Posner and Morozov write for Foreign Policy magazine

Two contributors to Boston Review have recently published articles in Foreign Policy magazine.

Eric Posner’s December 2008 article for BR, “Destructive technologies require us to re-assess civil liberties,” was a response to David Cole’s “Closing Guantánamo.” Posner argues that we ought to appreciate the Bush administration’s impulse to restrict civil liberties after 9/11. While Cole describes a preventive detention scheme that lurches into operation only after Congress declares war on a particular group, Posner’s alternative is less concerned about executive overreaching. “It is only a matter of time,” Posner writes, “before a general preventive detention system will be added to the criminal justice repertoire.”

Posner begins his recent article for Foreign Policy, “Think Again: International Law,” by stating that Bush did not brush aside international law as casually as his critics claimed. On a more controversial note, he asserts that President Barack Obama’s approach is likely to be surprisingly similar. This is not necessarily a bad thing, Posner suggests. He supplies the example of Kosovo: “The illegal military intervention in Kosovo stopped ethnic cleansing and, for a time, the wars that racked the Balkans.”

Evgeny Morozov, a Belarus-born researcher and blogger, is a frequent contributor to Boston Review. His articles, “Texting Towards Utopia,” “Cyber-Scare,” and most recently, “The Cyber-Attack that Wasn’t,” all address the question of how the Internet transforms global politics. In “Israel lobby: the blog edition,” Morozov writes at the cross-section of two issues: the Internet as a burgeoning political tool and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Several articles on the Israel-Palestine Conflict, including “Peace Out: The decline of Israel’s progressive movement,” by Helena Cobban and “The Best Hope–Still?” by Jeremy Pressman, are included in the same July/August 2009 issue.

Morozov responds to the surprising dearth of research “into the effectiveness of Israel’s decentralized new media advocacy efforts and the impact they have had on the international opinion.” Individual bloggers have emerged as “important opinion makers,” working to shape their country’s foreign policy. This argument was echoed in the article, “Reflections on Information Technology and Democracy,” by BR’s co-editor Joshua Cohen. Information Technology and the blogging scene are evolving in tandem with diplomacy and democracy. Cohen asks and responds to the pivotal question: How does the Internet shape this informal process of discussion–public discourse?