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 6, 2012
Dru C. Gladney is currently banned from entering China. Gladney, a professor of anthropology at Pomona College, says he has been prohibited from entering China ever since he co-authored a book titled Xinjiang: China's Muslim Borderland in 2004, which cast a spotlight on Xinjiang, a restive province in Western China. He spoke recently at the Watson Institute about both the substance and the repercussions of this work.
February 6, 2012
Watson Institute Senior Fellow Catherine McArdle Kelleher was one of only 37 women and three academics in attendance at the 48th Munich Security Conference, held earlier this month in Germany. The conference’s 450 esteemed attendees included US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. As part of the conference, Kelleher attended a breakfast in support of women in international security. Secretary of State Clinton spoke at the breakfast, saying more women should be involved in the international peacekeeping process – and recognizing Kelleher as the first president of Women in International Security.
February 6, 2012
Institute Professor Peter Andreas features prominently this month on Reinventing Peace, the blog of the World Peace Foundation, where he writes about political economies of conflict. Andreas’s writing is based on a memo he prepared for a World Peace Foundation seminar on “New Wars, New Peace,” held in January at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.
February 5, 2012
Institute Professor Michael Kennedy wrote this weekend that digital rights protests in the streets of Poland should be duly noted in the US and other countries wrestling to formulate internet policy. In an op-ed in the Providence Journal on Saturday, he called for common sense rules that protect innovation and creativity as well as intellectual property.
January 26, 2012
Watson Fellow Geri Augusto's senior seminar on Science & Technology Policy in the Global South (PPAI-1701G) held a live web conference last semester with a corresponding class at Tsinghua University's School of Public Policy and Management, taught by Professor Zhou Yang.
January 26, 2012
Last November, following 35 hours of what they call “interactive conflict resolution, the 15 Strait Talk 2011 delegates at Brown presented the culmination of their efforts: the consensus document. Their recommendations included a Framework for Channels of Culture and Communication, including joint history textbooks, high school exchanges, and joint college degrees; an experimental administration zone in Fujian to promote integration; and the development of some form of confederation.
January 26, 2012
In the January/February issue of the Boston Review, Institute Associate Professor Gianpaolo Baiocchi has co-authored an article on Spain’s indignados, described as “a mass movement whose participants come together directly as equal citizens – not as members of interest or identity groups, or through representatives – to debate the merits of policy.”
January 25, 2012
Now online: the latest issue of the Briefings newsletter, featuring updates on the Watson Institute and its research and teaching on world affairs. In it, you can read about: new pilot projects on environmental security, human security, cybersecurity ... undergraduate media fellows filing reports from around the world ... launch of a new India Initiative ... and more.
January 13, 2012
The fourth cohort of AT&T Media Fellows has begun posting videos, radio segments, photos, and essays from the Americas, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East on the Global Conversation. There, you can watch Nicholas Carter ‘11.5’s video of street musicians and dancers in Colombia, listen to Brigitta Greene ’12’s radio reports on fracking, read Tala Worrell ‘14’s moving account of a visit to her grandfather’s childhood home in Egypt, and follow Kaori Ogawa ‘12’s conversation with Chinese immigrants in Paris, as well as Kai Herng Loh ‘14’s exploration of innovation as an engine of China’s future.
January 12, 2012
“In the end Durban might have been a turning point,” J. Timmons Roberts said recently, as he returned from the COP 17 global climate change negotiating session that closed in December in South Africa. Roberts, a Brown professor and director of the University’s Center for Environmental Studies, led the delegation of Brown postdoctoral researchers and graduate and undergraduate students who supported the Least Developed Countries' negotiating bloc. The team has been blogging reports on the negotiations on the Institute-based Global Conversation. As Roberts discussed in a Brown news feature, the talks ended with an agreement to extend the greenhouse gas emissions targets set under the Kyoto Protocol and a pledge to work on a replacement treaty incorporating the United States, China, and India.
January 5, 2012
As 2011 closed, with troop withdrawals from Iraq, and as the new year began, with the Pentagon’s promise of reduced military spending, research from the Institute-based Costs of War project featured strongly in the mix of media commentary. In Foreign Policy’s Middle East Channel, project Co-Director Catherine Lutz questioned "the risk of the ongoing US operations in Iraq, where 16,000 civilians will be stationed, primarily as State Department employees or contractors from 2012 forward. Crucially, the mission in Iraq has come to change – and indeed militarize – the way in which the State Department operates.” On Democracy Now! she expanded on the State Department's new security focus in Iraq, saying, “I think that the basic human needs to recover from injuries and losses of the nine years of war, that’s what we need to be talking about. What is the State Department doing vis-à-vis those issues?” Costs of War research made its way into several year-end Iraq retrospectives. "The real tragedy is that the story of the Iraqi people and the suffering they have gone through is still poorly understood by Americans," Lutz said during Al Jazeera's segment on "Iraq War: Predictions vs. Reality." Read more inside.
January 5, 2012
India’s political conflicts as the world’s largest democracy and one of the fastest growing market economies have been analyzed in recent weeks by the Wall Street Journal India, Forbes India, and the Financial Times – all of which turned to the work of Institute Professor Ashutosh Varshney to address different facets of the situation. Varshney also penned his own account of India's 2011 democratic record in the Indian Express.
January 5, 2012
"There's got to be a way to manage resentment so that people aren't in unregulated revenge mode." Recently on NPR, Brown Middle East Studies Program Director Melani Cammett bluntly assessed conflict swirling around Arab leaders ousted from power or under pressure to leave.
January 3, 2012
Predicting a “combined austerity binge,” with 11 of the Eurozone’s 17 countries poised to slash their budgets in hopes of averting financial crisis, Institute Professor Mark Blyth today professed Europe’s austerity policies “not much of a solution.” In an interview on Bloomberg TV, he said, “We can’t all simultaneously cut our way to growth because someone has to be spending to maintain economic growth.”