Is IT transforming democracy?
22 July 2024
Random legislative amendment generator A two-column headline in an Italian newspaper has reminded me this morning of the hidden transformative powers of ...
The price of ignoring context in problem-solving
15 July 2024
To see what is in front of one\'s nose needs a constant struggle. – George Orwell, In Front of Your Nose: 1945-1950 In the realm of international relations, one of the fundamental assumptions of ‘realism’ is that states act as unitary entities, with a single coherent principal directing the actions of subo...
The hidden layers of consciousness
18 June 2024
We like to speak of the Zeitgeist – ‘the spirit of the times’ – the formulated visions and ideals that a social group holds at any given period. Ideas sweep up people, carrying them befor...
The waning of mind maps
07 June 2024
In order to survive, a hunter-gatherer of yore (or his contemporaries today) needed a mind map with information on game, water, berries, roots, at different times of day and ...
Religious history and big data
27 May 2024
Micawberism: \'The improvident state or habitually optimistic point of view\' (Merriam-Webster definition) Governments have been caught spying on each other. So what else is new? Before making informed decisions, governments weigh the benefits and costs of action. To this end, they gather, b...
Video games for diplomats?
04 May 2024
Diplomacy is an art, where \'art\' can be described as applying rules in a complex, ever-changing, and surprising context. It is an exercise in discernment, understanding what can and cannot be a...
The winding road to understanding soft power
22 April 2024
In my blog entry The Soft Underbelly of \'Soft\' Power – I, I waxed sceptical about Joseph S. Nye’s ‘soft power’. I disliked the intertwining of persuasion and brute power. Persuasion bac...
How does identity impact segregation?
10 April 2024
\'Identity politics is back\', opines a comment to my blog post The Trump Swerve. I admit to having difficulties with the concept of \'identity\'. To put my queasiness into perspective, let ...
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