Thursday Cartoons Did Their Civic Duty

Did you?  Good for you if you did!  Unless you voted like this guy:

 

Remember, Remember, the 5th of November

Today is Guy Fawkes Day, which I’m ok with ignoring, since he was 1. British and 2. possibly a terrorist.  But it did remind me of an entry I wrote for a blog I had before this one, We Are Publius.  I started it back while I was still involved in Citizens for Global Solutions because I wanted to write, because I specifically wanted to read the Federalist Papers and chronicle them, and because I thought it would be interesting to discuss federalism from a more… liberal perspective than the Federalist Society.  It was a pretty successful blog, at least in terms of my commitment to it, but it ended up being too narrow for my purposes, and I eventually switched to the EI.  Still, the work I did there, and with CGS, helped push me towards the work I’m doing now at Georgetown, and with D&S.com.  Maybe someday I’ll get back to it.

In the meantime, here’s the Guy Fawkes post.

Election Day, Nov. 3, 2009

It’s the first Tuesday in November, and over 30 states are having elections, which means that a lot of people need to vote.  If you have already, congratulations!  If you haven’t, find your election center at Rock the Vote’s site.  Vote!  Participate in the great polity we call the United States of America.

CCT 754 Blog Post: R2P and International Norms

There are many kinds of institutions – networks of relationships – today.  There are networks of both domestic and international activists, some with cross-cutting ties between the two levels.  There are the networks of state relationships – trade, security, law, culture, through institutions such as the WTO, NATO, the UN, countless formal bilateral agreements, as well as bonds of friendship and statesmanship between leaders.  On the one hand, these institutions may be said to be very effective, as they have allowed us to go 60+ years without a World War, have allowed us to respond to countless emergencies and horrors, from September 11, 2001 to tsunamis in South-East Asia.  On the other hand, these institutions have failed to enact new international norms, including environmental standards (Kyoto), common agreement over the management of oceans (Law of the Sea), or the forceful condemnation of the targeting of civilians in violent conflicts, whether with a genocidal purpose or simply to inflict mass casualties (R2P).  Furthermore, norms that once stood solidly, such as the Geneva Conventions, are now at risk as more and more states openly torture, led by the US.

New Blog, CCT 754, and Paper Abstract

I’m continuing to work on this idea for my CCT 754 paper about R2P.  The original question was how does the existence (and complete failure) of the R2P doctrine stymie the international discussion on conflict intervention? I still think that’s a good question, but after a thoughtful conversation with my Methods prof (chief blogger at DemocracyandSociety.com), I’ve started to expand the idea a little to looking at the creation and enforcement of international norms.  Barak also encouraged me to submit an abstract for the paper to a “Democrats, Dictators, and Demonstrators” symposium, so Friday night I wrote this:

Why are some norms established and effectively enforced and not others?  There has been a long evolution of human rights as a system of international norms, beginning with the abolitionists in the 18th and 19th centuries and the Geneva Convention in the mid 1800s.   More recent targets of human rights activists have been female genital mutilation (FGM), torture, and genocide.  The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) began working to create a new international norm to prevent genocide with the release of their 2001 report, A Responsibility to Protect (R2P).  Yet, despite admirable principles, an unprecedented moment of international solidarity and goodwill in the wake of September 11, 2001, and the support of the UN Secretariat and a coalition of dozens of international nongovernmental organizations, R2P has yet to be seriously invoked or acted upon.

Reasons for R2P’s failure include the lack of political will, lack of resources, inefficient or ineffective networks, and the well-established norms of national sovereignty and self-interest.  Yet obstructive  norms, and the lack of resources and access to power, etc, are not new problems, and were effectively overcome by the Abolitionists and supporters of the Geneva Convention.  Successful norms frame the issue in a way that actualizes state self-interest, and mobilize international support.    Using these case studies, this paper will examine the process of issue framing, actor mobilization and network utilization to answer the question: Given the domestic and international networks in which actors are embedded, how do we create effective norms and institutions?

The blog post for CCT 754 (that will follow) is an attempt to start thinking about this topic, and maybe build up an outline, since if accepted, my final paper will be due by Nov. 27, and I already have 35 pages about Uganda’s sector investment to write in the next two weeks.

Govt 541: Research Methods

Another class I really love is my Research Methods class. It is, more or less, a class on how to apply the scientific method to political research.  I’ve ready plenty of such research, but I’ve never actually attempted to present my own work in such a manner, so it’s actually an enlightening, and challenging, class.  Our assignment is to design a research proposal that could be submitted as a grant proposal, should we find such an opportunity.  Luckily, it is just the proposal, and we are not actually responsible for doing the required research or data analysis, because that would probably take up far more time than I will have while in grad school (or at least w out the income of a grant).  My proposal is to study government intervention into 4 sectors of the Ugandan economy, as outlined below:

Research Question:
What explains the variation in success of four products/sectors of the Ugandan economy?

Hypotheses:
Infrastructure and government investments favored one industry over the other.

Alternative Hypotheses:
•    Collapse or growth of world markets
•    Environmental conditions in Uganda
•    Political or conflict situations in Uganda and/or surrounding countries
•    Economy and infrastucture of neighbors

Dependent Variable:
Economic success within industry (possible measures include sustained growth, profitability, share of market, share of employment)

Explanatory Variables:
•    Transportation systems
•    Communications systems
•    Government or donor subsidies, tariffs and other protectionist measures
•    Relationships with neighbors (diplomatic or trade)

Cases: oil, coffee, cut flowers, tourism industries in Uganda

Research Method: Analysis of sectors, variation between and over time

Potential Problems:
•    Data availability – some sectors are only just now being rebuilt or built up
•    Identifying and controlling for alternative variables or hypotheses (culture, geography, history) – some control comes from limiting study to one country
•    Impact of regional development, infrastructure

This one pager and the accompanying presentation 2 weeks ago went very well and I got a lot of good suggestions and generally very positive feedback.  I’m considering actually doing some of the research for this (but only on one sector) as the paper for my African Development class, but I’m not sure yet.  I’ll continue to post the work I do here as it develops.

CCT 754 Paper Topic

It’s getting the time of the semester that profs start requesting paper topics be chosen.  For CCT 754, I have to actually post a brief intro/outline of my paper topic, and do so tonight, which means that I should probably actually chose a paper topic.  My current top contenders are:

1. A continuation of my previous post on R2P: how does the existence (and complete failure) of the R2P doctrine stymie the international discussion on conflict intervention?
2. Under which circumstances does technology democratize international relations, especially activism, but also diplomacy?

#1 seems like a fairly straightforward (and possibly easier topic), but since it is a networks class, I’ll probably have to look at the networks of military action and international diplomacy at a bilateral and also regional/international level (NATO, UN) and then of course historical/colonial ties and how those influence current events.

#2 is a more recent, and probably farther reaching question, and one that I definitely intend to pursue, but I’m thinking that I’ll write about #1 for this semester.  R2P is a subject I’ve been struggling w for a while, and it feels good to be motivated enough by the assignment to finally begin work on it again.

So there’s my paper topic.  Now to write an actual summary of it for class….