New Bedford Guide Your Guide to New Bedford and South Coast, MA
Last week I had the chance to sit down and talk with another of UMass Dartmouth’s distinguished political science professors, Professor Avery Plaw. Professor Plaw, as I mentioned last week in my Drone Database article, is one of the founding members of the database and also the university’s coordinator for the Honors Program.
The interview started with him telling me an interesting little anecdote about one of the reasons he chose to come to the area. Apparently Professor Plaw was a huge fan of H.P. Lovecraft, and especially of Herman Melville’s book Moby Dick. I couldn’t help but chuckle a bit as with enthusiasm he told me of how enthralled he was with the fantastic places that previously had only existed in his imagination. Never in my life would I think that New Bedford would be another man’s Middle Earth, truly it made me see things a bit differently. It made me remember back to the first time I came to UMass Dartmouth, or the trips I had taken in the past to marvelous places like Boston or Washington D.C. and how overwhelmed I was visiting those cities for the first time when I was younger. Unlike Professor Plaw, I knew those places truly existed, but seeing them was something else altogether and so in that way I could relate to how he must have felt.
Over the years Professor Plaw has done a lot of research concerning drones and their use, and questioning the ethical and moral decisions involved in using them. One such book examining this is Targeting Terrorists, which he wrote around the same time that the Drone Database was still in its infancy. The book examines exactly what you would expect, looking into the political history and the moral and legal justification of these operations. For someone with a great deal of interest in the topic it sounds like a very interesting read, but if you’re a casual reader and not a political science nerd like myself then I probably wouldn’t recommend it.
“It interests me because there are competing interests and they need to be negotiated,” Professor Plaw said speaking on his interest in the Drone Database, he then went on to say, “I’ve always thought that you can come to practical judgments as to the best policy, even in the light of deeply contested questions.”
On his specific opinion of the usage of drones Professor Plaw said, “I think they are a powerful instrument and states should have them, the US should retain them in its arsenal, and maybe that it should be more judicious about how it uses them.”
In addition to his already published work, Professor Plaw is currently working on a textbook alongside his fellow researchers on the Drone Database project, namely Professor Matthew Fricker and undergraduate researcher Carlos Colon. The new book, in addition to including much of the information gathered through the Drone Database that wasn’t included in the first, he explained to me is, “providing an overview of the debate, whereas the first argued a position.”
All in all it sounds very interesting, and if you’re in the field of political science, or if you have a particularly great interest in the subject matter than these books may be something to look into. Since they’re academic though, and considering the rising costs of textbooks, if you’re interested in them then I’d recommend trying to either rent them or buy them on Amazon. Either way I can’t wait to see where this research will go, but I’m sure it’ll be interesting and cast America’s policy decisions on this issue in an entirely new light.
