March 21, 2012
Curriculum writers Andrew Blackadar and Sarah Massey, and videographer Tanya Waldburger, of the Institute-based Choices Program, received the Franklin Buchanan Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. The prize was awarded for their curriculum unit on The United States in Afghanistan, published in September 2011.
March 20, 2012
Succession of power in North Korea captured the world's attention recently, with some speculating that there would be a violent power struggle and the late President Kim Jong-Il's appointed successor, his son Kim Jong-Un, could have difficulty consolidating his rule. US Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel Dee Rosser spoke this month on the North Korean leadership transition as part of the "Future of East Asian Security" lecture series. Dee is a Marine infantry officer and an East Asia Foreign Area Officer. He is fluent in Korean and served at the US Embassy in Seoul from 2004-2005. Dee was also the Operations Officer for the United Nations Command Military Armistice Commission from 2005-2007.
March 14, 2012
Institute Professor Mark Blyth reflects on viral media, austerity policy and the academy in a short interview with the London School of Economics blog.
March 14, 2012
The Nigerian statecraft project cannot be allowed to fail, said Richard A. Joseph, John Evans Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. According to Joseph, the Nigerian state currently faces three key challenges: the promotion of sustainable economic growth and poverty reduction, the strengthening and deepening of democracy, and the advancement of security for its citizens. These challenges are not necessarily relevant only to Nigerian or African concerns, Joseph said. Speaking at the Institute yesterday, Joseph proposed an integrated approach to answering these challenges, under the umbrella of his AfricaPlus project.
March 13, 2012
Human Terrain, a documentary film from the Institute's Global Media Project, was screened this month at the United States Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. The film examines the controversy over a US military strategy to use "culturally aware" soldiers and embedded social scientists in Iraq and Afghanistan.
March 13, 2012
Corruption, the idea of a nation as a geographical expression, undemocratic elections, and colonial legacies are among the challenges facing governments in Africa today, according to experts on statecraft in the continent. Richard A. Joseph, John Evans Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, Nduka Otiono, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Brown Department of Africana Studies, and Okey Ndibe, Allan K. Smith Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Trinity College and Visiting Assistant Professor at the Brown Department of Africana Studies discussed the current challenges to creating a successful state in Africa. Anani Dzidzienyo, Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, moderated the panel at the Watson Institute yesterday.
March 12, 2012
Institute Professor Mark Blyth commented on the waning importance of the "special" US – British relationship. "The policy elites in Britain would like to still believe there is a special relationship between the U.S. and Britain," Blyth observed, speaking in advance of President Obama's Wednesday meeting with British Prime Minister David Cameron. "The American focus has shifted toward Germany and the eurozone and away from the so-called special relationship with Britain."
March 8, 2012
Last Thursday, US Navy Lieutenant Commander Jeff Benson joined Lieutenant
Commander Toshihiro Nishibata of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force to speak at the Watson Institute on the critical US-Japan military partnership in the aftermath of the Tsunami last year.
March 6, 2012 Reuters
Richard Locke comments on the soon-to-be released report that alleges poor working conditions among Apple Inc.'s low-cost suppliers in China.
March 6, 2012
Ashutosh Varshney, professor of Political Science and founding director of the
Institute-based India Initiative, commented on the Indian political landscape in the
New York Times today.
February 28, 2012
The Watson-affiliated Choices Program has published an online lesson for secondary school deliberation of US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The curriculum unit, part of the Choices "Teaching With The News" initiative, is based largely on the work of the Watson-based Costs of War project.
February 27, 2012
Watson Institute Senior Fellow Catherine McArdle Kelleher has co-authored a working paper on missile defense as part of a joint project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The paper provides a basic concept for a cooperative NATO-Russian missile defense system.
February 24, 2012
The survival strategies of incumbent regimes shape the outcome of foreign aid in the Middle East, according to Dr. Anne Mariel Peters, assistant professor at the Wesleyan University Department of Government.
Speaking at at the Middle East Seminar Series workshop titled "What does U.S. aid "buy" in the Middle East?", Dr. Peters discusses how the degree to which aid supports growth of institutions, the nature of the recipient government’s relationship with the donor, and the composition of aid portfolios are all heavily influenced by the type of regime in the recipient country.
February 21, 2012
The India Initiative has been launched at Brown, based at Watson under the leadership of Institute Professor Ashutosh Varshney. The initiative will have two profiles – one research-related and the other dealing with India's public sphere and policy debates. An initial project on urban governance has already begun. Jointly directed by Varshney and Institute Professor Patrick Heller, the project is building collaborative arrangements with two Indian institutions: the Center for Policy Research (Delhi), a leading policy research institute; and Janaagraha (Bangalore), a major urban non-governmental organization. Early work is focused on Mumbai, Delhi, and Bangalore.
February 21, 2012
"In no country in the world is the problem of confronting a revolutionary past more challenging than in China," said Elizabeth J. Perry, Professor of Government at Harvard University and Director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute. "China's stunning economic ascendance has focused renewed attention both inside and outside of China on the legacy of China's revolution."
Perry spoke at the Watson Institute's Joukowsky Forum on February 13 in a talk titled "Anyuan: Mining China's Revolutionary Tradition."
View Full Lecture
February 21, 2012
According to US Army Colonel Randy Lawrence, the US-China military relationship has been "stuck in a cyclical nature of starting and stopping, with no real improvement over the past 25 years." Lawrence is currently a student at the US Naval War College. From 2008 to 2011, he served as the Executive Officer to the US Defense Attaché in China. On February 16, Lawrence gave a talk at the Watson Institute's Joukowsy Forum titled "The Future of U.S.-China Relations: Cooperation or Competition?"
February 15, 2012
The late Anthony Shadid shared an important moment with the Brown community in 2010. As he prepared to give a lecture that day, he received the news of his second Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. His message that evening amounted to a call for diversity and tolerance. With his death this week in Syria, we share a video of his 2010 lecture, an interview at Brown with Radio Open Source, and the audio from a lecture he gave at Watson in 2006, on Iraq, titled “The Inevitability of Unintended Consequences.”
February 9, 2012
The Brown community is remembering with fondness and gratitude Elizabeth (Betty) Garrison, who passed away on Monday. Her involvement with the Watson Institute began with the creation of Brown's Center for Foreign Policy Development in 1981, when she worked to build the center alongside her husband Mark, the CFPD's first director.
February 7, 2012
“What has the recent turn toward subnational analysis in comparative politics contributed to knowledge about democracy?” So asks Institute Professor Richard Snyder in a front-page article in the latest edition of ASPA-CD, the official newsletter of the American Political Science Association’s Comparative Democratization section.
February 7, 2012
“The rhetoric of international drug policy is all about shared responsibility for reducing the flow of drugs,” Mark Kleiman, a professor public policy in the UCLA School of Public Affairs, said at the Watson Institute earlier this month. “Everybody agrees that reducing the flow of drugs from Mexico to the US is an important goal – everybody but me. ... I think it’s a completely insensible goal,” said Kleiman, whose talk was titled “Managing Drug Violence in Mexico.” On April 12-13, the Institute-based Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies will continue exploring these issues with a conference on “Drug Wars in the Americas: Looking Back and Thinking Ahead."