As the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change prepares for a new round of research and input into global policymaking, Watson Institute faculty have produced a special issue of Environmental Research Letters on environmental scenarios for decisionmaking. The issue, “Where Next with Global Environmental Scenarios?,” makes 10 specific suggestions for improving the current approach to scenarios on which governments rely for policymaking, drawing from five articles by scenarios specialists.
January 05, 2009
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Brown Professor at Large Richard Holbrooke ’72 writes in the Washington Post about the agreement, 30 years ago, that unleashed “nothing less than the development of the most important bilateral relationship in the world today.”
December 19, 2008
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Abigail Hein ’10, a junior concentrating in international relations, recently wrote on Today at Brown about her summer work establishing a kids’ soccer league in Tanzania.
December 18, 2008
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Students concentrating in international relations, development studies, and Middle East studies are among the 14 undergraduates receiving $5,000 grants for summer travel abroad under the new International Scholars Program.
December 17, 2008
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Over the past year, the Watson Institute has covered a world of issues, nurtured global networks of academics and policymakers, graduated a new wave of internationalists, and produced media to increase its impact at home and abroad. Some of the year’s highlights are reviewed here.
December 17, 2008
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The US should exercise more restraint in its grand strategy, according to Barry Posen, director of MIT’s Security Studies Program. In a recent talk at the institute, Posen defined grand strategy as “political military strategy at the highest level” and gave notice that America’s current strategy is unnecessarily ambitious and unsustainable in a time of competition for scarce resources.
December 16, 2008
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This year the Watson Institute’s global media strategy premiered a documentary film and produced a rich collection of online radio programs, webcast lectures, faculty interviews, blogs, and more. A multimedia sampler follows inside.
December 16, 2008
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Anthropologist Elana Shever reports on the privatization of the Argentine national oil company in the November issue of American Ethnologist, describing how its story challenges the fit between neoliberal ideology and practice.
December 15, 2008
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Radical Islamist beliefs are more closely aligned with 20th century communism and fascism than with Islam, according to US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. In the new Brown Journal of World Affairs, Chertoff writes that combating violent extremism will require encouraging a greater understanding of Islam in the West and a recognition in the Muslim world that liberal democracy is not inimical to Islam.
December 11, 2008
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Anthropologist John Comaroff introduced his lecture at the Institute last month with a parable about an African community without any form of institutionalized government. In the absence of a judicial system, the community established a common understanding of right and wrong by demarcating boundaries between, in Comaroff’s terms, “Other” and “Self.” Transgressions against boundaries between “in-groups” and “out-groups” helped define the community’s geographical borders as psychological markers of group identity.
December 11, 2008
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The Ethical Blogger considers the pros and cons of the US Army’s new presence on the virtual world Second Life. Carnegie Council Senior Fellow Joshua S. Fouts blogs that it’s probably a step in the right direction – one the US State Department is also taking.
December 11, 2008
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Watson Institute Associate Professor Gianpaolo Baiocchi long foresaw the new Obama administration’s centrist makeup, as he participated in Contexts’ online moderated discussion among prominent sociologists on “The Social Significance of Barack Obama.”
December 11, 2008
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Development studies concentrator Emma Clippinger ’09 will share the grand prize in the Youth Social Entrepreneur competition, co-founded by the Staples Foundation for Learning and Ashoka. The award is for co-founding Gardens for Health International, which addresses the economic and nutritional needs of HIV/AIDS-positive people in Rwanda.
December 10, 2008
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Oslobodjenje, Sarajevo’s leading daily newspaper, last month featured 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). “The book represents mandatory reading for all interested in this period of our recent history, and some information presented in the book will shock even those who spent the entire war in Sarajevo,” according to the article, titled “War Profiteers are the New Sarajevo Elite.”
December 10, 2008
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In a major address on the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Watson Institute Interim Director David Kennedy ’76 drew attention to the human rights movement’s dark sides and disappointments, as well as its accomplishments. Speaking at the Minerva Biennial Conference on Human Rights at the University of Tel Aviv, Kennedy also cited daunting challenges ahead – from worldwide financial crisis to climate change and pandemics. “They are challenges about which human rights has very little to say – other than that state power continue to be civilized and legitimate,” Kennedy said. In building a new politics for a globalized society and economy, “human rights is no longer the way forward,” he said.
December 09, 2008
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Environmental collaboration in the Middle East – among scientists from otherwise hostile countries – holds out hope both for the region and for the world, according to Institute Visiting Fellow Daniel Orenstein PhD’06. In a recent opinion piece in the Providence Journal, Oreinstein writes of scientists gathering for the first meeting of the Middle Eastern Biodiversity Network to discuss a common goal: the survival of the region’s flora and fauna.
December 05, 2008
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Zarah Rahman '07, a development studies alum, has been posting updates from Sumatra, Indonesia, where she is working on a multi-media reportage for National Geographic on extractive industry (palm oil and logging) and its impact on local communities.
December 04, 2008
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The overlooked violence in South Sudan and the power of narrative took center stage at a recent discussion of Out of Exile: Narratives of the Abducted and Displaced People of Sudan. The book is part of McSweeney's Voice of Witness series, which collects, edits, and compiles interviews with survivors of humanitarian abuses to achieve its goal of “illuminating human rights crises through oral history.”
December 04, 2008
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A photo exhibit now on display at the Watson Institute highlights Brown students’ work with refugees in Providence – as it also provides a preview of “The Year of the International City: Providence, Urbanization, Internationalization.” For the exhibit, members of Brown Refugee Youth Tutoring and Enrichment (BRYTE) gave locally resettled refugees disposable cameras to capture images of their lives and views of the city. Looking ahead, a full program of activities analyzing the international dimensions of Providence is planned to ramp up in the spring.
December 03, 2008
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Watson Institute Senior Fellow Sergei Khrushchev is featured at length in the documentary Sputnik Mania, which will air on the History Channel on November 29 and 30. In the film, he comments on America’s fearful reaction to the Soviets’ launch of the world’s first manmade satellite some 50 years ago and notes that the Soviets were surprised by all the fuss. “The beginning of the Space Age was the same as Christopher Columbus discovering America,” Khrushchev adds. “We entered a new world without a real understanding of the consequences.”
November 21, 2008
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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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Brown and Banco Santander will inaugurate an annual series of International Advanced Research Institutes to convene a rising generation of scholars from emerging and developing countries at the University. Ileana Porras, a visiting professor at the Watson Institute, will direct the program.
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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