Fall 2010

End Notes

End Notes features the professional achievements of our scholars, students, and staff.  This includes recent awards, speaking engagements, and publications.

Activities

Seminar XXI celebrates 25th anniversary; The Center's series Audit of the Conventional Wisdom continues with a look at the security implications of the crisis in Krygyzstan; MIT experts Barry Posen, Henry Jacoby, and Simon Johnson assessed President Obama's work on Afghanistan, climate, and the economy; PEGS is initiating a new fellows program for graduate students at MIT; John Dower spoke about his new book Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9-11, and Iraq; The Center is hosting a range of IAP courses for January 2011.

Briefings

David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary for the United Kingdom from 2007 to 2010, will join CIS as a Robert E. Wilhelm Fellow in residence; Rabia Mehmood, a journalist in the Lahore bureau of Express 24/7 Television in Pakistan, has received the 2010-11 Elizabeth Neuffer Fellowship; A year-long study in six countries has found that the goals of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325, enacted 10 years ago, have not been fulfilled and that implementation is generally poor; CIS, along with The European Medicines Agency (EMA) and MIT's Center for Biomedical Innovation (CBI), is launching a collaborative research project with a focus on enhancing regulatory science in pharmaceuticals.

Much ado about decline

Author: 

By Joshua Itzkowitz Shifrinson

For at least the third time in the post-war era, the decline of American power is at the forefront of American foreign policy discourse. In perhaps the clearest manifestation of the decline hypothesis to date, President Obama argued in his 2010 State of the Union address: 

"China is not waiting to revamp its economy. Germany is not waiting. India is not waiting. These nations—they're not standing still. These nations aren't playing for second place [. . .] Well, I do not accept second place for the United States of America [emphasis added]."

Democratic insecurities: violence, trauma, and intervention in Haiti

Author: 

By Erica Caple James

On January 12, 2010, as this book entered the final stages of production, Haiti was struck with a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions, the latest in a long series of catastrophes that have afflicted the nation and its people. The epicenter of the 7.0 magnitude earthquake was mere kilometers southwest of the nation’s capital, Port-au-Prince, where the ethnographic research discussed in this book was conducted. Between 1995 and 2000 I worked with survivors of human rights abuses from the 1991-94 coup years and studied the interveners that attempted to rehabilitate them as part of my project analyzing the role of humanitarian and development assistance in postconflict reconstruction. Current estimates are that 80 percent of the capital has been destroyed.

précis Interview: Diane Davis

Diane Davis, a member of CIS, is professor of political sociology in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Her current research is focused on cities in conflict and, within that area, police corruption and police violence.

USAID is providing $385,000 for 8 case studies of urban resilience in situations of chronic violence. Through this grant, Davis and John Tirman (executive director and principal research scientist at CIS) will explore how cities from Brazil to Pakistan cope with violence, and inform policymakers of promising practices.

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