June 14, 2010
Three student groups shared their experiences with and opinions on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict during a panel discussion at the end of last semester. Students from Puzzle Peace, Brown Students for Israel (BSI), and Brown Students for Justice in Palestine (BSJP) directed the afternoon panel, titled “How Did We Get Here? A Symposium on the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict.”
June 13, 2010
"The Year of India is neither the beginning, nor the end of Brown's relationship with India," Dean of Faculty Rajiv Vohra says in a video capturing the program's events throughout the course of 2009-2010. Historian Romila Thapar received an honorary degree at Brown's commencement ceremony at the end of May, capping a year of major public lectures, cultural events, academic conferences, multimedia, and other explorations of India and its dramatic rise on the world stage. Visit the Year of India website and watch the video here.
June 8, 2010
Graduating international relations honors student Victoria Haddad-Salah ‘10 has received a Fulbright fellowship to continue her honors project in Jordan. At Brown, she has also received the Anthony Riccio Prize in International Relations, awarded each year to a student who “has demonstrated an unquenchable curiosity about another part of the world, a commitment to the rigorous learning of a foreign language, an intrepid pursuit of study abroad, and a pride in her university and her country.”
June 1, 2010
Highlights of the Institute’s spring semester – from research on religion in internationalism, to collaboration on global financial reform, to the start of a new discussion of knowledge flows and their media – are featured in the recent issue of Watson’s Briefings newsletter.
May 28, 2010
The Providence premiere of the documentary Human Terrain is taking place during Brown’s 2010 commencement weekend. The film will be screened on Saturday, May 29, at 4:15pm at the Avon Cinema, 260 Thayer Street, and will benefit the Michael Bhatia '99 Memorial Fund at Brown. Human Terrain breaks open the simmering debate over the US military’s “Human Terrain System” – a program to embed anthropologists and other social scientists with combat troops to increase their understanding of local cultures, civilians, and fighters. The documentary takes a tragic turn when an early collaborator on the film, Michael Bhatia, joins a Human Terrain Team and is killed in 2008 by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan.
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.
May 28, 2010
The following prizes have been awarded for international relations theses:
May 28, 2010
Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen once warned famously that India is at risk of becoming “half California, half Sub-Saharan Africa.” Listen to him expand on this and other ideas on India on Open Source.
May 27, 2010
Institute Professor Catherine Lutz recently recommended steps to address the systematic patterns of sexual exploitation and abuse that have emerged around UN peacekeeping missions. In a May keynote address to a UN conference for its Conduct and Discipline Unit personnel from around the world, Lutz pointed to the need for a heightened cultural awareness and greater enforcement – on and off duty – among other steps to help reduce peacekeepers’ misconduct in the communities they are sent to protect.
May 27, 2010
Thirty-five students will graduate this year with degrees in development studies. The development studies program at Brown is designed to provide undergraduates with a comparative perspective on the long-term social, political, and economic changes that have accompanied industrialization and the growth of the modern state in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and in the historical experience of European countries. Directed by Gianpaolo Baiocchi, the program includes a particular concern with understanding how processes of change impact the distribution of wealth and opportunity both within and between nations. Every student of development studies at Brown is required to write a senior thesis. This year’s prize winners for excellence in thesis writing are:
May 26, 2010
Twenty-three undergraduates will receive degrees this year in area studies concentrations located at the Institute: Latin American studies, Middle East studies, and South Asian studies.
May 21, 2010
Brown alum Paul Wozniak '09 recently blogged on the Global Conversation from China, where he had just spent the weekend at Expo 2010 Shanghai. "Ni hao, I'm Kobe Bryant" may have been one of the high points in a lackluster US showing, he wrote.
May 18, 2010
A long-running dispute between Greece and Macedonia – over claims to cultural heritage as fundamental as the very name “Macedonia” and as monumental as Alexander the Great – is being analyzed in all of its old and new manifestations by Institute Associate Professor Keith Brown and visiting Macedonian Fulbright Scholar Irena Stefoska. The two have recently aired their findings at Columbia University, the University of Chicago, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, and on the Voice of America. In an essay, they show how the argument is now being waged on the internet.
May 17, 2010
“What has happened shapes what can happen,” asserted Lloyd and Susanne Rudolph at the recent conference on “Six Decades of Indian Democracy,” hosted by the Watson Institute as part of the Year of India. In a joint keynote address entitled “Looking Back and Looking Forward: Researching Indian Politics for Almost Six Decades,” the husband-and-wife duo used their own sustained scholarship in India as a lens through which to view the profound changes that have reshaped the country’s political landscape. They also critically reflected on how area studies – the study of the politics of foreign countries – had changed in the United States over the last two decades or so.
May 11, 2010
When Professor Anthony Bogues spoke to the UN General Assembly in late March, he emphasized the continuing relevance of Haiti’s slave-led revolution and its 1805 constitution.
May 9, 2010
The spread of violent videos from Afghanistan and Iraq on the Internet represents a break with past practice, according to a recent Newsweek article, “Carnage.com.” Combat images used to be captured and disseminated by only a handful of professionals. But now, Institute Professor James Der Derian says in the article that “there’s a new order.” And, “unlike the photograph, the moving image creates a feeling that it more accurately depicts what it is representing, whether it does or not."
May 9, 2010
Institute Associate Professor Peter Andreas takes issue with a recent op-ed in the New York Times calling for the US to “regain” control of its border with Mexico. “Such calls to ‘regain’ control of the border suffer from historical amnesia, perpetuating a common myth that it was ever actually under control,” he writes with colleague Edward Alden, of the Council on Foreign Relations. Also pointed out in the rebuttal are increased border patrols and the use of new technology and fencing that make the US border with Mexico “one of the most heavily policed borders in the world.”
May 9, 2010
Brown will confer honorary degrees on Nobel laureate Nelson Mandela and seven other distinguished candidates during its 242nd commencement exercises on Sunday, May 30.
May 8, 2010
"You could hardly have engineered a worse result," Watson Faculty Fellow Mark Blyth told NPR following Thursday’s election in the UK, citing difficulties in forming a new coalition government among the implications. In the runup to the election, Blyth also co-authored an article for Foreign Affairs calling it a referendum on the country’s last 30 years of evolution from a manufacturing economy to a center of global finance. The article “Labour Pains,” concludes that: “Languishing in recession, unable to project force, and unwilling to engage with others, Britain may turn inward and rethink its legacies – institutional and economic, domestic and foreign. The upcoming election is nothing less than a referendum on leaders and policies past. The outcome of that referendum will become the frame for where the United Kingdom will go next.”
April 30, 2010
Development Studies concentration advisor Cornel Ban has been recognized by Brown’s Undergraduate Council of Students with its Outstanding Advisor Award for 2009-2010. He was presented with the award on April 30, “in honor and recognition of your distinguished devotion to undergraduate students and their pursuit of education.”