IR Program Presents Graduating Class
May 28, 2010
Over 125 Brown seniors will graduate this year with an academic concentration in international relations (IR).
One of the University’s largest concentrations, the IR program is a rigorous and comprehensive one that maximizes student choice with cross-disciplinary training and strong international skills. Its objectives are to foster creative thinking about pressing global problems and equip students with the analytic tools, language expertise, and cross-cultural understanding to guide them in that process.
To this end, the concentration draws on numerous departments including anthropology, economics, environmental studies, history, political science, psychology, religion, and sociology. It also incorporates courses from the humanities and has a 3-year language requirement.
Located within and drawing upon the expertise of the Watson Institute, the IR concentration is organized around a multidisciplinary core and sub-themes of global security, political economy and development, and politics, culture, and identity.
It also offers a quality honors program in which students undertake thesis research on an international topic.
Thirteen students graduated from the International Relations Honors Program this year. To do so, each of them researched, wrote, and presented a graduate-level thesis, in addition to completing with distinction the usual IR course requirements and three years of a foreign language.
IR Assistant Director Claudia Elliott PhD ’99 designed the current program, now in its eighth year, and worked with IR Program Director Peter Andreas, among 25 other faculty members, in advising the students. This year’s honors recipients are listed below along with the title of their theses:
• Sancho Accorsi. “The Weaponization of the Civilian: Network-Centric Warfare, the Human Terrain System, and Postmodernist Critique of the ‘Civilian’”
• Jae Wan Ahn. “From Developmental State to Welfare State: Defining the Political and Economic Transformations and Consequent Social Conflicts in South Korea”
• Chantal Berman. “Between Structure, Policy, and Human Security: Explaining Syrian and Lebanese Policy Responses towards Iraqi Refugees”
• Sasha David. “Closing the Global Gender Gap: Explaining the Rise of Female Executives in Latin America”
• Victoria Haddad-Salah. “Defining the Borders of the Nation: Refugee Policy, Regime Security, and the Formation of National Identity in Jordan”
• Chihiro Ikegami. “Interstate Reconciliation: Memory and Apology in Germany and Japan”
• Nandini Jayakrishna. “A Critical Convergence: Gender Development Theory and the Practice of Women’s Empowerment in the Indian Informal Sector”
• Harrison Kreisberg. “Of Bullets and Ballots: Reforming Radical Islamists through Political Inclusion”
• Andrew Nelson. “The Constitutional Imperative – Establishing Domestic Legal Frameworks as the Foundation of International Law”
• Erika Nyborg-Burch. “Representing ‘Deportable’ Subjects: Constructions of Immigrant Identities in the Discourse on Removal in the United States”
• Amelia Plant. “Rape: A Crime against Humanity – A Case Study of International Norm Formation”
• Alex Rothman. “Japan as a Non-Nuclear State: Capability, Contradictions, and the Nuclear Taboo”
• Claire Vergerio. “The Enforcement Gap: Understanding Persisting Discrimination against French and British Muslims in Employment”