Three Books on the Rise of China | Foreign Affairs

Get your China fix in this review of three new books by Edward Luttwak, Steve Chan, and David Shambaugh by Andrew J. Nathan in the March/April 2013 issues of Foreign Affairs.

Of the three, the latter one, China Goes Global: The Partial Power posits Shambaugh’s intriguing argument that although China may be a seen to be a global power with unequalled power–it hasn’t arrived yet.

Shambaugh’s masterful survey of China’s presence on the world scene shows that in every field—diplomatic, economic, military, and cultural—Beijing’s influence, although growing, remains limited. China has global economic interests without dominating any market; it has a large military without being able to project force very far beyond its borders; its sizable propaganda apparatus promotes cultural products and ideological values that few admire.

via Three Books on the Rise of China | Foreign Affairs.

What the Experts Got Right (and Wrong) on the Arab Spring

What social scientists hit (and missed) on the Arab Spring from Lisa Anderson, president of the American University of Cairo:

From the perspective of state formation and regime change, four postulates of conventional wisdom seem to have been confirmed in these events—and four features of this political change were, in some part, unexpected.

via Arab Spring Awakening – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Walt, Sullivan and Dorff on Bad Academic Writing

The Professor wrestles with the Journalist on the question of poor writing.  This issue is not just for those two professions but clearly diplomats–as well as international affairs professionals need to develop writing skills.

The problem is that this narrative form is rarely the best way to make a convincing case. Once you know what your argument is, really effective writing involves sitting down and thinking hard about the best way to present that argument to the reader. The most important part of that process is figuring out the overall structure of the argument — what points need to be developed first, and then what follows naturally or logically from them, and so on. An ideal piece of social science writing should have a built-in sense of logical or structural inevitability so that the reader moves along the argument and supporting evidence as effortlessly as possible.

Achieving this quality requires empathy. You have to be able to step outside your own understanding of the problem at hand and ask how your words are going to affect the thinking of someone who doesnt already know what you know and may even be inclined to disagree with you at first. Indeed, persuasive writing doesnt just convince the already-converted, a really well-crafted and well-supported argument will overcome a skeptics initial resistance.

via Why is Academic Writing So Bad? | Stephen M. Walt.

This week Patricia Dorff, long-time expert editor at Foreign Affairs will address this very subject at BYU. Hopefully she will make a profound impression on our IR majors. Also, Walt’s recommended reading to improve our persuasive prose would center on the following two books, which I strongly endorse:

1. Strunk and White, The Elements of Style
2. Anthony Weston, A Rulebook for Arguments

And from ForeignPolicy.com’s own writer guidelines, consider these gems:

• Avoid the obvious. We receive dozens of pieces with titles such as “NATO at the Crossroads” and “The Future of Trans-Atlantic Relations.” We publish almost none of them.
• Connect the dots. FP focuses on why what happens “there” matters “here” — and vice versa. That’s why we rarely run articles on single countries. So unless your piece on Nagorno-Karabakh is going to be relevant or worth reading by someone in, say, Antananarivo, don’t bother sending it.
• Don’t send us anything that refers to “our” interests “abroad.” Unless, that is, you’re the president, the secretary of state, or some other government official. FP has readers in more than 90 countries and seven foreign editions, so articles that assume a strictly American audience are probably not for us.
• Steer clear of wonky, technical language. FP believes in making big ideas accessible to the widest possible audience.

And the best one of all for all who have read undergraduate international relations papers for business or pleasure:

• Don’t send us any article or proposal that begins with “Since the end of the Cold War…” or “In the wake of September 11…” Really. Please don’t.

U.N. invokes diplomatic immunity on Haiti cholera epidemic | Turtle Bay

How much “moral authority” does the UN keep when it must be concerned about legal exposure?  This question will grow in other areas as the UN addresses global problems–and occasionally becomes entwined in questions of liability.

 

A U.S. cholera expert at Tufts Univeristy, Daniele Lantagne, who was a member of the U.N. panel, told the BBC last October that further scientific evidence pointed more conclusively towards the Nepalese peacekeepers. She said it is “most likely” that they were the source of the outbreak.

Jonathan Katz, a former Associated Press reporter who covered the cholera outbreak, said the U.N. has “spent the last year and change saying” they can’t talk about the cholera epidemic because the claims case was pending. But now, he said, the U.N. maintains that it won’t even consider the claim.

Katz, who authored the recent book on the Haiti relief effort, The Big Truck that Went By, said U.N.’s refusal to confront responsibility reflects a deeper concern that establishing precedent could open the door to a slew of lawsuits against the United Nations around the world.

via U.N. invokes diplomatic immunity on Haiti cholera epidemic | Turtle Bay.

‘Noncognitive’ Measures: The Next Frontier in College Admissions – Students – The Chronicle of Higher Education

How do you measure leadership and other intangibles?  Emotional intelligence is one conceptual tack, but college admissions are now trying to integrate more fully the concept into the admissions process even more folly.

This is not unlike the considerable research and effort companies put into “getting the right person on the bus.” It is also an important part of leadership.

Although noncognitive assessments are supposed to do the same, there’s no consensus on how best to get at students’ intangible qualities. With no gold standard, researchers are dabbling in an array of approaches. The College Board has tested a standardized way to measure 12 qualities, such as artistic and cultural appreciation, and integrity. The Educational Testing Service has created the Personal Potential Index, an online system allowing evaluators to rate applicants in six categories, including communication skills and teamwork. A means of standardizing letters of recommendation, the index has caught on at some graduate schools and may have a future in undergraduate admissions.

For now, most noncognitive assessments are homegrown experiments, exciting yet challenging. Just ask Noah Buckley, director of admissions at Oregon State University.

In 2004 the university added to its application the Insight Résumé, six short-answer questions based on the research of William E. Sedlacek, a professor emeritus of education at the University of Maryland at College Park and pioneer of noncognitive assessment. One prompt asks applicants to describe how they overcame a challenge; another, to explain how they’ve developed knowledge in a given field.

via ‘Noncognitive’ Measures: The Next Frontier in College Admissions – Students – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Diplomacy Expert to Lead Amherst College – The Chronicle of Higher Education

From the study of diplomacy to the leadership of a top liberal arts college–Peter Uvin puts his skills to work:

When he was growing up in Belgium, “my first dream was to become a diplomat,” Mr. Uvin said in a phone interview. “I wanted to go across the world and end wars and promote justice.

“That was before I knew that this is not necessarily what diplomats do.”

He holds a bachelor’s degree in diplomatic science and a master’s degree in political science from Ghent University. At 22 he went to Geneva to earn a doctorate in political science at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies.

He came to the United States 20 years ago and worked most recently at Tufts University, for 12 years. For the past six, he was the academic dean at Tufts’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. As a professor of international humanitarian studies, he was the founding director of the Institute for Human Security. His academic specialization has been development, conflict, and human rights in the Great Lakes region of Africa. The African Studies Association honored his Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda as the most outstanding book of 1999.

via Expert in Diplomacy to Take On Task of Being a College’s First Provost – People – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

British Exit From the European Union Is Not Widely Embraced – NYTimes.com

Not so fast.  Maybe a Brexit isn’t such a good idea:

Britain, simply put, is already having enough trouble competing in the regional and global economy without making things more difficult by risking its open access to trade with the Continent, to which 58 percent of the country’s exports now go.A British withdrawal from the European Union “would be a big problem for us,” said Mark Blinston, commercial director at BM. The company depends on the bloc for a third of its sales, which reached £22 million, or $34 million, last year.

via British Exit From the European Union Is Not Widely Embraced – NYTimes.com.

Mosh Pits Teach Us About the Physics of Collective Behavior – Lindsay Abrams – The Atlantic

Ok, so moshing is explained as people acting as a gas. Implication for negotiations–let alone all the hygiene jokes.

Look familiar? Moshers, as they “move randomly, colliding with one another in an undirected fashion,” seem a lot like gas particles, the researchers note. Or, as Silverberg explained to me: “It turns out that the statistical description we use for gasses matches the behavior of people in mosh pits. In other words, people bounce around like the molecules in a gas.” And they can be understood using the same basic principles we use to study those molecules.

via Mosh Pits Teach Us About the Physics of Collective Behavior – Lindsay Abrams – The Atlantic.

Booklist | Andrew Preston explores religion’s influence in U.S. foreign policy

Highlights from an NPR interview with Andrew Preston, today’s Book of the Semester speaker at BYU’s Kennedy Center for International Studies:

On religion providing some of the core ideas for the founders of the United States“Even people like Thomas Jefferson or George Washington, who werent very religious … saw religion as the source of conscious morality, and therefore you had to protect religion almost at all costs. And Thomas Jefferson … who certainly didnt have any faith in the divinity of Christ, even he believed that you had to protect individual conscience and therefore you had to protect religion. But in order to protect that, and to prevent ecclesiastical tyranny, you had to separate church and state — and thats where these early ideas emerged.”

On the separation of church and state“The First Amendment has the free exercise clause and the establishment clause, and thats pretty much it. And how that was interpreted for the first 150 years was that religion had a role in public life, religion had a role in politics. It just meant that the government couldnt regulate religion; it couldnt set up a national church, and it couldnt interfere with the way people worshipped. Essentially what it did was make Protestantism the unofficial religion. That only changed after World War II, when our nation became more religiously pluralistic and other groups like Catholics and Jews started challenging the Protestant domination. The Supreme Court decided to make things more simple for a modern era by hardening what Jefferson called the wall of separation between church and state. The best thing to do was to try and remove religion from public life as best as people could.”

On FDR and foreign policy“FDR by 1937 wanted the United States to play a more active role in world affairs and a much more active role in resisting Nazis – maybe not to go to war, but certainly to take a more active role in resisting Nazism. And he constantly evoked both the sword of the spirit and the shield of faith in overtly religious language – speaking of religion by name and quoting from the Bible, and especially pointing to the threat the Nazis posed to all religions. And he used the sword of the spirit to call for a robust American foreign policy. But he also used the shield of faith to couch it in terms that were very much about implementing world peace and spreading democracy.”

On American exceptionalism“To most people it means that America is exceptional in that its not only different, but its better. And often its better because of those differences. And America is a unique force of good in the world, a unique force for virtue. And exceptionalism usually applies to people who believe that America should spread this virtue or should share it in the rest of the rest of the world, and often that results in conflict and/or war.”

via The Religious Language In U.S. Foreign Policy : NPR.

 

 

And now for a world government – FT.com

Gideon Rachman keep his Red State friends up at night:

So could the European model go global? There are three reasons for thinking that it might.

First, it is increasingly clear that the most difficult issues facing national governments are international in nature: there is global warming, a global financial crisis and a “global war on terror”.

Second, it could be done. The transport and communications revolutions have shrunk the world so that, as Geoffrey Blainey, an eminent Australian historian, has written: “For the first time in human history, world government of some sort is now possible.” Mr Blainey foresees an attempt to form a world government at some point in the next two centuries, which is an unusually long time horizon for the average newspaper column.

But – the third point – a change in the political atmosphere suggests that “global governance” could come much sooner than that. The financial crisis and climate change are pushing national governments towards global solutions, even in countries such as China and the US that are traditionally fierce guardians of national sovereignty.

via And now for a world government – FT.com.

Given this was before the broad outlines of the European financial crisis were made known, but there are numerous linkages between the existing system of international organization that we have today and the European model.