“Our government is treating the suffering of the Iranian people as a backdrop for our own entertainment, as if it’s just another piece of content to be swiped through …But we lose our humanity when we are thrilled by the destructive power of our military.” www.archchicago.org/en/statement...

The aspect of this war that reminds me most of operations in Iraq is the part where we're conducting operations in Iraq. 👀 www.wsj.com/world/middle...

How Congress politicians in India are discussing the boat strike (the guy she's citing is of India's most decorated GOFOs):

fwiw here's the sourcing I saw at 1am about the US sinking of an unarmed and knowingly unarmed Iranian Navy ship x.com/KanwalSibal/...

Excited to be co-organizing the Multi-Method Conflict Consortium at Duke May 15-16 with @meganastewart.bsky.social & @dotanhaim.bsky.social! Advanced PhD candidates and postdocs are invited to apply for our funded Junior Fellowship, deadline March 10: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Thinking a lot about this quote from Phil Klay's Missionaries this week.

Kind of a behavioral law: if you have nine explanations for doing something, you actually don’t have one.

"There is anxiety among senior leaders that fighting will extend for weeks, stressing limited U.S. air defense stockpiles. 'There is concern about this lasting more than a few days. I don’t think people have fully absorbed what that has done with stockpiles.'" www.washingtonpost.com/national-sec...

At all three places where I taught, veterans and military students are admired for their service, their ability to get their academic work done quickly and extremely well, and for often balancing family and school. Not *once* have I ever heard a faculty member disparage a military student.

Follow Karim and @carnegiemec.bsky.social generally for this.

In the past, sometimes presidents have said it’s just a military operation or limited airstrikes to skirt Congress. Trump has unilaterally launched major combat operations, declaring war with the goal of regime change. A major violation of the U.S. Constitution, also illegal under international law

Do it now. Yes, you can leave a message. Yes, call the DC offices. Script here again.

This war would be strategically dumb and morally wrong even if it were “free.” It is not going to be “free,” for Americans or Iranians.

This is flying below the radar, likely because the US has not fought a high-end conventional adversary in decades. Even the most expensive military in the world can actually get to the bottom of the stockpile.

Read this whole thread

The notion that this is a war to "defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats" from Iran is simply fantastical. This is a straight-up preventive war a la Iraq 2003. www.cnn.com/2026/02/28/u...

I overlapped with three active duty officers in grad school. All were good people. I learned a lot from each, and I think they became better, more thoughtful leaders for their time at MIT. 1/2

NBC ran a piece where Mary Carrillo went to Norway to find out why they're so good at the Winter Olympics and i was yelling BECAUSE IT'S COLD THERE then she went to a little tiny ski jump for kids and was like "it's free, equipment is provided, & they don't emphasize results" and i was like. oh!

”What turns people into radical jihadist clerics? A new book suggests thwarted career ambitions. A subset of Muslim clerics who advocate for jihad started out as mainstream clerics looking for state-sponsored jobs…only to become unemployed, disenchanted, and radicalized” news.mit.edu/2017/why-som...

"As a member of the press, I filmed the church protest a few weeks ago and now I'm being arrested for that," Indipendent journalist Georgia Fort said. "It's hard to understand how we have a Constitution, Constitutional rights, when we can just be arrested for being a member of the press."

I wrote something... Hope it’s helpful ☮️ I’ve studied Nonviolent protection movements in war zones for 2 decades. Here’s what I’m seeing in the U.S. theconversation.com/anti-ice-pro...

Happy to announce the 1st ever @isanet.bsky.social conference in South Asia in August 2026. Hosted in Colombo, Sri Lanka, we welcome proposals from scholars based in and/or studying South Asian politics & international relations, but also broader global themes ofc www.isanet.org/Conferences/...

Time is a flat circle, episode 134: Warren Zevon ad-libbed Bibi Netanyahu's name into a live performance of Mohammed’s Radio shortly after he was first elected PM ... 30 years ago. archive.org/details/wz19...

From November 2025 - Estimating the Impact of Drone Strikes on Civilians Using Call Detail Records - https://cup.org/4qy0az4 - Paolo Bertolotti, @aidanmilliff.com, Fotini Christia & Ali Jadbabaie #OpenAccess

Exciting new paper on analysis of interviews at scale! As I've argued elsewhere (APSR, 2024), I think it's important to put humans back in the loop as an additional step *after* the LLM, but this method could easily be extended to do that. academic.oup.com/ej/advance-a...

I wonder if it’s related to the McKinley/expanding territory fandom www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

I feel like I haven’t even been properly lied to about the purposes of this war

Submit your papers *by 1/7* for SoWEPS-10 at FSU. www.soweps.org/call-for-pap... SoWEPS is a great chance for advanced grad students and junior faculty to get feedback on developed projects. We'd love to see you in Tallahassee this March!

“America’s openness to the world’s most ambitious people — and its unique ability to absorb and make use of human talent — has perhaps been its most potent form of soft power. Why try to defeat the world’s richest country when you might have the chance to join it and reap its ample rewards?”

I went to Texas to write about the sudden end of one of America's most successful experiments: the six decades of welcoming India's most educated and ambitious citizens. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/29/o...

Not planning to do an overall year wrap up but do want to share some work on US strikes in Somalia over the year. By our tracking (not yet updated for holiday strikes), it is the peak of the campaign and may surpass the peak of strikes in Pakistan. 1/7 www.newamerica.org/future-secur...

“NCAR has played a greater role in advancing weather prediction & atmospheric modeling than perhaps any other single entity in the world,” says @weatherwest.bsky.social Dismantling NCAR would be “like taking a sledgehammer to the keystone holding up our scientific understanding of the planet.” KH

Friends: University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment is hiring...and definitely looking for social scientists. Apply!

Just received a rejection on a paper that was under review for 8 months. The rejection part is totally fair. Waiting 11% of the tenure clock for a first decision on a paper, on the other hand....

Last class of the semester so grad students get to take it easy with questions like: - What does ethical research (not) look like? - What is professional responsibility? - What is the nature of goodness?

🚨 New in @bjpols.bsky.social : “Estimating the Impact of Drone Strikes on Civilians Using Call Detail Records.” By Bertolotti, Milliff, Christia & Jadbabaie. We use 12 billion call records from Yemen to measure the civilian consequences of drone warfare. 1/6

NEW - Estimating the Impact of Drone Strikes on Civilians Using Call Detail Records - https://cup.org/4qy0az4 - Paolo Bertolotti, @aidanmilliff.com, Fotini Christia & Ali Jadbabaie #OpenAccess

The recording industry in Kenya is legit fascinating. There was a period of time in maybe the 70s when labels were popping up at the *county* level, recording folk songs on 45s for hyper-local distribution.

Southside Weekly holding strong as Chicago's best reported local paper (with the Guardian in ironic second place).

Despite the grim topic, this is a very good paper: monuments that signal white supremacy can substitute performative violence and thus reduce it. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Very short summary of this paper:

Very excited that my paper with @katakeith.bsky.social is now out in @polanalysis.bsky.social. We investigate whether LLMs actually follow the instructions/definitions provided in codebooks, propose some diagnostics, and release a new evaluation dataset. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

It's important to remember the 🐺 Wolf Number 🐺 In 2021 @today.yougov.com found that 12% of Americans said they'd beat a wolf in an unarmed fight ⁉️ When you see a survey response split 85/15, remember: 12% of people will say literally anything on a survey. today.yougov.com/society/arti...

Modest #APSA2025 proposal: Move all panels, receptions, meetings, etc. to Stanley Park. Just describe the tree you are meeting under, and count on everyone to find you.

🤔 (I really don't think India is interested in the opportunity to be a treaty ally with the US if they have to drop historic partners who aren't currently imposing tariffs on their exports to do so)

So far during the second Trump administration, this puts the US military at: —1,000+ air strikes in Yemen (in March-April) —65+ air strikes in Somalia —5 air strikes and 2 JSOC ground raids in Syria —1 night of B-2 strikes on 3 sites in Iran —1 air strike in Iraq —1 air strike in the Caribbean

Syllabus plug! Here's what I assign on how to give feedback (of which peer reviews are a special type, imo)

A veteran US Navy SEAL reflects on Gaza dbarkhuff.substack.com/p/i-should-b...