POLS 170 Blog Group 5

The Gaza Strip has been a Palestinian enclave for more than 70 years. Palestinians that lived in now modern-Israel areas have been forced to the over-crowded and under-resourced city of Gaza and its surrounding areas. The population consists of around 2.1 million people where 1.4 are Palestinian refugees. Half of the population of Gaza is unemployed and more than half live in poverty. These people live without consistent access to food, clean water, and other basic necessities. Due to these horrible conditions that people in face in Gaza, they are sent humanitarian aid from organisations, such as the UN, and other countries. Although this sounds like the right thing to do (to note: I don’t argue that global attention, acknowledgement, and at least the intention of aid is wrong), there are consequences and issues with humanitarian aid into areas. Firstly, there is the argument that foreign aid is never properly specialised to the area that is receiving it. The narrative of what helpf...

     In August, the biggest talk of every news station in America was the removal of US troops in Afghanistan as well as the effects it had on the landscape of international politics. While I am definitely not saying the strategy of exiting Afghanistan was executed well, should the US have even been there for as long as they were in the first place? I am all for global peace and having no threats to the well-being of the planet, but is it the US’s job to always be the savior? I understand that the US is a wealthy nation with a strong military, so the narrative is always that the US can almost “save the world” like a Superman-esque figure. One thing with the Afghanistan debate on how or when the US should have pulled out of there was interesting to me. In Nicholas Grossman’s article Every Option in Afghanistan Was Bad, he quotes on a similar case in the Middle East a couple of years back, “We got September 11th and ended up back in. Similarly, the United States withdrew fr...

  Thomas White The New Technological Age of Warfare     Throughout this course, warfare was one of the most consequential and influential factors within the International system. As we learned, there’s an entire system of viewing international politics that says war is the most fundamental interaction between states or governmental bodies. This concept, known as realism, is one that I have previously discussed in a blog post, where I attempted to prove why it is an incorrect viewpoint for the 21st century. I discussed how in the modern age there is too much interaction between states that is not driven by war or seeking power. However, this post is meant to be an exercise in arguing the other side and in an atypical lens. Today, as social media has been skyrocketing to unprecedented and previously unimaginable heights, warfare has taken what may be a new look. Two examples of this are TikTok and the Russian SolarWinds hack on the US, both of which are different scena...

  For my final blog post, I wanted to further explore the topic which I discussed in my last analytical essay, climate change and its relationship to international relations.  I found this topic to be extremely interesting as it highlights a real issue that continues to stay unresolved due to the fact that any means of international organization is extremely difficult.  I felt like my paper was lacking in the broader ramifications of climate change in relation to how climate change will impact physical relations, rather than a focus on the inability of asserting some sort of international governance to mitigate climate change.   I was still interested in exploring other facets of this topic, and found the answers to a lot of the questions that I had in a recently published Phys.org article, “Can the World Change Course on Climate?” by Kathryn O’neil.  This article is Q&A style with MIT professor Nazli Choucri.  One of the most interesting points th...

According to the Chicago Council Poll on Foreign Policy of 2021, 68% of Americans say that Globalization is mostly good for the US. This number represents an all time high for the support of globalist practices, but it doesn’t recognize the whole story. Despite Globalization’s impressive accomplishments in improving quality of life, through increased economic activity and interconnectedness, this is not the case for all communities. One can easily argue that globalization has caused just as many problems as opportunities, through the example of increased terrorism, crime, and environmental degradation. But this argument also fails to address everything that globalization contributes to life as we know it. In this blog post, I will argue that without the sunny side of globalization, life as we know it would disappear, and therefore globalization, on the whole, is a beneficial force in our lives.  Firstly, one can regard globalization as beneficial because it strengthens the economy...

 Eli Webb Human Rights in Soccer Soccer can help us focus on human rights and discrimination around the globe. The book we read by Franklin Foer, How Soccer Explains the World , pointed out many issues and characteristics of the world, and in each chapter he focused on different aspects of the world that soccer could help explain. I would like to focus on the general conversation of discrimination that Foer mentioned in his chapters “How soccer explains the pornography of sects” and “How soccer explains the Jewish question”. Both chapters discuss the sectors of team support and where rivalries came from, and for a little snippet, the conversation about race/religion in the soccer world.  The focus on this blog post is the recent endeavors by the soccer community on human rights and discrimination across the globe. Foer wrote his book in 2004, yet the discussion about inclusion and race is still in the news today. Specifically this week (Dec. 1), I got a notification on my ...

     An act of terrorism can be defined as unlawful, politically motivated violence and/or intimidation that is usually used against civilians. A person who does acts of terrorism is a terrorist. The definition seems simple, but who is really deemed a terrorist?      The word terrorist has been pinned to a certain stereotype through the use of media and the cultivation of the American enemy. The image that comes to mind (and in a quick Google images search) for the word terrorist is a Middle Eastern man. This stereotype has been fostered by influences ranging from movies continuously portraying brown Muslims as terrorists to the president of the United States’ words.       In March 2016, Donald Trump said “It’s very hard to separate (Islam and terrorism) . Because you don’t know who’s who” (Corbin. 476). Having these words come from the president of the United State’s mouth is extremely influential and detrimental to verity. As well as ...

  Eli Webb IR Blog Post #4 Global Justice The readings on November 15th about Global Justice were very intriguing as we discussed the role the United States has around the world and the power we have in terms of institutional, structural, and productive. In terms of Nhina Le’s article on whether or not human rights are universal or culturally relative, the United States many times has overstepped their powers and decided to interfere with other countries' cultural ideas. People might consider this a good thing, others might see it as bad. Considering the question asked for the second analytical paper about non-governmental organizations and if their benefits outweigh the problems they cause, I would view the United States in a similar category when they try to interfere with other countries. Some instances it is absolutely worth the interference, like in the case of the Muslim treatment in China today, or the apartheid in South Africa, however, instances like Vietnam and Cuba a...

       In Nhina Le’s article, Are Human Rights Culturally Relative Or Universal, she lists and describes the ways in which the American Anthropological proves the proposed doctrine Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) to be culturally biased, and thus not universal. There were four claims made, and all of which have something to do with different people of different backgrounds seeing things differently. For example, one of the claims of culture bias pertained to culture practices which the article quotes, “Fourth, some rights that the UDHR recognizes, such as the right of private ownership of the means of production, equality, and marriage and religious freedoms, are at odds with traditional practices and norms in non-Western societies” (Le, 204).  This claim shows how the UDHR, based on American and Western European philosophies, values their practices as “proper” and non-Western as “improper”. I agree with the argument against the UDHR being universal...

  For this blog post, I wanted to further explore the question that I used in my last analytical essay: Is a world without nuclear weapons desirable?  In my essay, I concluded that a world without nuclear weapons is in fact desirable as it is impossible to remove the knowledge of their existence as an assembly, therefore a world without nuclear weapons cannot be undesirable, as it is impossible.  I also concluded that by removing these devices, it would only promote  their secret assembly and storage, which could lead to hostility and promote the misuse of nuclear power.  I felt like this question highlighted a lot of the problems that arise on an international scale and how difficult it is to implement global governance.  I think that this question also highlights how technological  developments can change how interactions between different nations occur and alter the way in  which nations act and react.  I feel like this question extends be...

  Thomas White Professor Shirk International Politics 11-29-2021 Personal Experience with Terrorism     Terrorism is the greatest threat to immediate security in the 21st century. Defined by the FBI as two different concepts, there is both international and domestic terrorism. In class, international terrorism was obviously discussed more, and that is something that most in the US think less about, both because it less often affects their daily lives and also because the US government does not want to draw attention to actions they take that may be considered international terrorism. Domestic terrorism will be the topic of this Blog Post, both my personal experience with it and how a community can deal with its aftermath.     Terrorism is a concept that is impossible to fully understand until it affects you or someone in your community. Oftentimes, the media creates a narrative of sympathy for victims instead of empathy, where individuals are meant to...

  How will the US return to the World Health Organization affect the spread of the new  Omicron Variant of Coronavirus? In July of 2020, President Donald Trump drafted a letter to the United Nations declaring US intention of exiting the World Health Organization. Despite different claims of the reasoning behind the withdrawal, that the withdrawal had to do with the huge amounts of funding the organization required, it’s poor handling of the pandemic, or even just a protectionist attitude towards his own people, Trump’s declaration marked an important moment in the Pandemic. It pointed to the idea that the WHO had been “slow to respond to the pandemic,” and “too ‘China-centric,’” and that the US need not pay so much to be a part of such an organization. ( NPR ) But critics of this withdrawal, including Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, claimed that all it did was leave “Americans sick and America alone.” Due to critiques like this, President Joe Biden moved to rejoin the WH...

       The United Nations is an intergovernmental organisation that promotes peace around the globe through aid, action, commitments, and support. Its mission is to maintain international peace and security. Although, through looking at various interventions in the UN’s history, it can be seen that this supposedly harmonising organisation has claimed peace in areas even when it has not been fully reached. In one of my classes, we look into how media portrays events incorrectly especially in regards to feeding into the White superiority complex, ignoring colonialist histories, and not blaming external countries and organisations for ultimately harmful interventions. While looking for such a document to critique, I came across an article by the UN titled “Their 15-year mission a success, the UN peacekeepers depart a stable and grateful Liberia”. With some knowledge of Liberia’s present, it can be deduced that it is not in a stable or peaceful state. After the two d...

  In Abdelal and Ruggie’s writing, The Principles of Embedded Liberalism: Social Legitimacy and Global Capitalization , the regulation of world trade after the free trade years after World War II, or from 1945-1970, was a huge topic of debate. Embedded liberalism is the core theory of Abdelal and Ruggie’s article, as it is to protect trade from being dominated by a select number of powerful nations. An organization that embedded liberalism is shown is the World Trade Organization that we as a class discussed. As a trading system it has involvement from most countries, with the non-members being around ten to fifteen third-world countries, and it has economic advantages to the United States. However, the World Trade Organization really is only beneficial to the multinational corporations themselves, and not necessarily the smaller, underdeveloped nations involved.      I see the World Trade Organization similarly to the recent Netflix show “Squid Game” . In the show, ...

  I was extremely interested to learn about the global financial structure as outlined by Susan Strange in her 1990 article, “Finance, Information, and Power.”  Strange describes how structural power is tied to the finances of a country and makes note of all the nuances of the discrepancies in finances between countries, like exchange rates, credit systems, and rates of interest.  This article raised my attention to an international system, which I had never really considered to be an aspect of international relations before, the global financial system.  Strange explains how this system has grown to become more global in recent times, stating how the system “has shifted from being a predominantly state-based system with some transnational links to being a predominantly global system with some local differences (Strange 260).”  In this course, we have covered so much material that describes how nations cannot come together and how conflicts arise, as well as h...

Thomas White Professor Shirk Blog Post 3 10.27.2021 Why US Debt to China is a Political Facade         The media in the United States is, for the most part, privately funded. Massive corporations whose goals may include having an educated populace, however, this is not their main focus. Educating citizens is superseded by turning a profit, so news outlets want headline-driven stories that inspire clicks. The 21st century is all about clicks, and the news media is no different. Alike to the news media, one of the best strategies for Politicians in the modern American political climate is to be controversial while stoking fear of change into the hearts of American voters. Fear is a tactic that has been prevalent for decades, however, the click-driven media inherently props it up. Issues regarding jobs, immigration, and terrorism have all been manipulated by fear-mongering to push agendas that have had dire consequences. One of these examples is the national d...

  Susan Strange writes in her paper, Finance, Information and Power , “The integration of the world economy has been achieved through the bringing together of national financial systems into one global system.” (Strange, 259-260) This global system has played a massive role in the global economy and capitalism throughout the world as it connects many powerful countries and large economies in a way that many benefit. Strange’s main focus was on the comparison of the US and Japan and their relational and structural power, yet she mentions the use of technology throughout the conversation of the global system.  In this blog post, I will discuss the role technology has on humans, which is connected to government involvement in those innovations, and how the role of government should continue like the “embedded liberalism” Rawi Abdelal and John G. Ruggie wrote about. In my foundation class, From Fire to Uber, we focus on the role technology has played in the development of human ev...