In 1985, William F.S. Miles left his dark brown stallion in the West African country of Niger, in the care of the chief of a Muslim village. In 2000, after learning of the chief’s death, Miles set off for Niger with his ten-year-old son Samuel in order to settle the inheritance dispute over the horse. Miles, an adjunct professor, describes the quest in My African Horse Problem (University of Massachusetts Press).
November 20, 2008
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Engagement, monitoring, and other policy options for dealing with Iran’s growing nuclear capacity were weighed in a recent talk by Mark Fitzpatrick, a senior fellow for nonproliferation at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Fitzpatrick came to Brown as part of the Watson Institute’s research project on Nuclear Dilemmas in the 21st Century.
November 20, 2008
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Financial deregulation in the United States had the unexpected consequence of reducing the wage gap between blacks and whites, according to a working paper co-authored by Rhodes Center for International Economics Director Ross Levine, whose findings were cited in the recent issue of the Economist.
November 18, 2008
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How is power exercised and security achieved among the world’s cultures and nations? How does so much poverty and inequality persist in a world of such plenty? How is our world governed and policy most effectively made? David Kennedy ’76, Brown University’s vice president of international affairs, has been posing these questions since taking up the post of interim director at the Watson Institute in July, as he leads deliberations on the Institute’s strategic growth.
November 15, 2008
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University of Chicago anthropologist John Comaroff discussed this US-South Africa comparison with Visiting Fellow Christopher Lydon, host of the Open Source podcast series at Watson.
November 14, 2008
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In The Japanese Challenge to American Neoliberal World Order: Identity, Meaning, and Foreign Policy (Stanford University Press, 2008), author Yong Wook Lee engages in a historical analysis of Japan’s response to the US promotion of free market policies around the world. The author, who conducted research for his book while a visiting fellow at the Watson Institute, writes that the United States has attempted to deemphasize the role of the state in economic development, promoting a free-market strategy for growth regardless of country-specific economic and political conditions. Japan, he argues, challenged the foundations of this neoliberal world order by fostering an alternative state-led development strategy that began in the mid 1980s. Japan has remained the only developed state that has directly questioned the universal validity of the free market strategy, Lee maintains.
November 14, 2008
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Institute Interim Director David Kennedy ’76 spoke about war and law in an interview last Friday on Denmark’s Radio P1. His remarks follow:
November 14, 2008
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Earlier this month, students from the Graduate Program in Development (GPD) met to present their summer field research at a workshop titled “Back from the Field: Cross-Disciplinary Research on Development.” Eight graduate students, from the Departments of Anthropology, Economics, Political Science, and Sociology, received constructive feedback on their research.
November 13, 2008
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November 12, 2008
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Visiting Fellow Catherine Kelleher, a former official with the Carter and Clinton administrations, pointed out potential pitfalls in the current presidential transition, in a recent interview on Federal News Radio. “The Bush administration is now falling victim to the perception of all the countries and parties in the world that they are not just lame ducks but not in a position to make promises or promise incentives of various kinds,” she said. “They really are trying to set up a legacy but they lack the tools and in fact the resources to carry it off.” Meantime, she said, “The major problem is that it will take the new president and his team quite a while, I think – maybe measured in months or weeks – to get a hold on particular issues and to move forward. One hopes that this gap in time won’t prove a source of mistakes or errors.”
November 12, 2008
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Former US Sen. Lincoln Chafee ’75 discussed the Republican Party’s future in the wake of its recent election losses on NPR’s The Takeaway this morning. Chafee, a visiting fellow and former Republican, believes the party will have trouble regaining traction with moderates leaving its ranks and the dominant right wing rejoicing in their departure.
November 12, 2008
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Four faculty members participated in the World Economic Forum’s first-ever Summit on the Global Agenda last weekend, which was described as a brainstorming exercise among “the 700 most knowledgeable people related to 68 global challenges.” Institute Interim Director David Kennedy ’76 joined the deliberations in Dubai as a member of the summit's Council on Global Governance; Rhodes Center for International Economics Director Ross Levine sat on the Financial Markets Development Council; Institute Lecturer Vasuki Nesiah was on the Council on Human Equality and Respect; Kay Warren, the Charles B. Tillinghast Jr. '32 Professor of International Studies and Anthropology, was on the Council on Illicit Trade. The summit, many of whose findings reflected the current global economic crisis, provided input to the new US administration and to this week’s G-20 conference, in addition to setting WEF's longer-term agenda. At its closing, the summit called for a “fundamental reboot” of the basic systems that drive the world’s economies, markets, and societies.
November 11, 2008
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In a recent talk at the Institute, Susan Rose-Ackerman drew on five case studies to discuss the relationship between corruption and domestic conflict. Part of the Colloquium on Comparative Research, Rose-Ackerman’s lecture highlighted the need for peace resolutions to address long-term political and economic considerations to curb the growth of corruption during post-conflict reconstruction.
November 11, 2008
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Last month, secondary school teachers from around New England gathered at the Watson Institute for a professional development seminar sponsored by the Choices Program. During the seminar, teachers were introduced to the program’s curriculum unit, A Forgotten History: The Slave Trade and Slavery in New England. The program included a lecture by James Campbell, associate professor of Africana Studies and American Studies, as well as workshops on constructing multimedia lessons for students on “the triangular trade,” “enslaved people’s experience,” and “role-playing Rhode Island’s 1783 decision.”
November 11, 2008
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Fredric B. Garonzik ’64, a member of the Institute’s board of overseers, died this month at the age of 66. He had been a general partner of Goldman Sachs, from which he retired in 1998 as co-head of the Fixed Income Currency and Commodities Division. He was also a trustee of Brown University and headed its Investment Committee.
November 11, 2008
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Current US military efforts to include more anthropologists and other social scientists in its research carry several risks, according to Catherine Lutz, an anthropology professor at the Institute. Among the reasons: the amount of Defense Department money is large relative to other grant money in the field of anthropology; “it represents an important attempt to garner ideological acceptance among anthropologists for doing military research; much larger sums of military funding could be forthcoming in the future; and this money could shape and distort our field in significant ways, as has happened with other disciplines that have been the recipients of Pentagon largesse,” Lutz writes in a guest editorial in the October issue of Anthropology Today.
November 10, 2008
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Does history provide clues as to the difference President Obama might make when he assumes office? In an op-ed last week in the Providence Journal, Professor James G. Blight argues that it does. Research on recently declassified documents and formerly secret presidential tapes – captured in the new documentary film Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived – indicates that Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson were under the same pressures from the same advisers to go to war in Vietnam. Where Kennedy resisted, Johnson consented. Fast forward to today: “Obama’s stated approach to foreign policy is, in fact, uncannily JFK-like,” Blight writes.
November 10, 2008
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Why does Watsonblogger Jonathan Mendel favor the US law prohibiting direct propaganda toward the US population? “outright propaganda, aside from ethical issues, may simply end up looking bad, he says in a recent post.
November 07, 2008
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Working papers from the Globalization and Inequality Initiative are revealing new findings in such areas as the relation of land ownership to the transition to an industrial economy, the role of cultural assimilation and diffusion in economic development, market competition’s effect on racial discrimination, and more. The papers, by Rhodes Center for International Economics Director Ross Levine, Watson Faculty Associate Oded Galor, and co-authors, are some of the early results of the Initiative, which explores the dynamics of global integration and the inequalities it produces and perpetuates – with the aim of fashioning policy solutions.
November 07, 2008
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Former US Sen. Lincoln Chafee '75 blamed the Republican Party’s lack of fiscal discipline for the current economic meltdown last night on the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC. The party inherited a historic surplus and squandered it in eight years, said Chafee, a visiting fellow, with tax cuts and expenditures on wars, farm subsidies, and a new homeland security federal bureaucracy.
November 06, 2008
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Watson Institute faculty have been offering a range of advice for the administration of President-elect Barack Obama. In a policy paper distributed in Washington, Visiting Fellow Catherine McArdle Kelleher lays out five prescriptions for the next secretary of state. Among them: “Restore diplomacy as the administration’s international instrument of first resort.” A policy paper from the Institute and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies advocates: “a US foreign policy that respects the sovereignty of foreign nations.” A letter signed by faculty members and over 350 other scholars of the region urges the US to “renew its active support for human rights throughout the region.” On the qualities that must be in play in the White House, on the Truthdig.com website, Professor James G. Blight and Adjunct Professor janet M. Lang recommend “(a) skepticism about the utility of military solutions to political problems; and (b) the willingness and the ability to inform and instruct the American people as to why, as Churchill once put it, ‘to jaw-jaw is better than war-war.’”
November 05, 2008
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Tonight, the Cable Car Cinema will present the Providence premiere of Virtual JFK: Vietnam If Kennedy Had Lived, directed and produced by Watson Institute faculty. Opening in the waning days of the current US presidential election, the film addresses President John F. Kennedy’s decisionmaking under pressure to go to war. In parallel with the premiere of the film, and drawing from its lessons, producers James G. Blight and janet M. Lang have written a piece now posted on truthdig.com, on what it will take to manage “the bewildering array of dangerous foreign policy crises,” the next US president will face.” Following screenings tonight and Monday night, the documentary's creators will discuss the film and its relevance today.
November 03, 2008
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The Pembroke Center is hosting a year-long research seminar in the 2009-2010 academic year that will analyze global flows of people and technology through the lenses of several academic disciplines. As part of the seminar, to be led by Watson Institute Professor Kay Warren, applications are being accepted for three post-doctoral positions for younger PhDs in the social sciences and humanities.
October 31, 2008
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Professor James Der Derian led off a recent conference on the ideas of cultural theorist Paul Virilio by screening a new video short, Disastrous Horizons, and giving a lecture on “War as Planned Disaster.” As Virilio tells Der Derian in the video, "According to [military philosopher Carl von] Clausewitz, 'War is the pursuit of politics by other means.' Henceforth, the full-scale accident is the prolongation of total war by other means." Watch Disastrous Horizons here.
October 27, 2008
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Associate Professor Keith Brown recently presented his work with policymakers and practitioners to document the impacts of different approaches to democracy-building and to develop assessment techniques to help guide future initiatives. His report was published in EES News, a publication of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, where he spoke.
October 23, 2008
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Policymakers face tradeoffs that must be carefully weighed when promoting the production of biofuels made from cellulose, such as grasses and other nonedible plant sources, and those made from grains, such as corn. A recent Science article co-authored by Institute Faculty Associate Steven Hamburg warns that early policy mistakes made in subsidizing grain-based biofuel cropping systems are being repeated in more recent subsidies for cellulosic ethanol.
October 22, 2008
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A recent panel at the Institute discussed Associate Professor Peter Andreas’s new book, Blue Helmets and Black Markets: The Business of Survival in the Siege of Sarajevo (Cornell University Press, October 2008), which contends that black markets and other clandestine activities during the 1990s siege were responsible for the city’s prolonged suffering as well as its survival.
October 22, 2008
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The recent violence in Georgia has brought the United States’ relationship with Russia back to the front pages and rekindled an important debate. How should the US view Russia: as a growing threat, a tough rival, a potential partner, or something else? What policies should the United States follow to manage its relationship with Russia? Russia's Transformation: Challenges for U.S. Policy, the Choices Program’s newest curriculum unit for secondary schools, traces the country’s post-Soviet evolution and provides interactive tools for understanding US policy toward this increasingly powerful nation.
October 21, 2008
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“States are central to development and human well-being.” So begins the new special issue of Studies in Comparative International Development (SCID), dedicated to “Revisiting State Infrastructural Power.” The issue explores why and how some states are better than others in providing basic security and public goods, with lessons from Argentina, Germany, Mexico, South Africa, and elsewhere. It closes with an article by Michael Mann, the UCLA sociologist who devised the concept of infrastructural power in the 1980s, as “the capacity of the state to actually penetrate civil society and implement its actions across its territories.”
October 21, 2008
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Acclaimed documentary filmmaker Eugene Jarecki cited a "corporate-political complex" behind the nation's economic woes, in an interview on last night's Daily Show. The appearance coincided with the release of his new book, The American Way of War (Simon & Schuster Free Press, October 2008). The US military-industrial complex is the subject of the book and of a high school teaching guide that will soon be released to accompany Jarecki’s film, Why We Fight.
October 20, 2008
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Ross Levine, director of the William R. Rhodes Center for International Economics, was reassuring even as he described hard times ahead at a recent “Roundtable on the Current Financial Crisis” at Brown.
October 17, 2008
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Ma Thida, a Burmese author/doctor, explored the intersections of her life and Burmese post-colonial politics during a lecture on Thursday. Thida, this year’s International Writers Project fellow at Brown, also gave a reading from her short story "Waiting." The story is based on the lives of one of her fellow political dissidents and his wife, both of whom long to meet each other in the open air. Thida has been active on campus since arriving this fall, giving talks and readings – particularly marking the recent one-year anniversary of the violent crackdown on peaceful protests in her home country.
October 17, 2008
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Watson Institute Visiting Fellow Catherine Kelleher gives five prescriptions to the next US secretary of state in a larger collection of advice delivered by the University of Maryland School of Public Policy. She prefaces them by saying, “Your biggest challenge must be to restore the standing of the past, to retrieve for the United States the status and the admiration – and even the affection – that it has so richly enjoyed and exploited in the past.”
October 16, 2008
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At a curator’s lecture earlier this month, Watson Institute Adjunct Professor Abbott Gleason compared the exhibit of Soviet political art now on view at List Art Center to a “cocktail party where the guests are happy to interact even if they don’t all agree.” Such analogies set the personal tone of Gleason’s talk, given in conjunction with an exhibit titled “Views and Re-Views: Soviet Political Posters and Cartoons.” The exhibit, which he co-curated with Bell Gallery Director Jo-Ann Conklin, includes over 160 pieces of propaganda dating from 1918 through the late Soviet era.
October 16, 2008
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Adjunct Associate Professor Jo-Anne Hart has created a set of classroom activities for grades 1-12 to engage children in the presidential debate and prepare them for an active civic life. Among the features of “Growing Voters” are such classroom activities as Candidate Debate, Spin Room, and a Civic Lemonade Stand.
October 14, 2008
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Associate Professor Peter Andreas’s new book, Blue Helmets and Black Markets: The Business of Survival in the Siege of Sarajevo (Cornell University Press, 2008), tells the story of the 1992-1995 battle for Sarajevo. It was the longest siege in modern history – and also the most internationalized, attracting a vast contingent of aid workers, UN soldiers, journalists, smugglers, and embargo-busters. A panel including Amb. Richard Holbrooke will discuss the book on Thursday at 4pm in the Joukowsky Forum.
October 14, 2008
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The Pentagon’s recent increases in the funding of the Minerva Research Institute have raised concerns among anthropologists, such as Watson Institute Professor Catherine Lutz. In an article in the Times Higher Education Supplement, of London, Lutz expressed fear that the money would “shape and distort” anthropological research, as social scientists engage in combat-related research for the military.
October 14, 2008
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“How can we think of ways to save energy?” former Chilean President Ricardo Lagos Escobar asked an audience last month at the Watson Institute. In recent years, global warming has become a pressing international issue. Environmentalists, energy specialists, and economists fear its threat to economic stability and environmental permanence. Lagos, who is a United Nations special envoy for climate change, fears the international community’s limited efforts to curtail warming pose an even greater threat. His recent climate change talk was one of several while in residence as a Brown professor at large.
October 13, 2008
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A recent power-sharing agreement signed in Zimbabwe between the ruling party and the opposition is nebulous and insufficient, but may provide the first step toward real and long-lasting change in Zimbabwe. After a violent and turbulent 2008 presidential campaign, there is hope that the warring political parties can maintain peace and provide stability to an economy with exorbitant rates of inflation, according to Glenn Warren P’09, the chief political officer at the American Embassy in Harare, Zimbabwe.
October 13, 2008
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“Palestine is a divided polity; every indication is that this will deepen,” Robert Blecher, senior analyst for the International Crisis Group, told an audience at the Institute last month. He spoke about the current situation in Palestine following what analysts have termed Gaza’s “second decisive movement,” from July to August 2008.
October 13, 2008
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America’s detention and interrogation practices in the “war on terror” are the subject of a new documentary airing on PBS stations this month and of an accompanying teacher’s guide from the Choices Program. Torturing Democracy premieres Friday, October 10, and will air on select public television stations in October (check local listings).
October 09, 2008
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The new issue of Brown Alumni Magazine describes the launch of the undergraduate-run Brown Journal of World Affairs in the early 1990s as the heroic act of “Macho Policy Geeks.”
October 08, 2008
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The Western response to a resurgent Russia took center stage late last month at “Georgia and Kosovo: A New Cold War?” – a campus forum sponsored by the Watson Institute's new research project on Nuclear Dilemmas in the 21st Century. Although the five panelists did not focus on the issue of nuclear weapons exclusively, there was “a nuclear shadow over the event,” as noted by moderator and Institute Associate Professor Nina Tannenwald.
October 08, 2008
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At the discussion following a screening of Reality Show last month, filmmaker and educator Rob Davenport reinforced the underlying message of his 2008 documentary: International aid organizations may sometimes value impressing supporters over improving lives.
October 03, 2008
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The current US financial crisis “is obviously going to exacerbate the problems in the world economy. So I think we’re going to be looking at a slowdown,” Institute Board Member William R. Rhodes ’57 said in a recent Financial Times video interview on global impact. Also looking at the situation this week was Ross Levine, director of the Rhodes Center for International Economics at the Watson Institute. “The plan that came out last week gave enormous discretion to [Treasury Secretary Henry] Paulson, in particular, to allocate $700 billion,” Levine said in an interview with Bloomberg. “At least the plan that’s coming up now has more oversight from Congress, which is fully appropriate.” Levine will be part of an open discussion of the crisis on campus on Friday.
October 02, 2008
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Social entrepreneurs from Brown and other universities gathered at the Watson Institute one weekend in September for a retreat on “Sustaining Social Entrepreneurship: Helping Good Works Stay Well.” Led by Shirley Brice Heath, a Brown professor at large who studies youth-initiated social entrepreneurship around the world, the retreat highlighted steps young people have taken to create innovative social change and to sustain and extend these efforts.
September 30, 2008
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Watson Institute Senior Fellow Sue E. Eckert recently gave a mixed review to a new European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruling that gives Europe’s courts jurisdiction over local implementations of UN-mandated terrorist sanctions. “While the ruling is a challenge, I would hope it is also viewed as an opportunity which can be managed,” Eckert said during a panel at American University’s Washington College of Law. Separately, Countering the Financing of Terrorism, co-authored by Eckert, was recently reviewed in International Studies Review.
September 30, 2008
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The questions surrounding the current financial crisis continue to mount. Is there a single cause of the crisis? Is the bailout plan fair? What lies ahead? Answers have been provided in recent days by Watson Institute Board Member William R. Rhodes ‘57, Rhodes Center for International Economics Director Ross Levine, and Visiting Fellow Christopher Lydon, who has aired an Open Source interview with Vanguard founder John C. Bogle.
September 29, 2008
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With Russia's recent incursion into Georgia – and Kosovo's declaration of independence in the face of Russian opposition – leading scholars of the region will gather on a panel Monday at 4pm to discuss related challenges for US-Russia foreign policy. Designed as an open forum, “Georgia and Kosovo: A New Cold War?” will include Nikolas Gvosdev, a professor of national security studies at the US Naval War College, in addition to Watson faculty and affiliates Douglas Blum, Abbott Gleason, Catherine McArdle Kelleher, Ileana Porras, and moderator Nina Tannenwald. The event marks the launch of the Watson Institute’s new project on Nuclear Dilemmas in the 21st Century, which is re-examining fundamental assumptions and practices underlying the current world nuclear order.
September 26, 2008
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On Tuesday, Watson Institute Senior Fellow Xu Wenli was honored for his democracy advocacy by President George W. Bush. Xu was among activists from Belarus, Burma, Cuba, North Korea, Russia, and other countries attending a “Freedom Agenda” lunch with the president. They are “courageous men and women who have stood strong for freedom,” Bush said.
September 25, 2008
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On Thursday, International Writers Project Fellow Ma Thida will give a talk at the Institute titled “Banned Books: an Insider’s Perspective on Writing and Resistance in Burma.” Earlier this week, Adjunct Professor Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro spoke in New York at “Reading Burma: A Benefit for Cyclone Relief and Freedom of Expression in Burma/Myanmar.” A film, Burma: State of Fear, is being screened by the Brown Chapter of the US Campaign for Burma, and an interview with one of the leaders of the Saffron Revolution will follow, on Monday, September 29, at 7pm in Salomon 001.
September 24, 2008
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Wednesday afternoon, a screening of Reality Show will be followed by a discussion, with director Rob Davenport, of the 2008 documentary’s portrayal of an aid agency’s own brand of “The Apprentice” in Guatemala. Wednesday is also the start of the five-day Providence Latin American Film Festival, sponsored in part by Brown’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and free to all Brown students, faculty, and staff.
September 23, 2008
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“Lawyers as the ultimate guardians of legality have a particular responsibility,” Philippe Sands, an international lawyer and author of Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values, said during a recent talk at the Watson Institute. Sands discussed the role of lawyers in drafting the torture memos that changed the way the US interrogated prisoners, their disregard for international legal norms – and their impact on the United States’ reputation in the world.
September 23, 2008
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