Patrick A. Mello

International Politics, Security, and Methods

VU Amsterdam Research Portal

  • Perspectives on Politics

    Book Review of All Necessary Measures: The UN and Humanitarian Intervention

    The new issue of Perspectives on Politics (14: 1) contains my book review of All Necessary Measures: The United Nations and Humanitarian Intervention by Carrie Booth Walling (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).

    From the review: “The challenges of “humanitarian intervention” have been of pressing concern to policymakers and academics ever since the end of the bipolar confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. This became most evident when the international community failed to respond decisively to the genocide in Rwanda, despite having forces on the ground, as well as when it did not stop the atrocities of the Bosnian to its fate and when “safe havens” in Srebrenica were attacked and overrun by Serbian forces. In other conflicts, the UN Security Council did authorize a military response using “all necessary means,” as in Somalia, Sierra Leone, and, as the most recent humanitarian rights violations continues to haunt the international community, most visibly in the deadlock of the Security Council in the face of the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria.

    In All Necessary Measures, Carrie Booth Walling explores the social construction and evolution of humanitarian intervention discourse and subsequent action at the likelihood of force being used in defense of human rights by constructing narratives about the character and cause of a conflict.“ [Read Further]

  • Dissertation Award 2015 – German Political Science Association

    Democratic Participation in Armed Conflict Receives Best Dissertation Award 2015 from the German Political Science Association (DVPW)

    At its general conference in Duisburg-Essen, The German Political Science Association (Deutsche Vereinigung für Politische Wissenschaft) granted Democratic Participation in Armed Conflict: Military Involvement in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) the Best Dissertation Award for 2015. The prize is endowed with 1,000 EUR, provided by the Politische Vierteljahresschrift (PVS). The Laudation is published in PVS Issue 4/2015. [Book Information].

    The conference opening and the Laudation, held by Stefan Marschall on behalf of the award committee (together with Matthias Bohlender and Klaus Schlichte), can be watched here (minute 138 onward). See also a Press Release from TU Dresden.

  • ECPR Summer School in Methods and Techniques 2015

    Qualitative Comparative Analysis and Fuzzy Sets

    Patrick A. Mello (Week 1), Carsten Q. Schneider (Week 2), Adrian Dusa, and Nena Oana (Teaching Assistants)

    Methods Course taught for the European Consortium for Political Research at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, 23 July – 8 August 2015

    Course Outline: “This course introduces participants to set-theoretic methods and their application in the social sciences with a focus on Qualitative Comparative Analysis. The introductory course is complemented by an advanced course that is taught at the ECPR Winter School in Bamberg. The course starts out by familiarizing students with the basic concepts of the underlying methodological perspective, among them the central notions of necessity and sufficiency, formal logic and Boolean algebra. From there, we move to the logic and analysis of truth tables and discuss the most important problems that emerge when this analytical tool is used for exploring social science data. Right from the beginning, students will be exposed to performing set-theoretic analyses with the relevant R software packages. When discussing set-theoretic methods, in-class debates will engage on broad, general comparative social research issues, such as case selection principles, concept formation, questions of data aggregation and the treatment of causally relevant notions of time. Examples are drawn from published applications in the social sciences. Participants are encouraged to bring their own raw data for in-class exercises and assignments, if available” [Read Further]

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