I’m teaching a class on Digital Globalization this winter quarter at Portland State. The course will be fully online, thanks to great support from Vince Schreck, a course designer in OAI, and Linda Absher, the librarian who has tracked down countless documentaries to use as streaming videos, and helped to locate other key resources. Over the first six weeks the students will explore three main topics (Digital Culture; Transformation and Institutions; Security, Privacy and the Nation-State) before spending three weeks on individualized study. The final week of the course will consist of students sharing a Digital Artifact, such as a slideshow or video. I always learn far more from my students than they learn from me, and that’s particularly true with these final presentations. I’ve been working on a brief quiz on digital literacy, which takes five minutes to complete. Are you a cyber expert, who knows about Bitcoin, the Dark Web, the Sharing Economy, MOOCs, Wikileaks, Snowden, and social media? You can take the quiz here to find out.
Kimberley Brown
Portland State University
Guest blog post
Many campuses in the US and Canada have formalized comprehensive internationalization plans that call for increased numbers of international students on campuses, augmented numbers of outbound study abroad students, and expanded partnerships with universities around the world. International Studies Programs may have a unique role to play in these efforts on their respective campuses. If you have an ESL program for incoming international students, you may want to consider an on-campus partnership that allows advanced ESL students to use the academic theme of globalization in their courses and to collaborate with your students in your classes.
Recently two former students (who both completed their BAs in International Studies and their MAs in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) decided to use our textbook in Japan and Mexico for advanced level students in their English for Academic Purposes courses. Another MA student, heading off to teach EAP in Germany for a year, chose to work through basic globalization concepts covered in our introductory course and to write a brief reflection on the link between globalization and English for Academic Purposes. His goal in Germany is to introduce globalization concepts in his high level academic English courses that he will be teaching. Chen (2012) looks at the ability of the content area of globalization to serve as a way to introduce students, who are a few terms away from becoming matriculated students at their respective institutions, to the discourse of higher education. …
F35 on training flight. Wikicommons. U.S. Navy ID number 110211-O-XX000-001
P.W. Singer and August Cole have written a techno-thriller based on a Chinese invasion of Hawaii, in a strange replay of Pearl Harbor. As with Tom Clancy’s work, there are multiple points of view, moral black and whites, and the technology is at times as much of a star as the main characters. Yet this work creates a pessimistic twist to Clancy’s upbeat vision. In Ghost Fleet America’s reliance on technology makes the country so vulnerable to attack that it must draw (spoiler alert) on irregular warfare tactics that its armed forces learned fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.
There is a contradiction within this work. At times some scenes come across as unrealistic, and the analysis of international politics seems simplistic. Some plot devices, (another spoiler alert) such as the discovery of new resources leading to a surprise invasion, are so common in the genre as to be exhausted. In contrast, the focus on technology is all too convincing, and this detailed look at possible scenarios for future warfare (the book has extensive endnotes) is fascinating. The work is also carefully plotted, and the climax is deftly handled. …
When Kim and I wrote the first edition of the textbook, the external reviewers asked for a number of important changes, one of which was to include more demographic information. In the second edition, we continued to draw on demography, which particularly informed our discussion in the conclusion regarding future trends in global affairs. Demographic information can be dangerous if over-simplified, and it is often cited by cultural conservatives who fear the impact of migration. Still, demographics is perhaps the most reliable means to look into the future, whether it be to foresee the decline of francophone communities in Canada outside of Quebec and New Brunswick, or the enduring power of France, which has a brighter demographic future than many European states. The major global demographic trend in the world today is towards demographic decline amongst developed nations, even as Africa’s population climbs sharply. Some nations, such as Taiwan, have birth rates that are shockingly low. Of course, there are also advantages to population decline, particular regarding environmental issues. With a smaller population there is less demand for energy and other key resources. In the short term, however, most nation-states that have aging populations will face significant economic challenges, from how to fund the pension system, to the declining number of taxpayers to service the national debt. …
With the possible exception of Ukraine, there is perhaps no place in the world today so likely to see a localized conflict expand into a global war as the South China Sea. Business Insider has recently published a collection of maps that seek to explain tensions in the area. The maps themselves were originally produced by the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative, which has done an important service by documenting the economic, political and geographic issues that are shaping geopolitical tensions throughout the region. Therese Delpeche, who sadly passed away in 2012, argued in her important book, Savage Century: Back to Barbarism, that the political situation in Asia now resembles that in Europe in 1914. This idea was not new, and has been controversial within Political Science, but after reading her work it is difficult not to see historical parallels. For anyone who wonders why these ocean waters have engaged so many different nations, these nineteen maps explain what is at stake. The maps would also be a great teaching tool in an “Introduction to International and Global Studies” class.
Image of the Persian Gulf from the CIA World Factbook
This week an anonymous author wrote a brief article in the New York Review of Books that is attracting a lot of attention. All that we know about the writer is that they have worked as an official in a “NATO country” and that they have a great deal of experience in the Middle East. The central idea of the piece is that our current social science theories utterly fail to explain the rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria. As the author argues, there is a rich literature on guerrilla warfare, which is based on more than a century of experience. ISIS has violated everyone of these rules -don’t engage in fixed position warfare; don’t violate the social norms in the communities in which you exist- and yet ISIS still moves from success to success against vastly greater forces.
Like most observers, the author of this piece has been stunned both by the sheer speed of ISIS’s success, and its ability to change the rules of the game. The author makes the point that observers often assume that what is needed is more information, but perhaps that is not the case. Maybe the real problem is our analytical frameworks. Maybe we don’t know what we thought we know. Certainly, the complete failure of U.S. policy in Iraq raises questions about every aspect of U.S. counter-insurgency doctrine. Of course, one could also point to the deeply flawed rationale for the invasion of Iraq in the first place. Still, perhaps the conceptual problem is even larger than this, and speaks to the overall weakness of social science theories as they are applied to the region. The author makes the point that to see an equally stunning success against all expectations you might have to look to the Vandal conquest of North Africa in the dying days of the Roman Empire. This is an engaging analogy, although historians might quibble with the need to reach so deeply into the past. Even so, the larger point is that our current social science models governing what are sometimes called “small wars” don’t seem to be working well to understand this current conflict.
One might question whether our understanding of small wars is to Eurocentric. Still, most of the authors of foundational texts -Mao, Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara- were not Western. A counter-argument might be that ISIS may yet collapse as quickly as it emerged on the scene. Perhaps ISIS appears to be rewriting the rules only because there has not been enough time for it to pay the price for violating them. Perhaps ISIS has not yet had enough time to fail, and its collapse will be as quick as its rise. Still, if ISIS continues to thrive over the next few years, then the author is correct that something fundamental is wrong with our understanding of these conflicts. In that case, theorists and strategists will need to fundamentally question everything about our current understanding of irregular warfare.
If you are interested in the theory of war, I strongly recommend Ann Hironaka’s Neverending Wars. I used the book in my “Foundations of Global Studies Theory” class, as a key security studies text. I am often frustrated by much of the existing literature in security studies, which still overemphasizes conventional conflict, and relies too much on Realism as a theoretical approach. In an era of terrorist organizations, cyber-warfare, Anonymous, and drug cartels, much of this theoretical literature is in danger of becoming dusty. Hironaka’s work is interesting because it focuses on civil war, the dominant form of conflict in the world today, and draws on insights from Sociology. Her central argument is that the international community unintentionally propagates these conflicts, an idea that is relevant to many existing conflicts globally.
I have been researching the drug trade in Latin America this year, and recently came across this map of the global drug trade by Eduardo Asta, who created it in 2014. This particular map has now been published in the Atlas of Design, which celebrates the best maps produced in the world, and is published every two years. Although the map is in Portuguese, the images are so clear, and the cognates so similar, that it should be easy for any English speaker to decipher the map. One of the points that the map makes abundantly clear is the scale of the cocaine trade between Latin America in Europe. While in North America we tend to focus on the drug war, and the flow of drugs across the U.S. Mexican border, it’s important to remember that this is one part of a truly global trade. The European market for cocaine is almost as large as that in the United States. The Caribbean also plays a key role in the transport routes that bring cocaine from the Andes to the U.S. East Coast, but U.S. media coverage of the drug trade focuses almost exclusively on the Mexican border. The map also shifts our perspective on the drug trade by emphasizing the critical role that Afghanistan and Asia play in the global heroin trade. Finally, Africa receives little attention in discussion of the global drug trade, but it has a massive market for amphetamines. To me, this map is a beautiful work of design, which visually conveys an immense amount of information without succumbing to clutter.
I’ve posted before about how climate change will impact south Florida, and other areas that are particularly vulnerable to climate change. Still, how well would different nations respond to global warming? If you’ve ever asked that question, you can find an infographic with a ranking here. The map seems to place great emphasis on state capacity, rather than only measuring the direct impact of climate change.
Photograph of an original painting by Gary Sheehan. Depicted is his version of the scene when scientist(s) observed the world’s first nuclear reactor (CP-1) as it became self-sustaining. Source: Wikipedia Commons
In my “Introduction to International Studies” class this spring I showed the video “Nuclear Aftershocks,” which my library had in its Streaming Video database, under “Films on Demand.” This 56 minute documentary begins by discussing the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and the global impact that it had. The work also includes the voices of experts who argued that only nuclear power can provide sufficient non-carbon energy to meet the world’s future needs. The video then shifts to the United States, and the Indian Point reactor, which is located dangerously close to New York City. According to the documentary, the plant also supplies about a quarter of the electricity required by the city. The film finishes by returning to Fukushima, and the challenges that Japan faces in cleaning up the disaster, a process that will take decades. …
Charles King has an outstanding article inForeign Affairs titled “The Decline of International Studies.” The core of his argument is that cuts to federal funding programs (especially “Title 6” funds for regional studies) have saved the U.S. government little money, but have cost much expertise in International Affairs. He also argues that the government is increasingly supporting only research tied to security issues. He also provides evidence that college students are taking fewer language classes than in the recent past. Perhaps equally significant, he also points out that many scholars of “International Relations” do not themselves have a good command of a foreign language. …
