World Politics IV Conference Roundup

In a word, the PCWP IV conference at the University of Lapland was amazing. Kudos to Laura Junka-Aikio, Julian Reid, and the rest of the conference team for organizing and managing a tremendous event. If you ever have the chance to go to Rovaniemi, go!  Nowhere--including other far north outposts-- is quite like it. If you are a carnivore, the food is outstanding--indulge yourself and go to Restaurant Nili and order the Rovaniemi Market Platter. If not, the cloud berries, crow berries, and fresh local ceps will do the trick. But, I digress.

The conference was exactly what a conference should be: I walked out at the end and felt intellectually stimulated and enriched. It was great to meet a lot of new people doing work in the area, particularly the large contingent of postgrads from North America, the UK, and Scandinavia whose research is at the frontiers of the sub-field.

Laura and Julian went above and beyond in terms of bringing an incredibly accomplished group of plenary speakers who provoked and pushed their audiences to think about the myriad ways that popular culture contributes to the construction of the political. I tweeted from each of the plenaries. I'm not sure how much sense the notes now make, but if you want a flavour of what transpired, you can look here (scroll down).

The panels were equally great. There is some really important work being done at the moment that I look forward to seeing published in the not-so-distant future. I particularly enjoyed the discussions of the political function of discourses of empathy, Survivor and the sociability of game theory, collage and anti-proliferation images, Star Trek and depictions of torture, the political function of satire, and the aesthetics of biopolitics. You know a conference is truly excellent when you want to go to every single concurrent session.

In sum, Laura and Julian  put together a truly memorable event and were exemplary hosts. Paljon kiitoksia!

Next year, Kevin Dunn has graciously agreed to host PCWP V which will be taking place at William and Hobart Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. Stay tuned for more details...

Photo credit: yourbartender

Upcoming Talks at the International Studies Association Convention v. 1

Next week in Montreal, I will be giving two short presentations at the International Studies Association Annual Convention. Today I want to give a brief overview of one of the papers I will be presenting on Wednesday. I will give a brief blurb of my presentation for the roundtable on approaching the study of culture in international relations on Monday --yes, I do need the weekend to sketch out my thoughts on that one!

The first presentationforms a part of the 'Beyond Biopolitics? Political Authority and Critical Human Security Studies' panel that includes Suvi Alt, Giorgio Shani, Martin Weber,  Gul Ceylan Tok, and Jens Sorensen Stilhoff with Anna Agathangelou serving as discussant.

My paper examines  what has been recently dubbed by Edward Newman as 'Critical Human Security Studies' and how it functions as an analytic. Although one can see the potential attractiveness of combining the supposed emancipatory impulse of critical security studies with the policy currency of human security, I argue that Critical Human Security Studies merges the most problematic aspects of both.

After providing an overview of the ways in which human security moved from being a potential challenger to national security to one of its most important supporting structures, I then outline six reservations about Critical Human Security Studies.

First, I question the wisdom of trying to rehabilitate a concept (i.e., human security) that underpins some of the most problematic areas of contemporary security thinking such as counter-insurgency doctrine.

Second, I raise concerns about the appropriateness of security discourses as a site for critical reconsideration of political order.

Third, I question if the policy networks and strategic complexes enabled by human security are even spaces with political potential given their overwhelming concern with technocratic efficiency and delivery mechanisms as opposed to any deliberation over the aims and objectives that they serve.

Fourth, building upon the work of Claudia Aradau and Columba Peoples, I raise some objections to the unreflexive use of emancipation by critical security studies, particularly with respect to the role of violence in the process of emancipation and the management of difference.

Fifth, I identify a dangerous formulation within Critical Human Security Studies.  (Human) security and emancipation are assumed to be different sides of the same coin. Does this then mean that the project for Critical Human Security Studies is de-securitization for the purposes of re-securitizing new phenomena? Moreover, neither human security nor the emancipatory impulse of critical security studies seem to present a fundamentally different vision of the political that moves beyond the Schmittian 'friend/enemy' distinction.

Finally, I argue that Critical Human Security Studies suffers from an improverished understanding of the sites where politics takes place. By privileging formal policy venues, it too eagerly seeks to adopt a discourse that actualy constrains the potential for transformation while discounting alternate means of engaging in political activity.

Image credit: versionz

How to Set Up a Research Radar

What is a research radar?

A research radar is a system that allows one to keep in the loop of the latest developments in one's areas of research interest. It involves a personalised system of electronic and more old-fashioned means of data collection, organisation, and management.

While it can take a bit of time to set up, the ultimate value of a research radar is in its capacity to provide an efficient, organised and manageable flow of information about your research interests.  It should help to keep you informed of the latest developments in your field while dramatically reducing the amount of time that your spend searching for new materials or retrieving documents you have already found.

The personal element is important here. You need to establish a research radar that works best for you. Thus, it may be the case that some of the elements listed below are not particularly appropriate for your needs.  That’s absolutely fine; do what works best for you!

Similarly, to gain access to some of these systems may require that you provide personal information to private concerns (mainly for the purposes of marketing).  And if you harbour fears about becoming embedded into the Google matrix, some of suggestions below are not going to be for you. However, with a bit of digging, you should be able to find other programmes or systems—many of which are also freeware-- that offer similar features.

Improve your browser capability

Tech-heads generally agree that Internet Explorer is one of the weaker internet browsers on the market.  A research radar can often benefit from the enhanced functionality and features of other means of trolling the world wide web for research materials. These include a dazzling display of add-ons and free programmes that provide your browser with extra capabilities.

The following are some of the more popular browser options available free of charge:

Firefox
Google Chrome
Opera

These literally have thousands of additional programmes available that integrate into the browser. One of the most useful is AddThis , a feature which allows one to quickly post content found on the web to various social networking sites (e.g., twitter, facebook) as well as to archive it on on-line book-marking sites. Various task bars for services like StumbleUpon or Digg can also be very useful for the purposes of archiving material.

Setting up a Bespoke iGoogle Home Page

For a research radar to be effective, it is important that it is fairly centralised, allowing you to quickly survey multiple flows of information. This saves the time and effort of having to toggle through various programmes on a regular basis to see if anything new or interesting has arrived.

Setting up a bespoke iGoogle home page is one way of achieving this goal. The advantages are that it is fairly simple to do and there is a lot of on-line help and advice if you run into any problems. Most importantly, by using iGoogle as a platform, you have a research radar in place that you can access from any computer in the world. If you find yourself regularly shifting from labs, to laptops, to home computers, to internet cafes, universal accessibility and synchronisation can save both time and energy in procuring materials and the management of your research archive.

To set up an iGoogle homepage, you will need to have a google account. Information on how to set up a google account can be found here.

For an extremely comprehension discussion of all of the features and neat tricks available via iGoogle, please see this 17 part video series at wonderhowto.com. Many  how-to-books (like Rule the Web) also contain information on iGoogle and other on-line archiving resources.

The main use I have found for iGoogle is as a central hub for compiling my RSS feeds from various on-line sources including academic journals, newspapers, blogs, other websites, google searches, and database searches.

RSS Feeds

An RSS feed (short for Really Simple Syndication) is a means of delivering (almost) real time updates to changes in content on a web page.  By staying informed of changes to site content, you need only visit a particular website when something actually interests you. This saves time by not having periodically to visit yourself to look for material or updates. By arranging your RSS feeds, one has the capability to scan several websites worth of new content (or updates) without having to visit each site individually. An example might help here.

Say you are following newspaper coverage of a by-election campaign. Rather than visiting multiple sites several times a day to see if the campaign is being covered, what is being reported, and if information posted is new or updated, looking at the RSS feeds allow you to quickly scan this information all at once without leaving your iGoogle--or other RSS reader--platform.  You can also set this up for google search terms so that you receive an update every time new web posts on a particular topic appear from around the world.

I know this probably doesn’t sound like much and I was quite dubious myself when I first started with RSS feeds.  What I have found is that they have helped me to save time in finding/collecting relevant information for research, allowed me to stay more informed of recent updates in my areas of interest, and exposed me to new sources of information that I might not have found otherwise.

Most websites now have a RSS tab that allows you to subscribe to their feed by clicking it. Moreover, most browsers have a RSS subscription feed box—for websites that have RSS--just to the right of the address box.

RSS feeds can be customised to show as much—or as little—of the content as you prefer. Thus, you can customize the number of updates that will be shown, the amount of content (e.g., a few opening lines) that is shown, and the type of content that this shown and updated (e.g., this allows you to ignore updates in comment sections).

There are many different RSS readers, many of which are freeware. For a list of some of your options, please see here and here.

For an excellent tutorial on how to use RSS feeds and get the most from them, please see here.

On-line bookmarking tools

On-line bookmarking tools allow you to create on-line accounts to store web materials that you have found. In some respects this duplicates the traditional bookmarking feature of web browsers. The value added is that these accounts are accessible from whatever machine you may be working from, allowing you access to materials wherever you may be. They also have tagging features that allow you to organise, manage, search, and--in theory--quickly find particular documents and/or keywords.

Moreover, some involve elements of social media so that you can share links with colleagues, join groups, and receive recommendations based on pages you have bookmarked. Rest assured, these features can be turned off if you’d rather not be in the public spotlight.

Some of the more popular on-line bookmarking sites include Digg, Stumble Upon, CiteULike and Delicious. Many websites now have widgets (little icons) that if you click on them will directly upload the web-page address to your on-line bookmarking account. 

Most of these bookmarking sites also have browser applications that allow you to quickly bookmark web-pages. For example, I use Stumble Upon to bookmark and can save links and access them with a tool bar available in Firefox.

Again, what will works for me may not work for you. Thus, for a general scholarly review of bookmarking tools see Hammond et al (2005).

Social networking sites

Social networking sites can be a fantastic resource for coming across material that might have otherwise escaped your attention. What is important to keep in mind is that the value of these sites for your research radar is going to be dependent on how you use the sites themselves and who you choose to follow/friend.

Although much maligned, Twitter has developed into a valuable element in my own research radar. Yes, some people use the service to provide inane updates about insignificant personal events. However, a growing number of users in the media, government, ngo and academic communities are using the service professionally to share links to articles, data-sets, reviews, reports, and other valuable sources of information. It takes time to develop a good list of people/groups to follow but it can pay significant dividends as well as help in building a professional network. Another increasingly popular social media outlet geared towards academics is Academia.edu which is part personal web-page, part social networking site.

Academic Journal Table of Contents Updating Services

Most journals now offer table of contents updating services, either via email or RSS feed. Again, this is a low cost/low impact was of keeping alert of the latest research developments in your field. Here are a few of them in particular order:

Cambridge University Press email alerts
Palgrave email alerts
Routledge email  alerts
Routledge RSS updates
Sage email alerts

New Book Updates

All of the major publishers (e.g.,  OUP, CUP, Routledge/Taylor and Francis, Blackwell, Lynne Rienner, Palgrave, Polity, IB Tauris, et cetera) have email update services and RSS feeds for new books.

Email Listserves

Most disciplinary associations run email list-serves that users can subscribe to (often as a perk of membership). For example, the British International Studies Association has a list serve for its membership. H-Net has an extensive series of list-serves in the social sciences and humanities. Sometimes particular sub-fields or areas of scholarship have their own dedicated email lists. Ask colleagues or your supervisors for tips on what is out there. These tend to be best for finding out about conferences/workshops, calls for papers, and job openings.

Library Databases

Some library databases like Scopus allow one to set up an email alert and/or RSS feed for search terms so that one receives an update every time that an additional article matches the search parameters.

Concluding Thoughts

How we go about doing research and keeping up-to-date with regards to new information in our fields has changed dramatically with the opportunities of the internet. Yet, the speed with which information circulates and the volume that confronts us is staggering.  All the while, sources of really good research materials are rapidly proliferating. Keeping on top of everything is simply impossible. At the same time, disconnecting is not necessarily a viable strategy either.

Setting up a research radar won’t stem the information tide or necessarily allow one to keep on top of everything; however, it does allow one to better manage the flow that reaches them and to target sources based on research interests.

Image credits: zipckr and Patrick Hoesly

My Latest Article in the Review of International Studies

Back in April of 2007, I organized a two day workshop at Newcastle University. The focus was on the contributions made by Prof. Richard K. Ashley to the discipline of international relations. We had a great set of presenters (including Rick himself) and a very engaged audience that made for a lively couple of days. Even three decades on from Rick's early forays into the (il)logics of realism, the presence of post structuralism, let alone the implications for the discipline of international relations, remains highly contentious territory.

I am pleased to announce that three of the papers that were presented during this workshop are now featured in the latest issue of the Review of International Studies:

• 'Interuption Ashley' by Cynthia Weber;

• 'Things Lost and Found: The Silences of Thinking Space' by Mark Laffey;

• 'Dissidence, Richard K. Ashley, and the Politics of Silence' by Kyle Grayson.

Under the terms of the copyright agreement, I am actually allowed to post a copy of the article which can be downloaded here.

The full citation is:

'Dissidence, Richard K. Ashley, and the politics of silence' by Kyle Grayson Review of International Studies (2010), 36(4): 1005-1019 Cambridge University Press doi: 10.1017/S0260210510001415 Published online by Cambridge University Press 01 Nov 2010. © British International Studies Association

Many thanks to everyone involved, especially Cindy and Mark, who were very patient throughout the process.

Photo credit: Shahram Sharif

My Latest Article Published in International Politics

Human security, neoliberalism and corporate social responsibility

By Kyle Grayson (Newcastle University)

Mainstream critiques of human security theory and practice have criticized how human security is being conceptualized, with a specific focus on how the absence of a precise and universally accepted definition hinders its practical application. Rejecting these critiques as an explanation for the policy failures of human security agendas, this article argues that the difficulties experienced in operationalizing human security lie in the myriad ways human security policies have revealed themselves to be subordinate to an existing, well-established and equally diffuse policy agenda: neoliberalism. The specific case study examines Canada, a prominent member of the human security vanguard, and its unwillingness to regulate transnational corporate conduct that contributes to human insecurity.                           International Politics (2010) 47, 497–522. doi:10.1057/ip.2010.20

Key words: human security; Canada; UN; neoliberalism

Please email me directly if you'd like a copy.

Photo credit: xinhua1

Journal Ranking Lists in Politics and International Relations

I am always suspicious of ranking indices at the best of times. I am even more suspicious of ranking indices when they claim to be providing 'objective' indications of quality for something that is highly subjective. This is particularly the case with rankings of academic journals in politics and international relations. In comparison to the natural sciences and other social science disciplines, citations levels are extremely low with many high quality outlets not covered by the traditional citation indices. Moreover, there is far more diversity in the theoretical approaches, methodology, and empirical examples used in political research.  With less common ground, many scholars--even within the same sub-field--will routinely disagree about the quality of research papers and the quality of the outlets that publish them.

Yet, the academic environment today is one in which journal rankings are increasingly being used as a proxy for the quality of individual papers by hiring committees, tenure committees, promotion committees, funding agencies, and potentially as an (un)official part of the Research Excellence Framework process in the UK.

Unfortunately, these ranking systems are not going away anytime soon. And there does not appear to be any kind of concerted push by faculty associations, disciplinary associations, or trade unions to curb their use. Thus, one has a choice to make: ignore the lists and hope for the best or--and albeit from a slightly mercenary/career survivalist perspective--see if one can make the lists work for you.

If you choose the latter, one should have an awareness of what ranking lists are out there, what lists carry weight within their home institution or prospective institutions, and how to use them to one's advantage. There is also a very important freeware programme that can help one make a case as to one's research impact.

Journal Ranking Lists

For the disciplines of politics and international relations, here are some of the key journal ranking lists that can be drawn upon in order to put one's own work in the best possible light for snapshot purposes:

• Thomson-Reuters ISI Citation Index (you should be able to access this through your library's ISI Web of Knowledge Database). This is considered by many institutions to be the gold standard journal ranking list. Roughly speaking, journals are ranked on the basis of the rate at which published articles are cited by other ISI ranked journals. Given that the list is highly exclusive--there are many concerns about the transparency of the process for inclusion--many very respectable journals are absent. It also misses citations from other sources such as unranked journals and books.

• The ERA Rankings List: This list was commissioned by the Australian Research Council for the maligned (and abandoned?) Excellence for Research in Australia evaluation process. This list is far more comprehensive and less US-centric than the ISI. I was actually surprised at some of the outlets that made it on here (not because of 'quality' but because of their niche focus).

• The TRIPS List: From the Institute for the Theory and Practice of International Relations, at the College of William and Mary, this list is based on a ten country survey of scholars working in the discipline of IR. It includes two lists of journals and two lists of book publishers based on opinions regarding influence and quality (pp. 49-54). The list is not particularly comprehensive but it does reveal marked national differences in perceptions of influence and quality for those journals listed.

• The SCImago Journal and Country Rank: This is a ranking system developed by a research consortium from the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), University of Granada, Extremadura, Carlos III (Madrid) and Alcalá de Henares. SCImago draws its information from Scopus in order to capture the visibility of journals within this database since 1996. Although the coverage is extremely comprehensive, where journals are listed by subject area is somewhat idiosyncratic. Thus, it may be wise to search for individual journals first to see where they are listed before undertaking a subject area search.

• Comparative Journals Ranking List: Based on survey work conducted by Iain McLean et al, this report provides three lists of journal rankings based on survey work undertaken in the US, the UK, and Canada. It is important to note that the authors selected the 92 journals to be evaluated as opposed to eliciting responses. Thus the list is very similar to the ISI, albeit with some different ranking results in terms of national perceptions of quality.

• The EADI Journals Ranking Dossier: This has been compiled by the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes to counteract the 'monodisciplinary and Anglo-Saxon bias of prevailing citation indices and impact scores'. Anyhow, have a look for yourself (to dis-aggregate based on subject area, use the domain option under the advanced search settings).

• The Hix List: Named after Simon Hix, at the LSE, who developed the list as a component to be used for the purposes of ranking the top Political Science Departments in the world. Features more Political Science than International Relations journals.

Measuring Citation Levels: Publish or Perish

When it comes to trying to provide evidence of the overall impact of a particular piece of research, citation levels, for all of their problems still appear to be the measure of choice in many situations.

To help researchers compile both raw citation levels and a series of statistical measures based on these rates, Anne-Wil Harzing has come to the rescue with Publish or Perish

This is a free software package available for download that uses Google Scholar to compile raw citation rates and then performs various statistical analysis of these. It is well worth checking this out, not just to for the purposes of compiling one's own research dossier, but also because of what it can tell you about citation patterns in 'leading' journals--that is, regardless of the outlet, most articles receive zero citations while a very small percentage receive the bulk.

Anyhow, as I stated above, I am not a firm believer in any of these ranking lists or the use of citations as an accurate measure of research quality. However, both can be used to strategically plan the journals that one might target for research in progress and to roughly indicate the quality of one's published research to a hiring committee, promotions committee, or funding committee (never assume that any committee is familiar with the journals you are publishing in!). And what I've tried to do here is compile some tools that can help one make as strong a case as possible.

What's Missing? Comparisons of the Length of Time from Submission to Publication

Now, if someone really wanted to perform a service for the field, they would put together a wiki list like that being compiled by Andrew Cullison from the State University of New York at Fredonia. Focusing on philosophy journals, it provides a rough guide to acceptance rates,time lengths for reviews, rejections, resubmissions, and publication, as well as whether comments were received, and if so, whether or not the writer found them useful.

Although the plural of anecdote is not 'fact'--as Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow likes to say--the length of time for articles to get reviewed and end up in print appears to be becoming longer and longer for many popular journals in politics and international relations. It would be incredibly helpful for everyone, particularly early career researchers, to know which outlets are inundated with submissions and which might have a far shorter turnaround time. In turn, this might help editors who are currently overwhelmed with the volume of submissions that they are processing. Is anyone prepared to come to the rescue here?

[this post was updated 06/07/2011]

Photo credit: gingerpig2000

The Price of Peer Review

There is a lot that can be said about universities in the digital age. There is also a lot that can be said about current models for scholarly publishing and the ridiculousness of holding on to analogue products trapped behind barriers in a digital age as the output of choice.

But, if one needed any more evidence of the pathologies of contemporary academic publishing, one need go no further than the quick analysis undertaken by Prof. Martin Weller of the Open University at The Ed Techie blog (thanks to Cory Doctrow at boingboing.net for the link).

His estimate of the total labour cost of peer-reviewing in any given year is £209,976,000. This is quite a conservative estimate with other calculations placing the global total at £1.9 billion!

And it's not just that these labour costs go uncompensated by the private publishers who rely on peer-review to ensure that their journals are publishing academically 'rigorous' research. Rather, they then turnaround and sell access to these journals for a tidy sum to the very institutions whose employees have been a source of unpaid labour. And in most cases, these are public institutions whose primary source of funding is from the government. 

At a time of fiscal retrenchment, the continuation of this massive subsidy seems imprudent. Moreover, if there weren't already enough reasons, the barricading of most academic journals behind pay-walls can now add economic double-dealing into its calculus of moral dubiousness.

Given that keeping publicly funded knowledge behind barriers is socially irresponsible and that  higher education budgets are going to be slashed in the UK, our disciplinary associations ought to be leading the charge for open access to all publicly subsidized academic outputs. Unfortunately, based on previous experiences, I'm not going to hold my breath....

Photo credit: cinocino

Is the US Military Addicted to Drones?

As mentioned on GamePolitics.com, earlier this week, the UK's Channel 4 put together an interesting report on the use of Predator drones by the US Army. Many of the key issues are identified and discussed:

• the legality of drone strikes
• the appropriateness of the recourse to technological solutions for political problems
• how (military) technologies become gendered and tied to conceptions of honor
• the problem of proliferation (if you think this is far fetched, check out the DIY Drone community who build kit for recreational/non-military purposes)

But what is perhaps most fascinating is the claim that drones are changing military culture and tactical doctrine to the point where they are now referred to as 'Army crack'.

Given that drones are a dual-use technology that also allow for the overt and covert use of force,  what might it mean for understandings of modern warfare--or the popular identification of war itself--if the US military is indeed 'addicted' to the use of drones? Moreover, what happens to our spatial understanding of war-fighting when combat can be initiated and completed by individuals situated thousands of miles away from the theater of operation? Will actions traditionally considered to be acts of war become recoded as something else? What will be the political consequences of such a recoding?

These are but some of the questions that continue to motivate my project on assassination and targeted killing...

Many thanks to my colleague Martin Coward for alerting me to this story.