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Topics in this
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July 16, 2009
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U.S.
President Barack Obama greets the crowd at
a departure ceremony at the airport in Accra, Ghana, Saturday, July
11, 2009. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak) |
Africa
OBAMA'S AFRICA AGENDA. Jennifer Cooke,
Current History,
May 2009, pp. 195-201. “The Obama administration needs to
persuade a potentially skeptical Congress and public that Africa
warrants investment; that the gains of the past decade should not be
put at risk. . . .”
READ MORE
AFRICOM: TROUBLED INFANCY, PROMISING FUTURE. James Forest, Rebecca
Crispin, Contemporary Security Policy, April 2009, pp.5-29.
"Officially activated on 1 October 2008, US Africa Command (AFRICOM)
is first and foremost an internal consolidation and reorganization
of Defense Department personnel. Its primary mission is to help
Africans address their security challenges. AFRICOM differs from
other Defense Department organizations by focusing primarily on
activities that contribute not to warfighting, but war prevention.
Even so, it has struggled with controversy since its inception. The
views of key constituencies range from lukewarm acceptance to
outright hostility. The central lesson from this research is that
the views of foreign audiences toward American foreign policies have
a direct impact on the success of those policies." READ MORE.
OBAMA AND AFRICA: MATCHING EXPECTATIONS
WITH REALITY. Princeton N Lyman, Kathryn A Robinette, Journal
of International Affairs, Spring 2009, pp. 1-19. "The
election of Barack Obama as president of the US has aroused
expectations around the world, but nowhere as much as in Africa.
Obama inherits a record of achievement on the continent from George
W. Bush that will be hard to match, if not exceed. He will also be
far more heavily engaged elsewhere in the world than in Africa, with
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the nuclear threat from Iran, problems
encompassing Russia and the worldwide economic crisis. Obama will
face serious crises in Africa that the Bush administration was not
able to resolve."
READ MORE
U.S. FOREIGN ASSISTANCE TO AFRICA:
SECURING AMERICA'S INVESTMENT FOR LASTING DEVELOPMENT. Katherine J
Almquist, Journal of International Affairs, Spring 2009,
pp. 19-36. "Since 2001, the US has dramatically increased its
commitment to development in Africa and has transformed the way it
is implemented. In the last eight years, US foreign assistance to
sub-Saharan Africa managed by the State Department and the US Agency
for International Development has increased by $5.5 billion, or
340%. This article will examine how the US can achieve greater
development impact in Africa with its foreign assistance dollars.
The Obama administration has already signaled its intentions to keep
aid levels high, yet budgetary pressures in the current economic
climate and other pressing foreign policy priorities will push
against sustaining the US' level of commitment, much less to go
beyond and do more to meet the serious challenges still impeding
developmental progress in Africa."
READ MORE
Afghanistan
FLIPPING THE TALIBAN. FILE. Christia Fotini
and Michael Semple,
Foreign Affairs,
July/August 2009, var. pages.
"President Barack Obama's proposed
deployment of 21,000 more U.S. troops to
Afghanistan is necessary to tip the balance
of power against the Taliban. But it will
not be enough. Washington and its allies
must accompany the move with a political
"surge," an effort to persuade large groups
of insurgents to give up their fight. This
can be done: in Afghanistan, battles are
often decided by defections rather than
fighting, and for many members of the
Taliban, the insurgency is less a matter of
ideology than a way of life."
READ
MORE
Counterterrorism
A COUNTERTERRORISM STRATEGY FOR THE OBAMA
ADMINISTRATION. Bruce Hoffman,
Terrorism and Political Violence, July 2009, pp. 359-377.
"Al-Qaeda
is most dangerous when it has a safe haven from which to plant and
plot attacks. It has acquired
such a haven in Pakistan’s Federal Administered Tribal Areas and its
North-West Frontier Province and nearby areas, concludes terrorism
expert Bruce Hoffman at Georgetown University.
During 2008 al-Qaeda was able to re-group and re-organize in
these lawless regions along the Afghan-Pakistan border, once again
having a sanctuary in which it can operate, while marshalling its
forces to continue its struggle with the U.S.
The highest priority for the new administration and U.S.
allies is to refocus on Afghanistan and Pakistan, Hoffman says; part
of any counterterrorism strategy must include an understanding that
al-Qaeda and its local affiliates cannot be defeated by military
means alone. At its basic
level, a new strategy requires two major requirements -– a military
capability to systematically destroy and weaken enemy capabilities,
and the means to break the cycle of terrorist recruitment and
effectively counter al-Qaeda’s information operations."
READ MORE
Russia and Eurasia
GAS SUPPLY AND EU-RUSSIA RELATIONS. Evert
Faber
Van Der Meulen,
Europe-Asia Studies,
July 2009, pp. 833-856. "Drawing
on New Institutional Economics (NIE) theory, the article argues that
EU energy policy towards Russia damages security of supply because
it neglects the specific aims and propensities of Russia and Gazprom.
EU Commission initiatives are based on the promotion of
interdependence through market opening, favouring a policy of
competition over security of supply. The reason for this focus is
found in the EU's embedded inclination towards liberal markets.
Russia, by contrast, has chosen suboptimal state control of natural
resources over the frontier capitalism of the 1990s. Sustainability
of the current rent based system and geopolitical considerations are
essential to Russia and Gazprom. In this situation a pragmatic
approach that aims at security of supply and security of demand
seems to be more successful. In this approach, liberalisation of the
market can only be a long-term goal."
THE RUSSIA FILE.
Robert Legvold,
Foreign Affairs, July/August 2009, var. pages.
"As it redesigns U.S. policy toward Russia, the Obama
administration really does need to turn a page rather than simply
tinker at the edges. This means setting far more ambitious goals for
the U.S.-Russian relationship and devising a strategy to reach them.
It means starting a comprehensive strategic dialogue."
READ MORE
CENTRAL EURASIA IN THE EMERGING GLOBAL
BALANCE OF POWER. Adrian Pabst, American Foreign Policy
Interests, May 2009, pp. 166-176. "This analysis
identifies a new dynamic evident in the world and explains why it is
changing the existing power balance and reshaping the geopolitics of
the wider Middle East and beyond. The decline of Western power and
the rise of a new nexus between Central Asia and the wider Middle
East are likely to strengthen the influence of Russia and China at
the expense of the United States and Israel."
READ MORE
Iran
WHICH PATH TO PERSIA? OPTIONS FOR A NEW AMERICAN STRATEGY TOWARD
IRAN.
Kenneth M. Pollack,
Daniel L. Byman,
Martin S. Indyk,
et al., The Brookings
Institution, June 2009, var. pages.
“What should the United States do about
Iran? The question is easily asked, but for nearly 30 years,
Washington has had difficulty coming up with a good answer. The
Islamic Republic presents a particularly confounding series of
challenges for the United States. Many Iranian leaders regard
the United States as their greatest enemy for ideological,
nationalistic, and/or security reasons, while a great many
average Iranians evince the most pro-American feelings of any in
the Muslim world. Unlike other states that may also fear or
loathe the United States, Iran’s leaders have consistently acted
on these beliefs, working assiduously to undermine American
interests and influence throughout the Middle East, albeit with
greater or lesser degrees of success at different times.
Moreover, Iranian foreign policy is frequently driven by
internal political considerations that are both difficult to
discern by the outside world and even harder to influence. More
than once, Iran has followed a course that to outsiders appeared
self-defeating but galvanized the Iranian people to make
far-reaching sacrifices in the name of seemingly quixotic goals.
Despite these frustrating realities, the United States is not in
a position to simply ignore Iran, either. Iran is an important
country in a critical part of the world. Although Tehran’s role
in creating problems in the Middle East is often exaggerated, it
has unquestionably taken advantage of the growing instability
there (itself partly a result of American missteps) to make
important gains, often at Washington’s expense.”
READ MORE
CONTAINING IRAN?: AVOIDING A TWO-DIMENSIONAL STRATEGY IN A
FOUR-DIMENSIONAL REGION. Dalia Dassa Kaye and Frederic Wehrey
Washington Quarterly, July 2009, pp. 37-53.
"The authors’ fieldwork
finds the idea that Arab support to contain Iran has been spurred by
Tehran’s recent regional gains is dangerously flawed, based on a
misreading of local politics and the nuanced ways Arab states are
managing, and in some cases exploiting, the challenge from Iran."
READ
MORE
Clean and Green Energy
CATCHING A WAVE.
ELIZABETH RUSCH,
Smithsonian, July 2009, pp. 66-71. "In this article,
Rusch profiles electrical engineer Annette von Jouanne, head of the
Wallace Energy Systems and Renewables Facility at Oregon State
University, and one of the driving forces in the development of wave
energy. By some projections, tapping the energy of the tides could
meet 6.5 percent of U.S. electric power needs.
Many researchers over the years have attempted to build
devices to transform the energy of waves into electricity, but von
Jouanne advocates simplicity in design to achieve the most
dependable energy flow.
Her current design now being tested is shaped like a flying saucer
with a generating coil and a sliding magnet assembly capable of
generating a few kilowatts of electricity in a gentle wave.
Building the device is only one design problem; a means to
keep it anchored and consistently functioning in the tides is also
challenging. The Oregon
State researchers also need to avoid creating a device that could
damage the seaside ecosystem.
READ MORE
FACING DOWN ARMAGEDDON: OUR ENVIRONMENT AT
A CROSSROADS. Maurice Strong, World Policy Journal,
Summer 2009, Vol. 26, No. 2: 25–32. "The accelerating damage
to the Earth’s natural capital will have even more devastating
consequences for the human future than the current financial and
economic crises. The economic and human costs of climate change to
the global economy already amount to an estimated $125 billion per
year and the loss of 300,000 lives, according to a recent study by
the Global Humanitarian Forum headed by former UN Secretary-General
Kofi
Annan. (...) Some, however, still contend we can only deal with the
risks of climate change and repair damage from environmental
degradation after we fix the global economy. This is the height of
folly. Waiting would only intensify the imminent threats to our
civilization. Climate change is rooted in the same basic condition
that has produced the global financial and economic crises—the
unsustainable nature of our existing economic system."
READ MORE
PORTRAITS OF CLIMATE CHANGE: THE ROCKY
MOUNTAINS. Lina Barrera, World Watch Magazine,
July/August 2009, pp. 8-19. "People have been moving westward
in North America since the earliest European settlement of the
continent. For many early migrants, the Rocky Mountains simply
impeded progress toward California and the Pacific coast, but more
recent arrivals have come to the Rockies to stay, drawn by their
spectacular beauty, agreeable weather, livable communities, and
seemingly endless options for outdoor recreation. The area has
become a rapid-growth zone; six of the top ten fastest-growing U.S.
states lie along the Rockies. Growth of this magnitude would have
brought problems at any time, but the recent spurt has come during
an era of increasing stress on natural systems. Drought, resource
development, land-use changes, and above all climate change have put
the population growth and the region's ecosystems on a collision
course." READ MORE
ITS ECONOMY IN
SHAMBLES,THE MIDWEST GOES GREEN. KEITH SCHNEIDER, Yale
Environment 360, July 16, 2009, var. pages. "It took
awhile, but the U.S. Midwest finally has recognized that the
industries that once powered its economy will never return.
Now leaders in the region are looking to renewable energy
manufacturing and technologies as key to the heartland’s
renaissance."
READ MORE
Economy & Financial Markets
UNTANGLING THE RECOVERY.
ROBERT BRODSKY, Government
Executive, June 2009, var. pages. "The
author believes that government has another chance at proving it can
be effective in the present economic climate.
In early May 2009, President Obama unveiled his formal fiscal
2010 budget, including a list of 121 cuts to federal programs that
added up to a savings of about $17 billion.
Then there is the $787 billion American Recovery and
Reinvestment Act, signed less than a month after Obama took office,
as an opportunity to prop up a faltering economy, spur long-term
investments in energy and in education, and put millions of
unemployed Americans back to work.
For the nation’s over 2.7 million federal employees, the
stimulus plan and the new FY2010 budget represent chances to prove
that the government can still operate as an effective management
organization. Right now, the
most important use of funds are those that are allocated by the
Recovery Act to get Americans back to work and to restart a
faltering economy. Of this,
$60 billion is expected to be spent on federal contracts with
another $84 million going to the Recovery Accountability and
Transparency Board that was created to oversee fund disbursement and
to manage Recovery.gov, the central government repository for
information on the stimulus. READ
MORE
THE FINANCIAL
MARKETS AND FEAR ITSELF. HOLMAN W. JENKINS JR., Policy
Review, Jun/Jul 2009, pp.3-13. "There may not be a
national housing market, and certainly
there isn't a global one. But there is a
national economy, as well as a global economy, and policy structure
and political culture, and a media that communicates information and
analysis and fears and expectations instantly and globally.
Impossible to separate, then, are the precipitous
drop of confidence in asset values and a preciptous drop in
confidence in government policy, on which asset values necessarily
in part depend." READ MORE.
READ MORE
US Society & Values
THE TWITTER EXPLOSION. Paul Farhi.
American Journalism Review, June/July 2009, online edition.
"Whether they are reporting about it, finding sources on it
or urging viewers, listeners and readers to follow them on it,
journalists just can’t seem to get enough of the social networking
service. Just how effective is it as a journalism tool?"
Paul Farhi, a Washington Post reporter, writes frequently about
the media for the Post and AJR.
READ MORE
RISE OF THE GEEKS. Steve Baker,
Charlotte Middlehurst. New Statesman, April 27, 2009, pp.
20-23. A new class of specialists is analysing which
websites you look at, what you buy in the supermarket, and how you
behave at work. As we produce ever more digital data, the numerates
influence can only grow.
READ MORE
INFOMANIA. Carolyn
Marsan. Government
Executive, May 2009, pp. 34-42. The author notes that as participatory government brings an
onslaught of public comments online, agencies will need the right
tools to make sense of it all. In 2008, the General Services
Administration (GSA) had 214 million electronic communications with
the U.S. public, and it expects that number to increase in 2009.
Similar situations have developed at other government agencies as
they realize that more and more of public opinion and commentary are
going to be sustained through the new media. However, these new
examples of social media have several challenges in adopting
customer feedback techniques like those used in the private sector,
such as asking citizens to rank their interests on various subjects.
While federal agencies are new at gathering and analyzing public
comments, private business is experienced in managing feedback by
combining automated and manual processes, structured and
unstructured data. Government agencies also have legal restrictions;
they often have to negotiate standard terms of services with
providers because the government is bound by multiple federal
regulatory requirements.
READ MORE
TREATING DEPRESSION:
IS EFFECTIVE TREATMENT AVAILABLE.
Marcia Clemmitt. CQ
Researcher, June 26, 2009, pp. 575-595. Depression and
suicide always increase in tough economic times, as indicated by a
rash of suicides by men despondent over their families' financial
troubles. Meanwhile, a wave of suicides and mental disorders —
mainly post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression — has
hit military personnel returning from repeated deployments in
Afghanistan and Iraq, swamping military health-care systems.
Depression, the most common serious mental illness, is sometimes
caused by genetics, but it also can be triggered by stress or
trauma. Access to treatment has expanded in recent years, as more
and more primary-care doctors screen for the disease. And a new
mental-health-care “parity” law passed by Congress in 2008 is
expected to increase insurance coverage as well as access to
mental-health services. But many people with severe depression
remain uninsured and dependent on public health-care programs, which
recession-plagued states are cutting back as revenues dwindle.
READ MORE
Education
STIMULATING EXCELLENCE: UNLEASHING THE
POWER OF INNOVATION IN EDUCATION. The American
Enterprise Institute, May 2009, PP. 1-44. "The 2009
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act supports entrepreneurship in
education through a $650 million “innovation fund” designed to
encourage non-profits aimed at increasing student achievement to
scale-up their initiatives. Recognizing that entrepreneurs in
education often face barriers to success, this report presents
creative solutions to address such barriers that prohibit success at
the local, state, and federal levels."
READ MORE
A NEW GOAL FOR
AMERICA'S HIGH SCHOOLS: COLLEGE PREPARATION FOR ALL. Ron
Haskins; James Kemple. Brookings Institution Policy
Brief Spring 2009, pp. 1-8. (PDF)
"Disadvantaged young people in the United States have experienced
declining economic opportunity in recent decades. Experts agree that
the best way for disadvantaged youth to boost their income is by
achieving a degree from a two-year or four-year college. Here we
outline the steps high schools should take to help low-income
students prepare for and succeed in college. Specifically, high
schools should boost students’ subject matter knowledge and study
skills and counsel students on how to select colleges and obtain
financial aid. To increase schools’ accountability, school districts
should build data tracking systems capable of following students
from kindergarten through postsecondary education." Ron
Haskins is a senior editor of The Future of Children, senior fellow
and co-director of the Center on Children and Families at the
Brookings Institution, and a senior consultant at the Annie E. Casey
Foundation. James Kemple is executive director of the Research
Alliance for New York City Schools at New York University.
READ MORE
COMPARATIVE INDICATORS
OF EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES AND OTHER G-8 COUNTRIES: 2009. National
Center for Education Statistics, Web posted March 25, 2009.
"This report describes how the education system in the United States
compares with education systems in the other Group of Eight
(G-8)countries — Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Russian
Federation, the United Kingdom — that are among the world’s most
economically developed countries and among the United States’
largest economic partners. It draws on the most current information
about education from four primary sources: the Indicators of
National Education Systems (INES) at the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD); the Progress in International
Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS); the Program for International
Student Assessment (PISA); and the Trends in International
Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS)."
READ MORE
Immigration
A PORTRAIT OF UNAUTHORIZED IMMIGRANTS IN THE UNITED STATES.
Jeffrey S. Passel; D’Vera Cohn. Pew Hispanic
Center, April 14, 2009, pp. 1-54.
"Unauthorized immigrants living in the United States are more
geographically dispersed than in the past and are more likely than
either U.S.-born residents or legal immigrants to live in a
household with a spouse and children. In addition, a growing share
of the children of unauthorized immigrant parents — 73% — were born
in this country and are U.S. citizens." Jeffrey S. Passel
is Senior Demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center. D'Vera Cohn is
Senior Writer at the Pew Research Center.
READ MORE
IMMIGRANTS TO THE
UNITED STATES AND THE CURRENT ECONOMIC CRISIS. Demetrios G.
Papademetriou; Aaron Terrazas. Migration Information
Source, April 2009, online edition. "Immigration flows
to the United States have noticeably slowed in the last year,
raising fundamental questions for policymakers and analysts about
the effect the economic crisis is having on inflows and return
migration. [The authors] assess the potential impacts by examining
recent data, the likely behavior of immigrants, and immigration
history." Demetrios G. Papademetriou is President and co-founder
of the Migration Policy Institute. Aaron Terrazas is New Media
Director at BlueMango Creative Group.
READ MORE
WHY IMMIGRATION
MATTERS. Khalid Koser.
Current
History, April 2009, pp. 147-153.
"New responses are required
to international migration as it grows in scale and complexity. Most
of the legal frameworks and international institutions established
to govern migration were established at the end of World War II, in
response to a migration reality very different from that existing
today, and as a result new categories of migrants are falling into
gaps in protection. New actors have also emerged in
international migration, including most importantly the corporate
sector, and they have very little representation in migration policy
decisions at the moment. Perhaps most fundamentally, a shift
in attitude is required, away from the notion that migration can
be controlled, focusing instead on trying to manage migration and
maximize its benefits." Khalid
Koser directs the New Issues in Security program at the Geneva
Center for Security Policy. He is also a nonresident fellow at the
Brookings Institution and author of
International Migration: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford
University Press, 2007).
READ MORE
WAITING GAMES: THE POLITICS OF U.S.
IMMIGRATION REFORM. Susan E. Martin.
Current History, April 2009, pp. 160-167. "What the
United States need now is comprehensive reform achieved
incrementally to ensure the effectiveness and test the impact of new
approaches. Such a strategy has a better chance to convincing
skeptics on both sides of the debates." Susan E. Martin is
an associate professor at Georgetown University and director of the
Institute for the study of International Migration at Georgetown's
Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service.
READ MORE
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