2003-04 Mershon Center Speakers and Conferences
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Item The United States and Iraq: Why We're There, Where We're Going: An Educational Forum(Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security Studies, 2004-05-11) Grimsley, Mark; Herrmann, Richard; O'Connell, Mary Ellen; Webber, SabraIn April 2004, the United States suffered more casualities in Iraq than during the entire period of declared hostilities last year. Almost every aspect of American occupation remains controversial. Has the removal of Saddam Hussein helped the United States in its war on terror? What are the prospects of fostering democracy in Iraq? What are the implications under international law? How does the invasion and occupation appear to people living in other parts of the world, especially the Middle EastItem American Culture and Anti-Americanism in Russia(Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security Studies, 2004-05-07) Derluguian, Georgi; Zubok, Vladislav; Brown, JohnThe Slavic Center is organizing a symposium on “American Culture and Anti-Americanism in Russia” to be held on 7 May 2004 from 2:30-5:00 at the Mershon Center. This event is part of a series of symposia exploring the impact of American culture on various regions of the world. Each of the five area studies centers at OSU, in cooperating with the Mershon Center, will host a meeting dealing with its respective region. Last quarter the Middle East Center organized such a symposium. This quarter the Slavic Center invites a former diplomat, a sociologist, and a political scientist to participate in a panel focused on the impact of American culture on Russian culture and anti- Americanism emerging since the end of the Cold War.Item Exile and Otherness(Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security Studies, 2004-04-30) Stephan, AlexanderItem State Responses to the Collapse of Civil Order: an Italian Example(Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security Studies, 2003-12-04) Davis, RobertAfter 1560, the Papal States in central Italy were engulfed in an upsurge of urban and rural violence tied to a sharp increase in clan warfare, lethal new weaponry, and general rebellion against centralizing authority. By the late 1570s, the rule of law had largely disappeared from much of the Papal territories. This paper examines the (often unsuccessful) responses attempted by a succession of popes, applied with increasing ferocity against their subjects. In the process, it also explores the contrasting nature of state and private violence, both in a pre-modern and a present-day context, and traces the roots of some of the more extreme methods of repression that we tend to associate with the twentieth rather than the sixteenth century.Item The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Threats to Security and Nation-Building in Afghanistan(Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security Studies, 2003-12-04) Perkins, DougAn Army reservist, Mr. Perkins was mobilized from November 2001 - November 2003 to work as an analyst on the Afghan Crisis Team at the National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC) in Charlottesville, VA. During this time, he gave regular briefings and published several assessments on the various ground forces in Afghanistan. The last two months of his mobilization was spent as NGIC's liaison officer to U.S. forces in Afghanistan. He received the Meritorious Service Medal and the Military Outstanding Volunteer Service Medal for his efforts. He currently serves as a civilian defense economist at the National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC).Item New Boundaries for the World: The Postwar Visions of Eight World War II Leaders(Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security Studies, 2003-12-03) Weinberg, GerhardGerhard Weinberg, a historian well known for his work on World War II discussed his work on the post-war visions of Allied and Axis leaders. He emphasized that there were serious disagreements between these leaders about most things during the war, and a post-war vision was no exceptions.Item Essence of Victory: Winning and Losing International Crises(Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security Studies, 2003-12-02) Tierney, DominicPerceptions of victory and defeat in international crises, regardless of the reality, can make or break political careers, destroy or solidify alliances, and produce a distribution of praise and blame that endures long into the future. On the face of it, evaluating the winning and losing states in crises often seems a straightforward question – winning results from achieving one's aims and gaining tangible benefits in the final settlement or outcome. This talk will argue, however, that people's beliefs about which country has won or lost can be influenced as much by perceptions and misperceptions of the crisis, as they are by the actual reality of the final outcome. The talk, based on a forthcoming article in Security Studies, will focus on how evaluations of which side had won and lost the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis were distorted by a triad of influences: prior biases; the particular evolution of the crisis itself; and the deliberate manipulation of opinion. The talk will show how this new framework of understanding victory and defeat can be applied to perceptions of a number of other crises and wars, including the 1968 Tet offensive, the 1973 Yom Kippur war, and the recurrent crises with North Korea since the early 1990s. Understanding these sources of bias is vital for policy-makers who wish to hold on to power during and after crises, and for the public and media, if they are to hold their leaders accountable.Item The War on Terrorism: Are We Safer Today?(Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security Studies, 2003-11-24) Beers, RandA look at Afghanistan, Iraq, WMD terrorism, the UN and international coalitions, the US approach to the Islamic World, and Homeland Security and Civil Liberties.Item Virtue Ethics and Social Psychology(Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security Studies, 2003-11-21) Annas, JuliaRecently some philosophers have claimed that work in social psychology undermines virtue ethics by showing that it rests on a false conception of our moral psychology. I argue that these attacks misconceive what virtue is, and that a more accurate understanding of virtue shows that the philosophers' attacks fail and that virtue ethics can welcome the psychologists' findings.Item Americans and Homeland Security(Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security Studies, 2003-11-21) Gilmore, JamesItem Al Qaeda and Political Terrorism in Southeast Asia(Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security Studies, 2003-11-17) Thayer, CarlyleThis presentation critically examines three approaches to the study of political terrorism in Southeast Asia: international terrorism studies, regional security studies, and country studies. International terrorism specialists place al Qaeda at the center of analysis. Regional security analysts have uncritically accepted this al Qaeda-centric paradigm. Country specialists initially denied there was an international dimension to terrorism, particularly in the case of Indonesia. Recent research by Indonesianists indicates the saliency of local over international factors in explaining political terrorism in Southeast Asia.Item Opportunistic Policy Cycles: A Test in a New Democracy Setting(Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security Studies, 2003-11-14) Zhuravskaya, EkaterinaDr. Zhuravskaya received her Ph.D in Economics from Harvard and is the Director of Research at the Center for Economic and Financial Research in Moscow. She is currently a member of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton.Item George Lowther Steer: Reporting the Bombing of Guernica in 1937(Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security Studies, 2003-11-12) Rankin, NickNicholas Rankin is a prize-winning British broadcaster and the author of two critically acclaimed books: Dead Man's Chest: Travels after Robert Louis Stevenson (Faber, 1987) and Telegram from Guernica: The Extraordinary Life of George Lowther Steer, War Correspondent (Faber, 2003). Nick spent his childhood in Kenya, was educated in England and then worked and travelled in the "southern cone" of South America, and lived in Barcelona, Spain during the transition from Francoism to democracy. He has been a member of the National Union of Journalists in the UK for over twenty years. He works for BBC World Service making radio programmes on a wide variety of subjects. Among the notable feature series he has produced and presented are "A Green History of the Planet", "The Ageing Future", "Plants of Power", "Mapping the World", "Cowboys and Indians", "Americanization", "The Columbus Encounter" and "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee". He is married to the novelist Maggie Gee. They have a 16 year old daughter named Rosa and live in London.Item Partners Apart? The Foreign Policy Attitudes of The American and European Publics(Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security Studies, 2003-11-10) Isernia, PierangeloPierangelo Isernia (Ph.D., University of Padua) is Professor of International Relations in the Department of History, Law, Political and Social Science at the University of Siena. His primary research focuses on public opinion and foreign policy, Europeanization and domestic policy and the role of national identity and the use of force. He is the author of numerous books, including Public Opinion and the International Use of Force (Routledge, 2001), and numerous articles.Item POWER CYCLE THEORY IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, MANAGEMENT, AND FINANCE: ABSOLUTE CHANGE AND THE NON-LINEARITIES OF COMPETITION(Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security Studies, 2003-11-07) Doran, CharlesWhat matters in the structural dynamics of any political or economic system is the contradiction between absolute and relative trends. The “single dynamic” of power and role, of state and system (or firm and industry), encodes the “perspective of statecraft” (of strategic planning and implementation) in the trends and shifting trends of relative share. These “tides of history” shift counter-intuitively, creating enormous uncertainty, inverting future expectations about role and security (the trend of future profits), disrupting the normal stability of statecraft. These critical points (structural shifts) on the power cycle are causally related to alliance behavior and to the most massive wars in history. Complementarity and competitiveness lead to productive interaction and to the evolution of industry or international system.Item Evaluating IR’s Crystal Balls: How Predictions of the Future Have Withstood Fourteen Years of Unipolarity(Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security Studies, 2003-11-04) Fettweis, ChristopherThe fall of the Berlin Wall inspired a variety of scholars to speculate about why the Cold War came to such an abrupt and shocking end, why no school of thought anticipated its demise, and what the event meant for international relations theory. A set of articles simultaneously emerged purporting to identify the most salient aspects of the new system, structural and otherwise, and to anticipate the direction in which it was heading. This paper begins a re-examination of some of those predictions, using the evidence that has accumulated over the decade and a half since the collapse of bipolarity to evaluate how early visions of the post-Cold War international system matched events that followed. In all the main areas of contention between neorealist and constructivist predictions – over balancing, the rise of multipolarity, and conflict – constructivism, with its emphasis on the role of ideas and norms in state behavior, has proven more prescient.Item Chechnya Diary: A War Correspondent’s Story of Surviving the War in Chechnya(Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security Studies, 2003-10-29) Goltz, ThomasA self-styled “Post-Sovietologist,” Goltz has been writing and speaking about the former Soviet Union since its collapse in 1991. His articles have appeared in publications as diverse as the Washington Post, New York Times, Business Week, The Nation, and Soldier of Fortune. He has also produced short films that have aired on the BBC, PBS and Turkish and Russian NTV stations, while his book on Azerbaijan (M.E. Sharpe, 1998) is regarded as obligatory reading for students of the region. His most recent publication, Chechnya Diary (St. Martin's Press, 2003) will be a central part of his presentation. Of the book, the author John le Carre (David Cornwell) has written: "Russia's murderous and unrelenting persecution of the Chechens, now shamefully condoned by the United States and Britain as part of the war on terror, is here vividly portrayed in all its surreal horror. We must forgive Goltz his egotism and thank him with all guns for his message."Item Conflict on the Korean Peninsula? An Analysis of Inter-Korean Relations(Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security Studies, 2003-10-28) Yoo, Ho YeolHo Yeol Yoo is a visiting scholar this year at the Mershon Center. He is currently a professor of Political Science at Korea University. After receiving his Ph.D from Ohio State, he worked for several years at the Korea Institute for National Unification (KINU), where he worked extensively on the relationship between North and South Korea.Item The New Diplomacy: Propaganda and U.S. Foreign Relations in the Early 20th Century(Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security Studies, 2003-10-21) Osgood, KennethEvery major foreign office in the world ... is doing things today which it would have considered startling, if not improper, even ten years ago," an American official observed in the mid-20th century. He was speaking about propaganda, and about the increasingly commonplace act of meddling in the internal affairs of other countries. When he spoke, propaganda had already become an established fact of international relations. Gradually over the first half of the 20th century, the ancient art of diplomacy was transformed by the ongoing communications revolution. Foreign policy experts increasingly acknowledged that negotiations needed to take place on two levels: the diplomatic level between governments and the popular level to win international support for policies. Propaganda emerged as a critical element of the nation's foreign policy: not only publicizing ideas and manipulating minds, but changing the very act of diplomacy itself.Item Law, Politics, and Justice in Zimbabwe: Recognizing War Contributions(Ohio State University. Mershon Center for International Security Studies, 2003-10-16) Kriger, NormaNorma Kriger (Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology) is a visiting scholar this year at the Mershon Center. Her research on Zimbabwe reflects her interests in revolutionary war mobilization and post-war reconstruction. She is the author of Zimbabwe’s Guerrilla War: Peasant Voices and Guerrilla Veterans: Symbolic and Violent Politics in Zimbabwe, 1980-1987, as well as numerous articles that have appeared in such publications as African Studies Quarterly and Review of African Political Economy. Prior to coming to Ohio State, Kriger was a visiting fellow at Princeton University’s Center for International Studies, a Peace Fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, and was on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University. She has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, including one from the Lilly Foundation and from Yale University, as well as an individual research grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.