Tag: International Relations

The Experts’ IR Roundup in Zurich – Part 2

MAS ETH SPCM
The MAS ETH SPCM is offered in cooperation with leading academic partner institutions (Photo: ETH Zurich)

Our colleagues at the Center for Security Studies (CSS) recently hosted the “Security and Resources” module of their Master of Advanced Studies in Security Policy and Crisis Management program. Practitioners and scholars from around the world traveled to Zurich to discuss issues such as grand strategy, security policy development, crisis leadership and risk management. Given the fertile nature of these discussions, ISN staff members took the opportunity to speak to the lecturers and a Swiss course participant about five security-related issues currently on their minds. The following podcasts present their personal preoccupations and opinions.

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Global Voices

Out of the Classroom and Onto the Web

Image by trucolorsfly/Flickr.
Image by trucolorsfly/Flickr.

The Internet and Web 2.0 have enabled students to gain greater and quicker access to ‘International Relations’ (IR) education. Books, courses and information on universities and scholarships are easily available online.

Professor Sanjoy Banerjee, who holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University and is currently Chair of International Relations at the San Francisco State University, said this when contacted over email:

“The main benefit of technological advances (in ICT), particularly the Internet, is that it makes research much quicker. With search engines like Google Scholar, one can find articles and books on topics far quicker and more efficiently than before. Of course, reading and understanding have not become any easier. Still, my students read much more widely, across more disciplines, than I did as a student.”

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Turkey at the Crossroads (Literally)

By Stewart M. Patrick for the Council on Foreign Relations.

U.S. President Barack Obama (R) shakes hands with Turkey’s Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan after a bilateral meeting in Seoul March 25, 2012. (Larry Downing/Courtesy Reuters)

When it comes to “rising powers,” the BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India, and especially China—tend to get the most press. But there’s another emerging player that promises to shape world politics in the twenty-first century with its robust growth, political evolution, and strategic choices. It is Turkey, a country that straddles some of today’s most critical divides: between Europe and the Middle East, between the West and the developing world, between secular democracy and religious piety. Turkey’s evolving might, its geographic position, and model of moderate political Islam make it a natural candidate for “strategic partnership” with the United States. This is the conclusion of U.S. Turkey Relations, a just-released CFR task force report co-chaired by former secretary of state Madeleine K. Albright and former national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley—and directed by my able colleague, Steven A. Cook.

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US-India Relations: Pivot Problems

US Secretary of State Clinton delivering her remarks on “India and the United States: A Vision for the 21st Century.” Photo: US Consulate Chennai/flickr

There is a conundrum at the heart of the Obama administration’s “pivot” toward Asia, at least as it relates to India.  The US is eager to extricate itself from military conflicts in the Greater Middle East (Iraq and Afghanistan) so it can focus on a region where, as President Obama put it, “the action’s going to be.”  Shoring up the US strategic posture in East Asia amid China’s ascendance will entail a deepening of geopolitical cooperation between Washington and New Delhi.  But the quickening withdrawal from Afghanistan will increase bilateral frictions, pushing relations in the opposite direction.

The Pentagon’s just-released strategic guidance paper calls for “investing in a long-term strategic partnership with India to support its ability to serve as a regional economic anchor and provider of security in the broader Indian Ocean region.”  Both Obama during his visit to India in November 2010 and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during her trip last summer have called on New Delhi to play a more active strategic role in East Asia.

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Rawls and International Law

The sun setting on justice. Image: mindgutter/flickr

With our Editorial Plan discussing changing international norms and laws over the next two weeks, it is worth remembering that this discussion serves the wider purpose of helping to illustrate the elusive character of structural change in our world today.  One consequence of this approach, at least for this particular discussion, is that we ultimately treat norms and laws as effects of underlying causes – as symptoms, so to speak, of the underlying condition we are trying to diagnose.  A different but complementary approach is that of international political theory, which, as a variety of ‘ideal’ or ‘normative’ theory, often operates (if sometimes only implicitly) on the opposite assumption: that changes in ideas, norms and laws are themselves causes of structural change instead of vice versa. Today we consider an example of this other approach to international norms and laws, by way of a short introduction to the international thought of John Rawls.

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