Charli Carpenter
Biographic Data
| ID | 4379912 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Charli Carpenter |
| GIVEN NAMES | Charli |
| FAMILY NAME | Carpenter |
| SIGNATURE | CARPENTER C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Massachusetts Amherst |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5028-6006 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 169 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 16 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
The Ethics of Human Rights Advocacy in the Ukraine War
Amid Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine, the human rights community has understandably focused its attention on human rights violations committed by the Russian state. This has, however, left the human rights implications of the martial law Ukraine has put in place for civilians largely unexamined. This essay highlights the ways Ukraine's travel restriction on “battle-aged” civilian men has harmed three overlapping groups—civilian men, the fami…
Breaking Bad? How Survey Experiments Prime Americans for War Crimes
What affects Americans’ sensitivity to international laws and norms on the use of force? A wealth of recent IR literature tackles this question through experimental surveys using fictional scenarios and treatments to explore precisely when Americans would approve of government policies that would violate the laws of war. We test whether such survey experiments may themselves be affecting public sensitivity to these norms—or even Americans’ unders…
Does the Noncombatant Immunity Norm Have Stopping Power? A Debate
Our 2015 survey experiment—reported in the 2017 International Security article “Revisiting Hiroshima in Iran”—asked a representative sample of Americans to choose between continuing a ground invasion of Iran that would kill an estimated 20,000 U.S. soldiers or launching a nuclear attack on an Iranian city that would kill an estimated 100,000 civilians.1 Fifty-six percent of the respondents preferred the nuclear strike. When a different set of sub…
The Stopping Power of Norms
In “Hiroshima in Iran: What Americans Really Think about Using Nuclear Weapons and Killing Noncombatants,” a pathbreaking survey of attitudes toward the laws of war published in the summer 2017 issue of International Security, Scott Sagan and Benjamin Valentino found that Americans are relatively insensitive to the targeting of civilian populations and to international norms and taboos against the use of nuclear weapons. We replicated a key quest…
Questions of life and death
Public opinion polls on national security issues are often seen as indicators of the strength of international human rights norms. By contrast, we hypothesise that the very act of answering poll questions can weaken citizens’ understandings of important international human rights laws and norms in the very moment they are being measured. We ground this discussion empirically by analysing a new dataset of post-9/11 survey questions on two US natio…
Norms for the Earth
Climate change poses a grave security threat to national borders, habitats, and vulnerable people. Plagued by asymmetries in both states' vulnerability to climate impacts and their capacity to mitigate them, climate change presents states with a “wicked” problem that poses significant obstacles to interest-based solutions. Yet, most global climate change policy involves rationales and mechanisms grounded in an interest-based logic of consequences…
Does Science Fiction Affect Political Fact? Yes and No
Some scholars suggest popular culture shapes public attitudes about foreign policy in ways that can affect real-world political outcomes, but relatively few studies test this proposition. We examine whether—and more importantly how—popular culture affects public opinion on foreign policy through a survey experiment on American attitudes toward fully autonomous weapons. We queried respondents about their consumption of popular culture—including a …
The Future of Global Security Studies
If the field of Global Security Studies is approaching a rather messy and yet stratified crossroads, the Journal of Global Security Studies (JoGSS) aims to direct traffic flows at that intersection toward more meaningful destinations. Doing so effectively will mean thinking broadly about the field and our conduct of inquiry, even as we establish new ways of bounding our topic and mobilizing a community of scholars to follow suit. In reflecting on…
Rethinking the Political / -Science- / Fiction Nexus
A burgeoning literature in IR asserts there is a relationship between pop cultural artifacts and global policy processes, but this relationship is rarely explored using observational data. To fill this gap, I provide an evidence-based exploration of the relationship between science-fiction narratives and global public policy in an important emerging political arena: norm-building efforts around the prohibition of fully autonomous weapons. Drawing…
Lost Causes
Why do some issues and threats -- diseases, weapons, human rights abuses, vulnerable populations -- get more global policy attention than others? How do global activist networks decide the particular causes for which they advocate among the many problems in need of solutions? According to Charli Carpenter, the answer lies in the politics of global issue networks themselves. Building on surveys, focus groups, and analyses of issue network websites…
"Lost" Causes
Why do some issues and threats—diseases, weapons, human rights abuses, vulnerable populations—get more global policy attention than others? How do global activist networks decide the particular causes for which they advocate among the many problems in need of solutions? According to Charli Carpenter, the answer lies in the politics of global issue networks themselves. Building on surveys, focus groups, and analyses of issue network websites, Carp…
Explaining the Advocacy Agenda
Through a series of focus groups with human security practitioners, we examined how powerful organizations at the center of advocacy networks select issues for attention. Participants emphasized five sets of factors: entrepreneur attributes, adopter attributes, the broader political context, issue attributes, and intranetwork relations. However, the last two were much more consistently invoked by practitioners in their evaluations of specific can…
You Talk Of Terrible Things So Matter-of-Factly in This Language of Science
How does the everyday politics behind scientific inquiry impact what we come to know about the world? Here I consider this question in the context of my own fieldwork on the human rights response to children born of war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. First, I reflect on how the academy functions to direct researchers' attention and skill sets to certain types of human rights problems in certain ways, inevitably affecting what we can know about our subjec…
International Relations 2.0
The International Relations (IR) profession has not fully taken stock of the way in which user-driven information technologies—including Blogger, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Wikipedia—are reshaping our professional activities, our subject matter, and even the constitutive rules of the discipline itself. In this study, we reflect on the ways in which our own roles and identities as IR scholars have evolved since the advent of “Web 2.0”: the se…
Conclusion and Rejoinder
This piece introduces an ISP Forum on “Mainstreaming Gender into the IR Curriculum.” Our aim is to provide reflections on efforts within the IR discipline to integrate gender into mainstream IR courses. While we offer no specific prescriptions, the essays provide insight into both the value and the pedagogical challenges of this enterprise
Beyond 'Gendercide
The study of gender as a variable in ethnic conflict and genocide has been dominated by feminist approaches emphasising women's human rights. Adam Jones and other authors have recently sought to apply gender to a different context: the sex-selective massacre of adult civilian males. While an important extension of feminist approaches, the new 'gendercide' literature contains certain analytical inconsistencies and substantive limitations. In parti…
Rethinking the Political / -Science- / Fiction Nexus
A burgeoning literature in IR asserts there is a relationship between pop cultural artifacts and global policy processes, but this relationship is rarely explored using observational data. To fill this gap, I provide an evidence-based exploration of the relationship between science-fiction narratives and global public policy in an important emerging political arena: norm-building efforts around the prohibition of fully autonomous weapons. Drawing…
Does Science Fiction Affect Political Fact? Yes and No
Some scholars suggest popular culture shapes public attitudes about foreign policy in ways that can affect real-world political outcomes, but relatively few studies test this proposition. We examine whether—and more importantly how—popular culture affects public opinion on foreign policy through a survey experiment on American attitudes toward fully autonomous weapons. We queried respondents about their consumption of popular culture—including a …
Explaining the Advocacy Agenda
Through a series of focus groups with human security practitioners, we examined how powerful organizations at the center of advocacy networks select issues for attention. Participants emphasized five sets of factors: entrepreneur attributes, adopter attributes, the broader political context, issue attributes, and intranetwork relations. However, the last two were much more consistently invoked by practitioners in their evaluations of specific can…
The Stopping Power of Norms
In “Hiroshima in Iran: What Americans Really Think about Using Nuclear Weapons and Killing Noncombatants,” a pathbreaking survey of attitudes toward the laws of war published in the summer 2017 issue of International Security, Scott Sagan and Benjamin Valentino found that Americans are relatively insensitive to the targeting of civilian populations and to international norms and taboos against the use of nuclear weapons. We replicated a key quest…
You Talk Of Terrible Things So Matter-of-Factly in This Language of Science
How does the everyday politics behind scientific inquiry impact what we come to know about the world? Here I consider this question in the context of my own fieldwork on the human rights response to children born of war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. First, I reflect on how the academy functions to direct researchers' attention and skill sets to certain types of human rights problems in certain ways, inevitably affecting what we can know about our subjec…
Breaking Bad? How Survey Experiments Prime Americans for War Crimes
What affects Americans’ sensitivity to international laws and norms on the use of force? A wealth of recent IR literature tackles this question through experimental surveys using fictional scenarios and treatments to explore precisely when Americans would approve of government policies that would violate the laws of war. We test whether such survey experiments may themselves be affecting public sensitivity to these norms—or even Americans’ unders…
International Relations 2.0
The International Relations (IR) profession has not fully taken stock of the way in which user-driven information technologies—including Blogger, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Wikipedia—are reshaping our professional activities, our subject matter, and even the constitutive rules of the discipline itself. In this study, we reflect on the ways in which our own roles and identities as IR scholars have evolved since the advent of “Web 2.0”: the se…
Norms for the Earth
Climate change poses a grave security threat to national borders, habitats, and vulnerable people. Plagued by asymmetries in both states' vulnerability to climate impacts and their capacity to mitigate them, climate change presents states with a “wicked” problem that poses significant obstacles to interest-based solutions. Yet, most global climate change policy involves rationales and mechanisms grounded in an interest-based logic of consequences…
Beyond 'Gendercide
The study of gender as a variable in ethnic conflict and genocide has been dominated by feminist approaches emphasising women's human rights. Adam Jones and other authors have recently sought to apply gender to a different context: the sex-selective massacre of adult civilian males. While an important extension of feminist approaches, the new 'gendercide' literature contains certain analytical inconsistencies and substantive limitations. In parti…
Does the Noncombatant Immunity Norm Have Stopping Power? A Debate
Our 2015 survey experiment—reported in the 2017 International Security article “Revisiting Hiroshima in Iran”—asked a representative sample of Americans to choose between continuing a ground invasion of Iran that would kill an estimated 20,000 U.S. soldiers or launching a nuclear attack on an Iranian city that would kill an estimated 100,000 civilians.1 Fifty-six percent of the respondents preferred the nuclear strike. When a different set of sub…
Questions of life and death
Public opinion polls on national security issues are often seen as indicators of the strength of international human rights norms. By contrast, we hypothesise that the very act of answering poll questions can weaken citizens’ understandings of important international human rights laws and norms in the very moment they are being measured. We ground this discussion empirically by analysing a new dataset of post-9/11 survey questions on two US natio…
The Future of Global Security Studies
If the field of Global Security Studies is approaching a rather messy and yet stratified crossroads, the Journal of Global Security Studies (JoGSS) aims to direct traffic flows at that intersection toward more meaningful destinations. Doing so effectively will mean thinking broadly about the field and our conduct of inquiry, even as we establish new ways of bounding our topic and mobilizing a community of scholars to follow suit. In reflecting on…
Beyond 'Gendercide
The study of gender as a variable in ethnic conflict and genocide has been dominated by feminist approaches emphasising women's human rights. Adam Jones and other authors have recently sought to apply gender to a different context: the sex-selective massacre of adult civilian males. While an important extension of feminist approaches, the new 'gendercide' literature contains certain analytical inconsistencies and substantive limitations. In parti…
Conclusion and Rejoinder
This piece introduces an ISP Forum on “Mainstreaming Gender into the IR Curriculum.” Our aim is to provide reflections on efforts within the IR discipline to integrate gender into mainstream IR courses. While we offer no specific prescriptions, the essays provide insight into both the value and the pedagogical challenges of this enterprise
International Relations 2.0
The International Relations (IR) profession has not fully taken stock of the way in which user-driven information technologies—including Blogger, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Wikipedia—are reshaping our professional activities, our subject matter, and even the constitutive rules of the discipline itself. In this study, we reflect on the ways in which our own roles and identities as IR scholars have evolved since the advent of “Web 2.0”: the se…
You Talk Of Terrible Things So Matter-of-Factly in This Language of Science
How does the everyday politics behind scientific inquiry impact what we come to know about the world? Here I consider this question in the context of my own fieldwork on the human rights response to children born of war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. First, I reflect on how the academy functions to direct researchers' attention and skill sets to certain types of human rights problems in certain ways, inevitably affecting what we can know about our subjec…
Lost Causes
Why do some issues and threats -- diseases, weapons, human rights abuses, vulnerable populations -- get more global policy attention than others? How do global activist networks decide the particular causes for which they advocate among the many problems in need of solutions? According to Charli Carpenter, the answer lies in the politics of global issue networks themselves. Building on surveys, focus groups, and analyses of issue network websites…
"Lost" Causes
Why do some issues and threats—diseases, weapons, human rights abuses, vulnerable populations—get more global policy attention than others? How do global activist networks decide the particular causes for which they advocate among the many problems in need of solutions? According to Charli Carpenter, the answer lies in the politics of global issue networks themselves. Building on surveys, focus groups, and analyses of issue network websites, Carp…
Explaining the Advocacy Agenda
Through a series of focus groups with human security practitioners, we examined how powerful organizations at the center of advocacy networks select issues for attention. Participants emphasized five sets of factors: entrepreneur attributes, adopter attributes, the broader political context, issue attributes, and intranetwork relations. However, the last two were much more consistently invoked by practitioners in their evaluations of specific can…
The Future of Global Security Studies
If the field of Global Security Studies is approaching a rather messy and yet stratified crossroads, the Journal of Global Security Studies (JoGSS) aims to direct traffic flows at that intersection toward more meaningful destinations. Doing so effectively will mean thinking broadly about the field and our conduct of inquiry, even as we establish new ways of bounding our topic and mobilizing a community of scholars to follow suit. In reflecting on…
Rethinking the Political / -Science- / Fiction Nexus
A burgeoning literature in IR asserts there is a relationship between pop cultural artifacts and global policy processes, but this relationship is rarely explored using observational data. To fill this gap, I provide an evidence-based exploration of the relationship between science-fiction narratives and global public policy in an important emerging political arena: norm-building efforts around the prohibition of fully autonomous weapons. Drawing…
Does Science Fiction Affect Political Fact? Yes and No
Some scholars suggest popular culture shapes public attitudes about foreign policy in ways that can affect real-world political outcomes, but relatively few studies test this proposition. We examine whether—and more importantly how—popular culture affects public opinion on foreign policy through a survey experiment on American attitudes toward fully autonomous weapons. We queried respondents about their consumption of popular culture—including a …
Questions of life and death
Public opinion polls on national security issues are often seen as indicators of the strength of international human rights norms. By contrast, we hypothesise that the very act of answering poll questions can weaken citizens’ understandings of important international human rights laws and norms in the very moment they are being measured. We ground this discussion empirically by analysing a new dataset of post-9/11 survey questions on two US natio…
Norms for the Earth
Climate change poses a grave security threat to national borders, habitats, and vulnerable people. Plagued by asymmetries in both states' vulnerability to climate impacts and their capacity to mitigate them, climate change presents states with a “wicked” problem that poses significant obstacles to interest-based solutions. Yet, most global climate change policy involves rationales and mechanisms grounded in an interest-based logic of consequences…
Does the Noncombatant Immunity Norm Have Stopping Power? A Debate
Our 2015 survey experiment—reported in the 2017 International Security article “Revisiting Hiroshima in Iran”—asked a representative sample of Americans to choose between continuing a ground invasion of Iran that would kill an estimated 20,000 U.S. soldiers or launching a nuclear attack on an Iranian city that would kill an estimated 100,000 civilians.1 Fifty-six percent of the respondents preferred the nuclear strike. When a different set of sub…
The Stopping Power of Norms
In “Hiroshima in Iran: What Americans Really Think about Using Nuclear Weapons and Killing Noncombatants,” a pathbreaking survey of attitudes toward the laws of war published in the summer 2017 issue of International Security, Scott Sagan and Benjamin Valentino found that Americans are relatively insensitive to the targeting of civilian populations and to international norms and taboos against the use of nuclear weapons. We replicated a key quest…
Breaking Bad? How Survey Experiments Prime Americans for War Crimes
What affects Americans’ sensitivity to international laws and norms on the use of force? A wealth of recent IR literature tackles this question through experimental surveys using fictional scenarios and treatments to explore precisely when Americans would approve of government policies that would violate the laws of war. We test whether such survey experiments may themselves be affecting public sensitivity to these norms—or even Americans’ unders…
The Ethics of Human Rights Advocacy in the Ukraine War
Amid Russia's illegal invasion of Ukraine, the human rights community has understandably focused its attention on human rights violations committed by the Russian state. This has, however, left the human rights implications of the martial law Ukraine has put in place for civilians largely unexamined. This essay highlights the ways Ukraine's travel restriction on “battle-aged” civilian men has harmed three overlapping groups—civilian men, the fami…
Political science (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Politics (7 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Global Security and Public Health (6 works) · Gender, Security, and Conflict (4 works) · Human rights (4 works) · International Law and Human Rights (4 works)