In this week's New Yorker, James Surowiecki examines how multi-faceted consumer pressure has created the types of supply chains that lead to tragedies like the factory collapse in Bangladesh last month. Surowiecki's argument is based on research published by Incoming Director Richard M. Locke in his new book, The Promise and Limits of Private Power.
May 17, 2013
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Research by the Costs of War project continues to inform a wide range of people, experts, and institutions about the ramifications of war in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. Last week, the United Nations-affiliated IRIN News published a series on development indicators in Iraq 10 years after the toppling of Saddam Hussein, citing research by Costs of War contributor Mac Skelton in its piece on the health care implications of US invasion of Iraq.
May 13, 2013
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Listen to Patrick Heller talk about the challenge of creating an inclusive India in an interview on Almirah Radio, recorded in Delhi where he is currently a visiting fellow at the Center for Policy Research. Almirah Radio is produced by Meara Sharma '11 and Henry Peck '11, with support from the Brown-India Initiative.
May 08, 2013
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May 07, 2013
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In the few weeks following the Institute's April 12 news piece about wide-ranging conversations sparked by Mark Blyth's Austerity: The History of A Dangerous Idea, more reviews and discussions have piled up around the book.
May 03, 2013
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Incoming Institute Director Richard M. Locke, currently deputy dean of the Sloan School of Management and head of the Political Science Department at MIT, authored the lead essay in a Boston Review forum on the challenge of creating "just" supply chains for global corporations.
April 30, 2013
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Earlier this week, Ashutosh Varshney reflected on the bombing in Boston in The Indian Express. "Just as Delhi and Bangalore are my Indian homes, Boston is my American home," writes Varshney. Boston, he explains to an Indian readership, is an inclusive, international, intellectually rich city. "What explains that some of those who grew up in the US, went through American institutions, lived in inclusive multi-ethnic towns, even took the oath of Citizenship ... would resort to terrorist violence on US soil?"
April 26, 2013
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The Watson Institute and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies welcomed what Professor Richard Snyder described as a "dream team" of panelists to discuss "Rhode Island's Emerging Latino Leaders." Panelists included Ricardo Lagos, former president of Chile and Brown professor at large, Providence Mayor Angel Taveras, Mayor James Diossa of Central Falls, Dr. Pablo Rodríguez of Latino Public Radio, Ana Cano-Morales of Roger Williams University, and Pawtucket School Committee member Sandra Cano. Each spoke briefly about the experiences that led them to become leaders, the challenges that they have faced, and their advice to future leaders. Above (L to R): Lagos and Taveras.
April 25, 2013
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April 23, 2013
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April 22, 2013
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Melani Cammett comments in the Huffington Post about landing in Beirut just as bombs exploded in her Boston neighborhood on April 15. "The irony of the situation was hard to miss," she writes. "Here I was in Lebanon, a country that Western press reports depict as perpetually on the brink of a new civil war and that has witnessed more than its share of bombings, war, and terror."
The experience of watching terror unfold in her hometown and witnessing the fear and confusion at her own children's school made the horrors of daily violence across the Middle East all the more real. "Based on what our community in Boston has undergone, I can only begin to imagine the nightmares and terrors that families in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan and elsewhere across the globe have experienced as violence has invaded their everyday lives. Sadly, violence to innocents is a tie that binds."
April 19, 2013
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Mark Blyth warns against the imaginary thinking of austerity policy in Time's Ideas section. In keeping with the mantra of his new book, he reminds readers that austerity is a "dangerous idea: it doesn't work in the world that we actually inhabit."
April 18, 2013
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The Institute is pleased to announce Neesha Nama '14 as the recipient of the 2013 Marla Ruzicka International Public Service Fellowship. With an interest in maternal and child health, Neesha will be working on a breast-feeding initiative and on an evaluation of the nutritional status of children under five years of age with AMOS Health and Hope in San Jose de los Remates, Nicaragua. Above: Revolutionary graffiti in Tunisia, photographed by Rahel Dette '13, last year's Ruzicka Fellow.
April 17, 2013
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Mark Blyth has been warning the world about the dangers of austerity for years. His new book, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, questions the logic that a government can "cut its way to growth," revealing austerity policy for what it is: "nonsense."
April 12, 2013
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Catherine Lutz, the Thomas J. Watson, Jr. Family Professor of Anthropology and International Studies, has been awarded a Fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to support work on a book about the contemporary moralities of American war.
April 11, 2013
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Melani Cammett, Dupee Faculty Fellow at the Institute, has been awarded the Mellon New Directions Fellowship, which funds scholars to pursue training outside of their own fields. Cammett, a political scientist, will train at the Harvard School of Public Health as a full-time visiting scholar and postdoctoral student. She will take coursework on health and health systems from diverse public health, sociological and anthropological perspectives during 2013-14 to further advance her current research in Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan, where she specifically examines state- and non-state providers in welfare regimes. Above: A street clinic provides free medical care to protestors in Cairo's Tahrir Square in 2011.
April 10, 2013
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A free public screening of the documentary Two Who Dared: The Sharps’ War, will be held at the Institute on April 16 at 7 p.m. The film was also screened last week at the Institute as part of a series of worldwide premieres occurring simultaneously at churches, synagogues, theaters, and schools in honor of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.
April 10, 2013
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Is Gross Domestic Product the best indicator of national success? Noah Elbot '14 explores the history — and future — of GDP. Above: Quotation from Jigme Singye Wangchuck, king of Bhutan, on a wall in Thimphu's School of Traditional Arts.
April 05, 2013
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Participants from the 2012 Brown International Advanced Research Institutes (BIARI) were at the Institute this week to workshop the chapters of their planned edited volume entitled "Urbanization in the Global South: Patterns and Processes." Above, from left: Jakob Alberto Augusto Eichman (Brazil), Varinder Jain (India), and Sagar Raj Sharma (Nepal)
April 04, 2013
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April 02, 2013
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Last week, Min Zhu, Deputy Managing Director for the International Monetary Fund (IMF), gave a lecture at the Institute titled "A Changing China in a Changing World." Before joining the IMF, Dr. Zhu was a Deputy Governor of the Bank of China, responsible for international affairs and banking policy. Dr. Zhu has been influential in the internationalization and modernization of China's financial sector, and his reform-minded view of Chinese banking policy is regarded highly around the world by economists and policymakers. Read an analysis of Zhu's talk by Noah Elbot '14.
March 29, 2013
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Peter Andreas spoke with NPR talk show host Diane Rehm yesterday about his new book, Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America. Listen to the show here.
March 29, 2013
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What is going on in Syria? What are the myths and realities of the Syrian situation? Is it a war or a revolution? Two years after the popular uprising began in March 2011, Beshara Doumani, faculty fellow at the Institute and director of the Middle East Studies program, interviewed Emerson University Professor Yasser Munif about the conflict's causes, current situation, and possible future. Professor Munif was raised in Syria and has traveled there often in the past year. Listen to their conversation.
March 25, 2013
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The Choices Program has just released Debating U.S. Drone Policy, a new lesson in its Teaching with the News initiative for high school teachers. The lesson provides videos, online articles, and teaching tools to foster exploration, evaluation, and classroom debate about U.S. policy regarding drones.
March 20, 2013
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A decade to the day after the US-led invasion of Iraq, car bombs and suicide blasts rocked Baghdad and areas to the south, killing some 50 people and wounding many others. At the same time, media references to the Costs of War project, which days ago released the first comprehensive analysis of direct and indirect human and economic costs of the Iraq War, abound -- including NPR Blog, HuffPost Live, Christian Science Monitor, Democracy Now, NBC News, and more.
March 19, 2013
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