IPExplore
International Politics and Economics Magazine Middlebury College
Issue 2
Spring 20091
GO explore 4 IP&E Mission Statement 6 IP&E: Don’t Ask Why— Ask why Not
8 The Origins of IP&E
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Full Circle
20 An Outsider’s Inside View
of the French Government
12 Scientia et Virtus 2
22 From Educator to Afghanistan
32 Featured Images from
Middlebury College’s 2008 Study Abroad Photo Contest
Editor-in-Chief: MarkWilliams Layout/Graphic Design: Carolann Davis Contributors: Julie Ellenberger,Vinay Jawahar, Nicholas Kent, Amichai Kilchevsky, Shawn Kilpatrick, Russell Leng, Eli Sugarman, Mark Williams Front/Back Cover design: Carolann Davis Proof Readers: Martha Baldwin, Carolann Davis
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The City that Mao Built
This magazine may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the express written consent of the editor-in-chief. Responsibility for content lies solely with its contributors.
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Ahhh...Spring!
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IP&E M ISSION S TATEMENT The carefully structured international politics and economics major provide students with the opportunity to study two disciplines as well as areas that cut across traditional departmental and disciplinary lines. Through courses developed and taught by economics and political science faculty, students examine the globalizing world through a variety of conceptual lenses supplied by the social sciences, learn multiple ways of solving problems, and explore areas of inquiry that intersect traditional disciplines. This approach, in combination with the study of languages and the immersion in another culture during study abroad, prepares students for a wide array of opportunities after college, including further study in graduate and professional schools. IP&E alumni are engaged in careers ranging from investment banking to the Peace Corps, from teaching to government service, journalism, public policy and management consulting.
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IP&E: T
his winter I received an email from a prospective student asking if I’d be available for a chat when he visited Middlebury. I told him yes, indeed, and we arranged the meeting. In the end, I enjoyed a stimulating, fortyminute conversation with both him and his father. I learned that they had traveled a long way to get to Middlebury (from across the Atlantic), and that they had other stops to make on their “college tour.” Middlebury, however, was high on their list and they were especially interested the International Politics and Economics program. In fact, in the course of our discussion the student mentioned that “IP&E is the reason I’ve applied to Middlebury; I’ve seen nothing like it at any other institution.” As director of IP&E, it was (of course) gratifying to hear this, but it was not really surprising. Over the years, I’ve heard some variant of this comment—“I came to Middlebury because I wanted to major in IP&E”—on multiple occasions.
Director of International Politics and Economics and Professor of Political Science, Mark Williams Photo: Carolann Davis
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It isn’t hard to understand why. The program not only reflects Middlebury’s strong international orientation, extensive foreign language resources, and commitment to study abroad; it’s also a wonderful blend of economics and international politics. Since
Don’t Ask Why— Ask Why Not its inception, the International Politics and Economics program has grown into one of the College’s most popular majors—one whose themes and subjects of inquiry students find especially relevant in today’s globalized world. IP&E opens up to students new vistas and offers training in new ways to understand and interact with their complex world. IP&E graduates, meanwhile, find that their course work, language training, and study abroad experiences position them for a range of opportunities—from academia to business, and diplomacy to journalism, even medicine—and many other careers in between. IPExplore is devoted to Middlebury’s IP&E majors and those who contemplate choosing this field of study. It’s the designated venue where students can share their experiences, reflect upon their challenges, celebrate their achievements, and find first-hand accounts of what life is like as an IP&E major or graduate. In this issue, we take stock of where the program has come from and where it may be headed, through an article by one of IP&E’s co-founders—Political Science Professor Emeritus, Russ Leng—who was there “at the beginning,” and twenty plus years later, remains pleased by what he sees. And we’re especially pleased to present articles by students past and present whose experiences have taken them from Chile to China, Argentina to France, and Ecuador to Pakistan, with various stops and forays in between. i
“IP&E is the reason I’ve applied to Middlebury; I’ve seen nothing like it at any other institution.”
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The Origins of IP&E
Article by Russell Leng
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I RECEIVED MY LETTER OF acceptance to Middlebury, the most enthusiastic person, besides me, was my high school Spanish teacher. (Never mind that she said that I spoke Spanish like a Texan.) She, like so many other language teachers across the country, had fallen in love with Middlebury after attending the summer language school to attain her M.A. In those days, Middlebury’s international reputation was based on the teaching of foreign languages, primarily its summer graduate program and its schools abroad. The social sciences devoted their attention to home. When I graduated in 1960, the political science department offered just one international course. It was an introduction to comparative politics, although it was not called an introduction because nothing came after it. HEN
I returned several years later as a young faculty member, to find that the situation had not changed much. I was the first faculty to member to offer
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courses in international politics in many years. Thanks to the interest created by the ongoing war in Vietnam, my enrollments were high, and soon the department was growing with additional faculty in international and comparative politics. Double majors and joint majors in languages and political science became common over the next couple of decades. Student interest in courses in international topics grew in other social sciences departments as well, particularly economics. Rising interest in international economics mirrored changes that were occurring in the world. With the Vietnam War over, and the Cold War melting away, economic issues took center stage. In the language departments, enrollments in Japanese increased, while those in Russian declined. The enlarged international curriculum more generally led to interdisciplinary competition for majors, as well as some pedantic debates among faculty over the “best” approach to international studies. Besides the competition between languages
The proposed IP&E major was approved by the faculty with remarkably little debate. Russell Leng, James Jermain Professor Emeritus of Political Economy and International Law
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and social sciences, there was a debate among social scientists (including historians) between area studies specialists, who focused on developing a thorough understanding of particular countries or regions, and functionalists, who advocated methodological training for dealing with particular international problems or issues, such as security, diplomacy, international finance, or development. I always have considered these methodological debates to be somewhat pointless. In the end, any reasonable person would agree that there is merit in each of the approaches. The difficulty confronting many of our majors was that those who were missing one approach or another were unnecessarily narrowing their perspectives, as well as limiting their graduate school or career options. This was the environment in which I approached my friend and colleague from economics, Michael Claudon, to suggest that we develop a proposal to integrate Middlebury’s international strengths into a single major combining international politics, economics, language, and study abroad. In the time it took for a leisurely cup of coffee, we had the outlines of what has become the IP&E major. Our informal approach mercifully avoided the contentiousness and the frustrating wheel-spinning of a committee of “stakeholders” appointed by the administration. Professor Claudon and I were in agreement on three important principles. First, the major had to have strong disciplinary underpinnings—it could not be just a hodgepodge of courses from different
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disciplines. This principle was partly a reflection of our social science training and functionalist leanings. Professor Claudon’s fields were international trade and finance; mine were international politics, conflict, and diplomacy. But we also believed that one of the most important roles of a disciplinary major is the development of theoretical and methodological depth, and we did not want to lose that in a watered-down interdisciplinary program. Second, the major would take advantage of Middlebury’s historical strengths in language and culture, by requiring competence in a foreign language and study abroad in the foreign language. Although Professor Claudon and I were functionalists, we recognized the value of area studies, and we did not want our focus on social science to result in the neglect of the humanities-based side of international studies. The third principle was that the new major should not consume so much of a student’s curriculum that IP&E majors would miss out on the benefits of a broader liberal arts and sciences education. The challenge was to find a way to fit all of this into a single undergraduate major. When we began to look at how many courses economists or political scientists believed were the minimum requirements in their particular disciplines, we found that we had our work cut out for us. When we added the courses in language necessary to achieve the competency to study abroad, and then a year abroad—which we agreed was preferable to just a single term—there was not much room left for anything else. We managed to negotiate some
compromises on course requirements with our colleagues, but issues of what must be required versus what could be optional, have continued over the history of the major. As, I might add, they do for almost all majors. The proposed IP&E major was approved by the faculty with remarkably little debate. Within a few years, it became the fastest growing major at Middlebury. Over the past two-plus decades, IP&E has withstood the test of time very well as one of Middlebury’s most popular and demanding majors. The current global economic crisis, a situation in which international politics and economics are inextricably intertwined, underscores the relevance of the IP&E major today. In fact, politics and economics intersect in virtually all of the major global issues facing us today, from attempting to attain a healthy balance between global environmental concerns and development to combating transnational terrorism, and drug trafficking, or even dealing with modern-day pirates. IP&E graduates, with their strong disciplinary training in both economics and politics, competence in a second language, and the experience of living and studying abroad, are more attractive than ever to employers and graduate programs in this age of globalization. In recent years, as Professor Claudon has employed his creative talents to “Digital Bridges,” an innovative program focusing on strategies and organization in business in the modern age, while I have moved into
those part-time activities that come with retirement. One of those activities has been to serve on the Board of Trustees for the Monterey Institute of International Studies. The Institute, or MIIS as it is known, recently undertook a thorough strategic review of its curricular structure. A concern that surfaced in that review was the relative isolation of each of MIIS’s four schools. The language, translation and interpretation, international business, and international policy schools were described as standing as four separate “silos,” with students in one school finding it difficult to take courses in another. Underlining the concern was the recognition that in today’s world, competent professionals require skills in both international business and politics, as well as the ability to function comfortably in different cultural environments. Under the presidential leadership of two former Middlebury faculty members, Clara Yu, from Chinese, and her successor, Sunder Ramaswamy, from economics, the four schools have been reduced to two in an effort to break down curricular walls. There is a single language school, and international business and international policy studies now are combined into a single school of International Policy and Management (IP&M). Beyond the structural changes, efforts have been mounted to devise new courses and programs that combine MIIS’s strengths in language, business, and policy, along with special projects abroad. As a MIIS Board member, I am delighted by the new direction. It reminds me very much of our own IP&E major. i
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Scientia et Virtus Scientia et Virtus 12
Amichai Kilchevsky is currently a fourth year medical student at The George Washington University School of Medicine. He will be starting his residency in Urologic Surgery at Yale–New Haven Hospital this summer.
Article by Amichai Kilchevsky (IPE&E ’05)
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NTELLECTUALLY CURIOUS BY NATURE, I FELT
comfortable knowing that whatever academic path I chose to pursue at Middlebury College I would receive the best education possible. Inspired by my father, a physician, I was strongly considering a career in medicine and assumed I would settle on a biological science major. However, after taking Professor Jeff Cason’s Comparative Politics course first semester, I realized that I would be missing out if that were the only political science course that I took. Ultimately, I decided on an International Politics and Economics (IP&E) major while still pursuing the pre-med track. I was able to sit down with Professor Mark Williams, Director of the IP&E program, and construct a schedule that would allow me to follow both passions. This multidisciplinary educational experience provided not only a diverse, well-rounded curriculum, but also taught me productive ways of thinking and approaching problems and issues.
My internships reflected the split in my academic interests, but I found that my IP&E training prepared me for all of them. One summer I spent interning in the White House Press Office with Ari Fleischer ’82, while the following summer I volunteered as an emergency medical technician in Israel. With the help of Biology Professor Chris Watters, I was able to spend a J-term working at the Mother Theresa Clinic in Addis Ababa with Dr. Rick Hodes ’75. During my final year at Middlebury, I received a very generous grant through the Rohatyn Center that enabled me to conduct overseas research for my thesis, “Peace and Economic Interdependence in the Middle East.” This project was especially meaningful, and I continued working on it even as a medical student in Washington, D.C. (in fact, working with my Middlebury professors I managed to convert my 250-page thesis into a readable article that was published in The World Economy).
While in medical school, these experiences and the IP&E courses I took provided me both with a needed reprieve on those nights when I could not take another minute of Gross Anatomy, and the ability to approach problems and issues as a political scientist—that is to say, by systematically breaking down issues into component parts, and looking at those parts in a macro, global, or regional context. Even in the strictly “medical world,” I discovered that my Middlebury experiences and training remained relevant. For starters, I learned that many of the surgeons with whom I interviewed for residency were genuinely excited about and, in fact, preferred discussing my political science research rather than my more recent forays into kidney infections and bladder tumors. Moreover, the analytical thinking style that I have described, which I gained at Middlebury, is largely overlooked during the first two years of medical school. When such thinking was once again required during my clinical rotations, I often felt more prepared than my classmates to tackle patients with complex, multiple disease processes. In the end, I was able to apply the many hours I spent with my college professors parsing out political and economic actors in the Middle East and explaining their complex relationships in a simple, yet comprehensive thesis, to patients and their diseases. Thus, in numerous ways my IP&E major has helped me in my accomplishments post-Middlebury, providing me not only with multiple outlets for my intellectual pursuits, but also preparing me to deal with the nuanced complexities of patient care and mediating the current healthcare system. Indeed, after approaching the problem of how to bring peace to the Middle East, anything can seem manageable! i
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AMICHAI KILCHEVSKY ’05, recipient of a RCFIA International Research Travel Grant while at Middlebury, has published “Peace and Economic Interdependence in the Middle East” in The World Economy (2007). The article grew out of his senior thesis in international politics and economics and was coauthored with Kirsten Wandschneider, Middlebury assistant professor of economics and international politics and economics, and Jeffrey Cason, Middlebury associate professor of political science and dean of international programs. Photo: Ami in Jerusalem
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...how did I ever get talked into spending the last of my savings on a plane ticket to California... 16
Article and photography by Vinay Jawahar (IP&E ’03)
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remember Commencement quite clearly. I remember lining up outside Pearson Hall, sleep deprived and in a state of considerable disrepair from the previous night’s carousing. I remember being unspeakably excited about moving on to “the real world.” I remember also that my enthusiasm was dulled by the anxiety of not knowing what the real world had in store for me. Though nothing like today’s economic outlook, 2003 wasn’t exactly a great year to graduate, and I was one of that special breed: the unemployed graduate from a top liberal arts program.
as program assistant at the Inter-American Dialogue, a small (though not unimportant) think tank in D.C. Surely luck had an important role to play in my (eventually) successful job search, but just as important (if not more) was my Middlebury background. As an IP&E major, my education had provided me with considerable breadth and depth, not least of which was the opportunity to spend a year in Valparaíso, Chile, without having to make excuses for it. From a formally academic perspective, my year in Chile was not nearly as rigorous as an equivalent year at
Full Circle If I’d known any better, I would have been even more concerned about my employment prospects, but luckily for me I didn’t. And so it was that I ended up in Washington, D.C., armed with an unpaid internship at The American Prospect, the naïve optimism that I would definitely find a job before the end of the summer, and most importantly, my sister’s kind offer to let me sleep on her couch. I’d love to be able to tell the story of how much I learned interning at The Prospect, but thankfully for me, I never really had a chance to find out whether I was cut out to work in the publishing industry. A little over a month after graduating, with my bank balance hovering perilously close to zero (how did I ever get talked into spending the last of my savings on a plane ticket to California for a two-week climbing trip?) I was offered a position
Middlebury College would have been, but study abroad has never been (simply) about formal academics. And anyway, I more than made up for it by becoming nearly fluent in Spanish, which was among my most useful and important qualifications coming into the Dialogue. [It would be remiss of me not to acknowledge here the unambiguous support and encouragement I received from my mentors at Middlebury, including everyone at the Rohatyn Center for International Affairs and especially Professors Mark Williams and Allison Stanger.] The Inter-American Dialogue proved to be a great first job, and played to my strengths and training perfectly. After spending the first few months getting comfortable with being inside the Beltway and with
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the administrative requirements of my position, I began organizing and attending conferences where it was not unusual to bump into high-ranking former and current politicians from the United States and Latin American countries, writing opinion pieces for newspapers, and generally honing my analytical and writing skills through the work I did with Michael Shifter, the Dialogue’s vice president. I even had the opportunity to go back to Latin America on several occasions, none of which I passed up. Although only one of those trips took me back to Chile, being invested in the region’s politics on a day-to-day basis allowed me to stay connected to friends I had made during my junior year there. As new and exciting as all this travel to Latin America was, perhaps the most memorable business trip I took in those years was in April 2006, when I returned to Middlebury to give a talk about U.S. policy towards Latin America. As an undergraduate I had toyed often with the idea of going to graduate school, but by the time senior year rolled around I decided that I had best wait until I was more sure about what I wanted to do with my life. Three years after I graduated I was sure (I thought), and I packed up shop in Washington, DC and moved to bucolic Princeton, NJ to join the politics department. It would be nice—although, to be honest, boring—if I were to note at this point that once again my background as an IP&E major held me in good stead. The truth is it did not. Yes I had been exposed to an admirably broad range of questions, but it wasn’t until after I arrived at Princeton that I realized just how different my idea of what
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“professional” political science actually was, from what it truly is. I write this not to cast aspersions on the quality of a Middlebury degree—I continue to believe that I could not have asked for a better undergraduate experience—but rather to sound a cautionary note to students interested in pursuing a doctorate in either economics or politics. As exciting, dynamic, and relevant as the IP&E curriculum at Middlebury College can be, it involves, out of necessity and design, a dilution of the deep and narrow (and arguably drier) focus of its component disciplines. This is not to say that this cannot be remedied at Middlebury itself (the Economics department, I recall, offered not a trivial number of statistics courses, for instance) but one needs to realize the trade-offs inherent in one’s choice of a joint program before one can compensate for them. It has been nearly three years since I arrived at Princeton, and I am considerably surer of myself than I was in my first few months here. I leave in two months to go back to Chile, almost exactly eight years since I first landed in Santiago for my junior year abroad. I’m going back to conduct preliminary fieldwork on my latest intellectual ambition—a desire to better understand the relationship between politicians and police institutions in democratic Latin America. This time my goals will be more specific, my movements around the country more deliberate. One thing, however, stays the same: I might have come full circle, but I am just as excited about this trip as I was about my first. i
Pg. 4: Table of Contents—Vinay on the steps of the Old Museum, Berlin, with the Berliner Dom (Berlin Cathedral) in the background. Pg. 18: Vinay Outside the New Guardhouse (Neue Wache), Unter den Linden, Berlin. Pg. 19: (upper left) Magellanic penguin colony, Otway Sound, Punta Arenas, Chile; (upper right) Student protestors,Valparaíso, Chile (March 2002); (center left) Local boy outside Incan ruins, Cuzco, Peru (December 2001); (center right) flamiNgos (almost) in flight, Atacama Salt Flats, Chile (September 2001); (lower left) Police barricade in anticipation of city-wide protests,Valparaíso, Chile (March 2002).
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An Outsider’s Inside of the French Govern Article and Photography by Julie Ellenberger (IP&E ’09)
S
ITTING SIDE BY SIDE IN CLASS WITH THE
future political and business leaders of France can be a pretty intimidating experience. However, by the end of my six months studying at Sciences Po in Paris, I went from knowing next to nothing about the French political system to writing a persuasive thesis (in the French style, of course) on the real reasons why Ségolène Royal lost the 2007 presidential election to Nicolas Sarkozy. As much as I have grown both as a student and as a person at Middlebury, I have no doubt that being at Sciences Po challenged me to think in new ways and to establish my identity in new surroundings. Also, being with students from so many different nationalities and backgrounds (especially the French ones) was truly a priceless experience in terms of what I learned from them and the life-long friendships that I made. Plus, where else in the world could you take a course entirely devoted to the perfume industry? At Sciences Po, one of the elite universities in France for political science, I had direct access to unbelievable resources–people and places that are much harder to come upon in the U.S., no matter what university one attends. Through my class on women and politics,
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Julie Ellenberger
Hôtel de Ville, city hall and office of the mayor of Paris.
View nment
Amphitheater of French Senate, Palais du Luxembourg.
I was able to go on a private visit of the Senate where we met, discussed, and shared champagne and hors d’oeuvres with the vice president of the Senate at the time, Michèle André. We also visited the National Assembly, where we could pick the brain of one of the leading female representatives, Elisabeth Guigou, on some of the key challenges facing France and Europe in the coming years. She also shared her experience as a woman in a traditionally male-dominated realm. Finally, as a result of a private tour of the Senate with the professor of my class on French political life, we got the inside scoop on the Senate proceedings, the current issues on the docket, and which Senators tend to get the most fired up during debates. However, my time in Paris not only helped me discover an entirely new culture with which I was previously unfamiliar, but also allowed me to reflect on my own culture and perspective of the world. I was the only American (or foreign) student in my discussion class on sustainable development and one of only a couple of Americans in my other courses.
Despite the common perception in the U.S. that the French dislike America, I found that it was indeed quite the opposite. I enjoyed taking on a sort of diplomatic role in order to promote understanding of each others opinions through active listening and respectful discussions. Often, our conversations ended up dispelling negative stereotypes that we had previously held of each other’s cultures. It is a great feeling to come to an understanding that can only result from a genuine interest on both sides as to what the other has to say. I believe that no international politics and economics education is complete without an experience abroad, because no matter how much we learn in the classroom at Middlebury, it is not until we leave that we are truly able to apply and build on our knowledge of how the world really works and how we can improve it. In any case, France is definitely a culture to which I feel very well adapted and cannot wait to explore further. i
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Article and photography by Eli Sugarman (IP&E ’02)
S
EATED IN THE CAVERNOUS CONFERENCE HALL,
I was surrounded by a sea of uniforms punctuated by an occasional suit or dress. Military officers, civilian defense officials, and diplomats from thirty-three countries had gathered in Quito, Ecuador, for the 2004 Conference of Ministers of Defense of the Americas, where we were now considering a paragraph on the use of anti-personnel landmines. Negotiations of the final Declaration—a political document summarizing the sentiments of the meeting—were moving along nicely until we hit an impasse. As I leaned forward to advise him how to respond to the proposal, the senior U.S. Defense Department official entrusted by Secretary Rumsfeld to wrap up the negotiations turned around in his seat and asked me to take the U.S. chair. Abruptly, he then stood up and left, leaving me responsible for concluding the negotiations and representing U.S. interests. I was surprised by this turn of events, because just about every other member of the U.S. delegation outranked me—soldiers and civilians alike. I could only hope that what I lacked in seniority, I made up for in subject matter expertise. I took a minute to gather my thoughts and to remind myself that my three years as a Foreign Affairs Officer at the Department of State had given me considerable exposure to multilateral negotiations on regional security matters. As a member of the U.S. Permanent Mission to the Organization of American States, I regularly negotiated resolutions on these same security-related issues. When the light on the microphone turned green and the Ecuadorian Brigadier General offered the floor to “el delegado de los Estados Unidos,” I explained why my government did not support the proposed language
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calling upon non-state actors (i.e. terrorist groups) to abide by the Ottawa Convention prohibition on the use of anti-personnel landmines. Although common sense would dictate support for a proposal urging terrorist groups such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) to refrain from such practices, I could not. Rather, I advocated the position of my government, which, despite being contrary to the will of the other countries, was nonetheless technically correct: the Ottawa Convention applies only to sovereign states, not to non-state actors. Consequently, urging non-state actors to abide by an international legal norm that applies only to governments—no matter how noble the intent— would set a dangerous precedent by affording non-state actors stature that by definition they lack. This episode is but one example of how the most challenging and exciting issues that I faced at the State Department were always those with a significant legal component. On a regular basis I came to debate, in Spanish, a range of international legal issues as diverse as the maritime transport of radioactive materials on the high seas, to conflict resolution mechanisms under the Pact of Bogotá, to illicit arms trafficking. Some of my most difficult assignments—for example, convincing foreign ministers of the value of nonsurrender agreements under Article 98 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court—were deeply rooted in the fascinating nexus between foreign policy and law. Experiences such as these motivated my desire to attend law school. I am now in my final year of law school at Stanford University where my studies focus on international law, national security law, and law and development. My most rewarding experience at law school has been co-founding and leading Stanford’s Afghanistan Legal Education Project (ALEP)–a student-driven
Pgs. 22-23: Panjshir Valley Above: Eli (far right) standing with Dr. Ken Whalen, Professor, American University of Afghanistan (AUAF) at the police road block in the Panjshir Valley.
Pg. 26: Cell phone and television antennae in the mountains surrounding Kabul. Pg. 27 (from left to right): Ben Joseloff (Stanford ’08), Eli Sugarman (Stanford ’09), Chief Justice Azzimi of the Supreme Court of Afghanistan, Professor Erik Jensen, Jason Berg (Stanford ’08), and Anne Stephens (Stanford ’09).
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initiative that develops innovative legal curricula for Afghan universities and law schools. My fellow ALEP participants and I co-authored the first textbook on the laws of Afghanistan in over a generation: An Introduction to the Law of Afghanistan. This text is currently used at the American University of Afghanistan (AUAF) and will shortly be translated into Dari and Pashto and disseminated throughout Afghanistan. I first visited Kabul in March 2008 as part of a fact-finding visit. Our objectives were to consult with key actors in the Afghan legal sector, gather information, and make contacts essential to the ALEP’s goal of assisting the development of Afghan legal education. During the week-long trip, we met with over thirty individuals ranging from law professors and law students, to international aid workers, to the
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Chief Justice of Afghanistan (pictured). In addition to strengthening relationships in Kabul and expanding our network of contacts, we were able to gather vast amounts of substantive information. Specifically, we learned about the status of legal education in Afghanistan from administrators, faculty members, and students at Kabul University and the AUAF; facts on crime and internal security from the Afghan National Police Department in Kabul; news on the judiciary and legislative happenings from the Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Interior, and Supreme Court; and information on media and the private sector from the Afghan Wireless Communication Company and Ariana Television Network. Upon returning to Stanford, we finalized the course materials for the introductory law class and delivered them to AUAF in summer 2008.
I returned to Kabul in August 2008 to observe and assist with the first two weeks of the AUAF introductory law class. August 20, 2008 was the first day of class and the inauguration of the legal studies program at AUAF. Dr. Tom Stauffer, the then-President of AUAF, began the class by providing a brief overview of how the course was created and expressing his pleasure at having such a distinguished professor teach AUAF’s first ever law course. After Professor Mutasem introduced himself to the students, I did the same and expressed Stanford’s eagerness to support AUAF and its students and to ensure the success of the law class. Each student was then given a copy of the textbook and document supplement that the ALEP had prepared. AUAF student interest in legal studies is significant; the nearly forty students enrolled in the class constitute fifteen percent of AUAF’s undergraduate student body. The students are extremely capable and driven. They openly discuss their desire to become government
ministers, entrepreneurs, and academic luminaries. They are the future leaders of Afghanistan. Women comprise a large percentage of the class, and it is difficult not to draw inspiration from those who strive to become the first female president of Afghanistan. One Saturday, I took time out to visit the Panjshir Valley in north-central Afghanistan, which has traditionally been a center of resistance to outside powers seeking to rule Afghanistan. Ahmad Shah Masood used the valley as his base from 1979-1989 to fight the Soviet forces in Afghanistan. The main road is still littered with rusted-out Soviet tanks and armored personnel carriers, as well as more deadly remnants of war, such as landmines. The valley was also an important point of resistance of the Northern Alliance against the Taliban when they rose to power in the 1990s. My colleagues and I stretched our legs at a police checkpoint (pictured) and marveled at the stunning views of the Valley (pictured). i
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Article and photography by Shawn Kilpatrick (IP&E ’10) with Nicholas Kent (INTL/EAS ’10)
F
EW CHINESE CITIES BENEFIT MORE FROM Mao Zedong’s Communist revolution than present-day Yan’an. Nestled in the dry loess hills of northern Shaanxi province,Yan’an is an oasis of neon lights, modern dining, and passable hotels in the midst of gloom and poverty. More than seventy years ago, when Mao’s beleaguered Red Army marched through the city gates, they found a dusty trading town, unchanged from its Ming dynasty heyday some five-hundred years earlier. Today, more than sixty years after Mao’s army marched on to conquer China, Yan’an has a firm foothold in the 21st century. Bored by the fast-paced capitalism and modern metropolises of coastal China, two friends and I set out by train to witness what Chinese socialism has done for the cradle of its revolution.
The thirty-hour train ride itself should have deterred us. To pass the time there was little to do but read and gaze at changing countryside. While the trains linking China’s emergent coastal cities sit at the forefront of modernity, the Hangzhou-Yan’an train, with its hard benches and built-in ash-trays, was an anachronism on wheels. A group of factory workers adjacent to us had the prescience to lug aboard a supply of baijiu—grain alcohol—in a sizable petrol tank. Day became night and then day again. The flat farmland
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of the Yangtze River valley gradually gave way to the yellow loess hills of Shaanxi. My thoughts drifted to the ‘Red Guards’ who traveled this same route during the ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.’ They, too, traveled in stuffy overcrowded trains to pay homage to the homeland of Mao’s Revolution. And like our revolutionary forebears, each of us carried a copy of Quotations of Chairman Mao—popularized as the ‘Little Red Book’—from which we sought to understand the hysteria and revolutionary zeal that gripped them. Ask any Chinese about Yan’an and they will tell you it is a hen hong de difang—a very red place. Upon arrival, I was bemused by the irony of a red place that was bathed so overwhelmingly in earthy yellow, from the dried-up riverbed to the majestic ‘Treasure Pagoda’ overlooking the city. But it is the city’s bustling commercial district that helped me
Pg. 28: Nicholas Kent (left) and Shawn Kilpatrick (right). Pg. 29: Mao strides with comrades. Pg. 30: A young Mao glares from a museum’s promotion (top); the omnipresent Mao (bottom). Pg. 31: A well-kept yaodong cave (top); the yellow riverbed and hills of Yan’an (bottom).
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understand what Chinese are referring to when they term the city ‘red’. From atop tall modern buildings and dusty souvenir stores red billboards shouted down at us, encouraging us to buy, buy, buy! And from these billboards and signs there beamed the cherub face and narrow mouth of Chairman Mao Zedong. Like the millions who flock to Yan’an each year, we had come to tour the various revolutionary sites dotted about the city. After spending the night in an oddly luxurious hotel, we first explored the Phoenix Village, the residence of Mao and the Communist Party elite upon their arrival in 1936. It was a complex of tightly-packed yellow mud brick dwellings, each room roughly 200 feet square—grand by local standards of the time. It was here that the top echelon spent its first year in Yan’an. Later, we visited the Date Garden: the headquarters built specifically to accommodate the Party leadership during the 1940s. Here, accommodations were slightly better. As with other revolutionary tourist attractions in Yan’an, admission fees were negligible. Within each building the walls were covered with images of revolutionary Yan’an and the ‘War of Resistance Against Japan’. Emphasis on the few foreign left-wing visitors to Red Yan’an gives the naive impression that the Chinese Revolution had an international following. Only a few cryptic references allude to the bloody ‘rectification’ campaigns which gutted party ranks in the early 1940s. Yet, at least as important as the tourist sites themselves was their impact on the region’s economy. Each tourist trap was besieged by souvenir stands, where revolutionary memorabilia of dubious authenticity could be haggled for. Further afield would be cheap restaurants selling dumplings, sweet rolls, and other assorted
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snacks to the tourist crowd. The city center contained no shortage of internet cafes, hotels, clubs, and bars—hallmarks of any coastal metropolis, strangely out of place in the poorer west. It is immediately apparent to any observer that the tourism industry is the primary employer in the city—population 300,000. Each year, Yan’an apparently receives more than four million ‘red tourists’. Desperate to cull some shred of revolutionary purity from the tourist traps, plush hotels and urban nightlife, my comrades and I (took the audacious move) of spending a night holed up in a yaodong—a cave dwelling dug into the loess hillside. But our yaodong of choice was not like any other. Overlooking the site of the seminal 7th Party Congress—where Mao was enthroned as supreme leader of the Chinese Revolution—is the steep Yang Hill. Dug into the cliff side are several derelict yaodongs, some reputed to have been inhabited by the Chairman. One afternoon towards closing time we paid the parks admittance fee like any other tourist, except with no intention of checking out. Yet in spite of our expectations, the sleepless night yielded few answers. The cave was cold and uncomfortable, and we lived in constant fear of being caught and mistaken for foreign spies. Most importantly, the specter of Mao did not guide us to enlightenment, or explain how his legacy could possibly have slipped into the embrace of the capitalism we witnessed in the valley below. As Mao is progressively edited out of school textbooks, the buying and selling of his likeness is all that remains of a fading memory. As we wearily departed Yan’an, we were left to conclude that we had witnessed a genuine product of the Chinese Revolution: the city that Mao built. It is precisely the legend of Mao’s Communist revolution that greases the engine of modern capitalism in this city. i
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Featured Images from Middlebury College’s 2008 Study Abroad Photo Contest . . .
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Celebrating Sunset Chile by Adele Plunkett ’09
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Une petite fille française France by Julie Ellenberger ’09
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Future of Egypt Egypt by Naya Gonzalez ’09
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Los Arcos de La Mezquita Spain by David Meschke ’09
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Ranu Raraku Chile by David Small ’09
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Braiding Aidae Bolovia by Sierra Murdoch ’09
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Little Hu’s First Contact with a Foreigner China by Garrett Reynolds ’09
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Patagonian Windmill Argentina by Jessica Lehner ’09
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Soledad Bolivia by Aylie Baker ’09
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Spices Israel by Mallory Falk ’09
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Dragon in Forbidden City China by Charles Evans ’09
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We are “Green” It does seem a bit strange that in the “digital age” we still consume enormous amounts of mashed up, bleached tree pulp, most of which gets used once or twice and then tossed or recycled.
The greenest paper is no paper at all,
so keep things digital and dematerialized whenever possible. The more you do online, the less you need paper. Keep files on computers instead of in file cabinets. Review documents on screen rather than printing them. Send emails instead of paper letters. Convert to PDF for paperless document sharing. 44