Journal of International Studies

Author:  Charles A. Kupchan , Whitney Shepardson Senior Fellow Vol.8 No.3, fall 2013

Chinese citizens don't think their government should have a monopoly on rumors. BY DAVID WERTIME   |   OCTOBER 22, 2013 "Official rumors" is more than just an oxymoron. The phrase -- pronounced  guanyao  -- has become a useful weapon in Chinese Internet users' linguistic guerrilla warfare against government censorship. That battle has intensified during a government-led  crackdown  on "online rumor-mongering," which has sought to rein in China's rambunctious social media, partly through the arrest  or  detention  of several high-profile online opinion leaders. Making things worse for China's Internet users is a new judicial interpretation, issued on Sept. 9 by China's highest legal authorities, stating  that posting defamatory messages read more than 5,000 times or shared more than 500 times can lead to up to three years in jail. In the face of these assaults on their right to speak out, grassroots Chinese are trying to t...

Or why the Pentagon needs to think big and look to the past in order to prepare for the chaotic technowars of the future. BY P.W. SINGER   |   OCTOBER 22, 2013 There's a famous (though, as with all great quotes, perhaps apocryphal) line attributed to Mark Twain that is often quoted as a guide to world leaders: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." With that quote in mind, for the last year I've been taking an informal poll of the joint chiefs who lead the U.S. military, asking each of them what period in history they think provides the most apt parallel to today. Interestingly, every single one of them has answered the same: the early 1990s, when the United States sharply pared back its military spending and   drew down the personnel size of its armed forces   following the collapse of the Soviet Union. These experiences were both painful for the military of that time (side note: most of the joint chiefs were midcareer officers at that...

A new report details the civilian costs of U.S. drone strikes -- and failures to compensate the families of victims.  BY LETTA TAYLER   |   OCTOBER 22, 2013 On a sultry evening in August 2012, five men gathered under a cluster of date palms near the local mosque in Khashamir, a village of stone and mud houses in southeastern Yemen. Two of the men were locals and well known in their community. The other three were strangers. Moments later, U.S. drones tore across the sky and launched four Hellfire missiles at the men. The first three missiles killed four of the men instantly, blasting their body parts across the grounds of the mosque. The final strike took out the fifth man as he tried to crawl to safety. Yemen's Defense Ministry described the three strangers as members of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), a group that the United States calls al Qaeda's most active branch. The men were killed, ministry officials said, while "meeting their fellows....

In Syria's little town that could, the death and resurrection of the witty, profane campaign to show the world the tragedy of civil war. BY AMAL HANANO   KAFRANBEL, Syria — The Syrian revolution's heart -- not yet ravished by the regime or Islamist extremists -- beats on in the northern town of Kafranbel, where a group of dedicated activists has captured the world's attention through  witty posters and banners  that reflect the state of the revolt since spring 2011. And even as the Syrian narrative has increasingly focused on the extremists or an international plan to dismantle the Assad regime's chemical stockpiles, the artists of Kafranbel have been engaged in their own struggle -- to win back the support of residents of their own town. The 40-year-old Raed Faris and his partner, 33-year-old Ahmad Jalal, are the creative duo behind the banners. Faris -- a tall man with a booming laugh -- writes the banners, while Jalal, quiet and shy, draws the cartoons...