I’m starting to put together my syllabi for next year. And so I’ve been reading some new books that I plan to use for my classes. Currently, I’m working my way through an incredibly interesting book on Nepal: Many Tongues, One People by Arjun Guneratne.

The Monday deadlines came & went. And I’m pleased to share that I’ll be joining Mount Saint Mary’s University in the fall. I think it’s a great fit for me, personally & professionally. It’s also conveniently located near K8’s post-doc at the University of Delaware, which means I don’t have to move far away. Most importantly, it’s tenure track.

The spring speaker series I put together at Dickinson is winding down, w/ two final speakers who will focus on the Andes.

A number of interesting (personal/professional) developments in the last few days. But they’ll have to wait until Monday, when I give a definitive answer. But my days at Dickinson are winding down, w/ only five more weeks left to go. It is, in many ways, a wonderful relief.

If you’re in the Dickinson area next week, you may be interested in the next installments of our Latin American Studies speaker series.

It’s hard to believe how quickly time passes. Javi is almost a month old now (and fussier by the day). The lack of sleep is starting to slowly wear me down. I still have two major projects (book manuscript, article rewrite) to finish—because in two weeks grading papers will take over my life.

I’ve had trouble getting some of my students (in a 200-level political science course on “Democracy & Democratization”) to engage in the semester readings. So finally I decided put together a handout to walk them through a single article.

The Argentine presidential elections are coming up tomorrow (Sunday, 28 October). It’s highly likely that Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the wife of current president Néstor Kirchner, will win the presidential race. The latest Angus Reid poll puts her at 47%—w/ her nearest rival (Elisa Carrió) pulling in barely 16%.

Last semester I designed a little “constitutional engineering” exercise for comparative politics. It’s probably better for a special topics course. Fortunately, I’m teaching just such a course this semester: Democracy & Democratization.

I’ve just finished the syllabus for my spring 2008 research methods course. Here’s the syllabus.

I’m teaching a multidisciplinary introduction to Latin American studies course next semester. It took me a while to conceptualize the course, but here’s the syllabus. Below are some of the texts I’m assigning (also in my Amazon bookstore). Comments are always welcome.

Last semester, I conducted a voting simulation in several political science classes (thank you, colleagues) at Dickinson. This year, I hope to expand that to a much broader cross-section of the student body. In addition, I’m hoping to rope in a few other colleges & universities, if possible. I’ll be running the simulation at Dickinson from October 22 through November 2.

A recent study by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) shows that most American college students can’t pass a test on political institutions & history. I know standardized tests aren’t de rigueur. But they do seem to say something. Like how a fifth of Americans can’t locate the US on a world map. So I took the ISI civics quiz. Some of the questions were trickier than I thought, but I’m happy to report that I passed (though only w/ a 93.3%). Care to try your luck?

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PS. It turns out the above claim about American’s geographic ignorance isn't true. Here’s a 2006 National Geographic report.

I’m constantly glad I’ve signed up for the Teaching Comparative Politics blog newsletter. Today it linked to a story in the New York Times about Iran’s attempts at “Molding the Ideal Islamic Citizen.” They suggest using it to make comparisons w/ similar efforts to create “new” citizens in the Soviet Union & China. But I have other ideas.

The article will fit perfectly w/ today’s discussion. Students were assigned three articles to read from Essential Readings in Comparative Politics:

Samuel Huntington (1993), “The Clash of Civilizations”—which argues that the world is now divided into “civilizations” (Western-Christian, Islamic, Hindu, etc.) as the fault lines of political conflict.

Amartya Sen (2002), “Civilizational Imprisonments: How to Misunderstand Everybody in the World”—which argues that Huntington is reductionist: civilizations are more complex than many realize & individuals can hold multiple identities.

Mark Juergensmeyer (1995), “The New Religious State”—which argues that “theocratic” states (in particular Islamic ones, but he mentions others) are similar to “secular” nation-states (if we accept that nationalism is a “secular religion”).

Last week they read about states & the historical-institutional development of modern states. This week they’ve been reading about nations, society, and political culture. Today was set aside for “in class discussion”—particularly as Huntington & Sen clearly hold conflicting views. The Times piece will (I hope) make the Juergensmeyer article more salient.

It’s perhaps fitting that today—on the anniversary of “9/11”—my Democracy & Democratization class is reading the first chapter of Samuel Huntington’s The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (1991). It’s fitting because “9/11” is both the anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 2001 and of the US-supported (if not directly “backed”) Chilean military coup of 1973.

While Huntington’s work has been controversial, he’s made some important insights that aren’t easily dismissed—and shouldn’t be overlooked. One of them is this snippet on pages 29-30:

“… the future of democracy in the world is of special importance to Americans. The United States is the premier democratic country in the modern world, and its identity as a nation is inseparable from its commitment to liberal and democratic values. Other nations may fundamentally change their political systems and continue their existence as nations. The United States does not have that option.”

Most of the class discussion will focus on the Huntington’s introduction to the idea of “waves” of democratization, which they’re reading alongside Dankward Rustow’s 1970 classic article, “Transitions to Democracy: Toward a Dynamic Model.” But I hope we have a chance to parse out this Huntington nugget (which closely follows an argument that increased democratization throughout the world may bring more peace & less violence). Because what Huntington notes in this passage is that US political identity is wrapped up in our belief in liberal, democratic values. The US isn’t only the premier democracy (for all its faults), but the world’s premier case of “civic” (as opposed to organic, ethnic, or cultural) nationalism.

The US wasn’t founded on the belief that “the American people” should govern themselves (in the way that, say, the Serbian nation-state is explicitly Serbian and not for others in Serbian territory—this example could be applied to a host of “ethnic” nation-states), but on the belief that people should. Re-read the first line of the Declaration of Independence; it clearly implies a universal scope. And it suggests that the US has a founding mission to promote the spread of democracy.

Perhaps if we paid more attention to the struggle for freedom & democracy around the world, we wouldn’t be so surprised in international relations. And we may need to constantly remind ourselves that our first priority—or “prime directive”—as a state is to act in ways that promote democratic values around the world. Perhaps the last question made before any policy decision should be this: “Will this policy hinder or advance the cause of freedom in the world?”

YouTube recently launched a University Channel, and Dickinson is participating in the project. Our first video is a 40-minute panel discussion preceding a screening of The Situation, a film about contemporary Iraq. I attended the event, which took place a few months ago. I found both the discussion & the film thought-provoking (even if the film, as a film, wasn’t all that good).

I’m using more YouTube snippets in the classroom. I have these “smart” classrooms, so why not take advantage of them? Or I simply point my students to them, as extra “reading” assignments. Today’s discussion (in my comparative politics course), for example, will make use of FP’s Failed States Index & a series of short (4-10 minute) interviews w/ diplomats from “failed” states (as rated by FP).

Just a quick note: I’ve been following the use of Facebook in the 2007-08 presidential primary races. Here’s a paper on about the Facebook & the 2006 mid-term elections. This is the kind of thing I plan to use in my Spring 2008 research methods course.

I enjoy having students write comparative papers, rather than merely sing-country case studies for their papers. I think it forces them to think harder about what their research question. I usually also insist that the two “cases” come from different “areas” (geographic/cultural regions)—unless, of course, it’s a course on a specific region (e.g. Latin American politics).

Stories like this make me glad I decided to add Frank Foer’s How Soccer Explains the World to the reading list for next semester’s comparative politics course. It’s a story about Iraq’s national soccer team (by Time magazine’s Tony Karon), which plays tomorrow (against Saudi Arabia) in the Asian Cup final. Could a victory help bring an end (even a temporary one) to the violence? The Ivory Coast’s civil war ended in similar circumstances last year. The combination of sports (and other elements of pop culture) & politics is often underappreciated.

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PS. Iraq won the 2007 Asian Cup, it’s first ever.