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 26, 2012
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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
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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
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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 25, 2012
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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
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“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 12, 2012
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"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 05, 2012
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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 05, 2012
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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 05, 2012
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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.”
January 03, 2012
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Angel Foster, a medical doctor and Middle East expert, spoke to an audience at the Watson Institute this semester about reproductive health in the Middle East, in a presentation entitled “Building the Case for Expanding Access to Emergency Contraception in the Arab World.”
December 16, 2011
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In today’s Financial Times, Institute Postdoctoral Scholar Cornel Ban looks at comparisons made between popular protests against Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in the late 1980s and against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad today. “The comparison is apt but it requires some major qualifications that may explain the survival of Mr Assad’s regime,” Ban writes. Among the differences: “While Ceausescu’s personal command over the state’s repressive apparatus simply withered away in a matter of days, after nine months of bloodshed Mr. Assad’s army and police were more likely to take their orders and click their heels than to break ranks.”
December 16, 2011
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December 15, 2011
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The Watson Institute announces fellowship opportunities for undergraduate research and community service overseas during the summer of 2012: the AT&T New Media Fellowships, Jack Ringer Summer in Southeast Asia Fellowship, and Marla Ruzicka International Public Service Fellowship.
December 14, 2011
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Domingo Cavallo, a former minister of economy and minister of foreign affairs in Argentina, spoke to 40 university students from across Latin America this semester when they visited Brown University as part of the Botín Scholars program. The Botín Scholars were part of a multi-week program seeking to support a network of university students from the region who are committed to public service and reform of civic organizations. The program is led by Fundación Marcelino Botín in association with the Watson Institute and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown. After their week of study on campus, the Botín Scholars traveled to Europe, where they spent several weeks engaging in sessions with academics and policymakers.
December 14, 2011
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Reflecting an increasingly common practice, activists from the Egyptian democracy movement at one point sent a letter of solidarity to Occupy Wall Street that began: “To all those in the United States currently occupying parks, squares and other spaces, your comrades in Cairo are watching you in solidarity. Having received so much advice from you about transitioning to democracy, we thought it’s our turn to pass on some advice.” Institute Professor Michael Kennedy highlights these and other peer-to-peer connections among activists across the globe in an essay on the Social Science Research Council’s “Possible Futures” blog. In another act of solidarity, flowing in the opposite direction: “On December 1, 2011, twenty-four people joined together in a small Pennsylvania town to show their solidarity with the protesters of Tahrir by targeting a company that makes tear gas used in the suppression of crowds in Tahrir Square.”
December 12, 2011
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“Do we still need area studies in a globalized world?” asks Richard Snyder, director of Brown's Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Posing this provocative question to open the pages of CLACS’ new annual report for 2010-2011, he goes on to argue that both place-based and global perspectives are needed to advance understanding and address today’s pressing social, economic, and political issues. “Globalization creates a dual demand for knowledge that is broad and deep, alert to cross-regional patterns and commonalities yet also carefully attuned to contextual specificities,” he says. To meet the challenge, CLACS is setting a new Globalized Area Studies agenda at Brown, together with its sister area studies programs and the Watson Institute.
December 12, 2011
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Institute Professor (Research) James Der Derian has been contributing his research on sustainable diplomacy, quantum diplomacy, and the media's influence on diplomacy to recent dialogues with policymakers and academics in European capitals. Meeting last month with Armenian Foreign Affairs Minister Edward Nalbandian in Yerevan, for instance, he emphasized the important balance between open borders and state sovereignty. Der Derian, co-editor of Sustainable Diplomacies: Studies in Diplomacy and International Relations (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), met with the minister as part of a visit that included a lecture on “Diplomacy and Global Media” at the ministry’s school of diplomacy.
December 11, 2011
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A change in economic model is necessary if China is to continue sustaining its economic growth. That was the message delivered by Hong Yinxing, Chancellor of Nanjing University, who spoke at the Watson Institute on Tuesday. His talk was part of Brown's Year of China program for 2011-12.
December 09, 2011
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Jalal Alamgir PhD’00 is being remembered at Brown and the Watson Institute for his fine scholarship, sentiment, and purpose, following his accidental death earlier this month. He had been a doctoral student in political science who got his Brown PhD in 2000, a visiting scholar at Watson, and an associate editor on the International Studies Review published here at the time. When he died, he was a professor at UMass-Boston.
December 08, 2011
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Li Xiguang, dean of the Tsinghua University International Center for Communication, presented the city of Chongqing as a model and “message of hope” for the rest of China in a lecture last month at the Watson Institute. Speaking in a presentation titled, "From American Dream to Chongqing Dream: The Making of Soft Power in China,” Li said the major manufacturing city in southwest China serves as a shining example of Chinese development.
December 05, 2011
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