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By the SAIS Observer Editors

Goodbye and Hello, Revolutions, Terrorists, Students

“As for me, all I know is that I know nothing.” — Socrates

This semester has been one of immense changes in the international sphere, but the question of progress is still left up to future decision makers, if not generations. We’ve witnessed a long-overdue Arab Spring in North Africa and the Middle East, an earthquake and nuclear dilemma in Japan, and the death of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan. Relations between nations are morphing but so are relations inside boundaries. Identities therefore are in flux at SAIS, the place where we come to study our human atmosphere. Is it still worthwhile to study Strat or the Middle East? Is the War on Terror going to be not just decapitalized but over? A new push in international development perhaps? We are professional wonderers and wanderers, if nothing else.

These are all interesting thought experiments but ultimately ones for which we are clearly unprepared to give confident answers, even as graduate students of international affairs. If life is uncertain, the interactions of many of them are even more so. New theories will emerge to explain what is going on but perhaps we are in a post-theory world in which there is no clear end-game in sight? As randomness expert Nassim Taleb explains, “The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.” There are no more intellectual crutches.

We’ve seen many students with little or no background in a particular topic show up to talks discussing the big issues of the day. What more of a reason do we need to study no one region or function but the world writ large? What more of a reason do we need to declare that we know much less than we think? Assuming this is the case, we should take stances on history and politics humbly. We are at SAIS but the world is not ours. The truth may be closer to the exact opposite: that we are the world’s plaything.

To the new students: welcome. To be sure, Washington, D.C. is a great place to study international relations, economics, and public policy. The city must have the world’s largest concentration of think-tanks, institutes, non-profits, and private sector organizations. Living in the nation’s capital, Washington provides you with an experience unlike any other. There is almost every country’s embassy within a few blocks, and experts in every field that has anything to do with international relations, buzzing about. In terms of clubs and organizations, there are many to choose from. The great thing about SAIS is that due to the small number of students and the many things going on, there is often little competition for great leadership positions and jobs.

There are numerous sources of funding across SAIS, and ample chances to fund unpaid internships, many of which even second year students haven’t heard about. Many of us have gotten involved simply by showing up to a meeting, helping out with one or two events, and then mentioning our interest in next year’s activities. Student Government too is very accessible, as is the Administration. You may have heard at Open House that SAIS’ faculty and administration is dedicated to its students and this can be easily glossed over without much thought paid. However, consider that the faculty and staff are here to serve only you. The great thing about SAIS is that there is no one else to demand their attention. No undergrads, no other graduate schools to split time between, and no one else to keep tabs on. They know the SAIS structure, its curriculum and student body, and the jobs we want and they know them well.

This all ties into networks: when it comes to governmental and international sectors and employment potential, DC and SAIS give students here an extraordinary edge. During your stay, you may have the chance to travel around the world on a school trip or two (or three) and through the process come to understand what it means to be a SAIS alumnus working abroad—in an embassy, think-tank, private company, or an NGO. SAIS will truly increase your ability to understand the world we live in. The world is your oyster and if you are fascinated by it, this is the school for you. If you haven’t already guessed it, we believe the opportunities to launch your personal development and career are here.

2011 has been a year of tremendous world affairs. We on the editorial staff can speak for the SAIS student body when we say it’s a privilege to be here while history is being re-written every day.

Best Regards,

The SAIS Observer Editors

Peter Gruskin, Ryan A. Pallathra, Susie Taylor

By Professor Thitinan Pongsudhirak

Perspectives from an Alumnus Teaching at SAIS

The time warp of May at SAIS is an annual ritual characterized by exams, internships for some, and orals, jobs, and commencement for others. And then there is packing for a time or for good. This compressed period induces stress and pressure of the immediate as well as anxiety and anticipation for what lies ahead. It is a crunch time not just for students but also for the utility of a SAIS education. What is SAIS good for after a year or two of trekking up and down Massachusetts Avenue into a few buildings?

Many SAIS grads and summer interns might enter the real world with a smug satisfaction of having been trained at a top-notch professional school only to discover certain shortcomings in their graduate education. SAIS provides some of the basic tools but much of the rest will come from learning by doing. From SAIS we become a jack of many trades, a substantive generalist of international studies. But our true expertise will be too narrow in niches and shallow in breadth. It will need harnessing and sharpening in the post-SAIS years. We can speak intelligently about current events in IR but would need to deepen expertise in regional area studies and functional economic analyses. SAIS teaches how to solve problems but the challenge frequently will be to come up with answers when problems have yet to arise. Without doubt, the paramount takeaway from the SAIS curriculum is the economics background. Without the economics requirements, the SAIS education would be devalued by half. (Thus it is alarming for future SAISers that the economics component of the oral exams has been done away with for 70 percent of graduating students.) With economics on one hand and a foreign language competency on the other, reinforced by functional fields and regional area studies, the SAIS product becomes formidable and competitively positioned. It is hard to beat an IR generalist who can make some sense of the world economy, equipped with regional familiarity and a foreign language. This is the recipe of SAIS’ success.

But beyond the curriculum, the friends we make at SAIS will stand us in good stead for subsequent years. The SAIS alumni network, up and down the class cohorts, is an underestimated but powerful asset. Job leads, internship setups and peer support, not to mention a readily available social life practically wherever we end up, are all benefits of the SAIS network. The friends we make at SAIS also tend to be lifelong friends. As months elapse into years, SAIS grads not only will maintain their bonds but their families often will make connections and remain connected. SAIS has much to offer to fulfill professional aspirations but it (like formal education elsewhere) cannot teach us how to cultivate a successful private life, which is decisive in our gross happiness. This is perhaps the trickiest and the most daunting challenge whose outcome rests beyond the forces under our control. SAIS students are international by definition. They are holders of a passport, which cannot be said for most Americans. Parochially inclined partners thus may not be compatible. Partners of SAISers should have some patience and appetite for the SAIS network. Otherwise our life outside and inside the home would not be as complete. For most grads, the first post-SAIS job is unlikely to be the last. We are not all set up to be winners but few of us will be losers. The trick is to land a job that embarks us on a flexible odyssey between now and retirement, and to build on a job to entrench and elevate or move on vertically. There is no set path. We will be tempted to maximize our careers from the SAIS degree but in the end it may be about optimizing. SAIS, through its formal training and off-campus benefits of networking and skills accumulation, enables us to make the most of our careers in the face of constraints and limitations.]

Graduating SAISers should think big but know that they are small. SAIS means a lot but probably less than we might think initially. The sense of humility and modesty, coupled with pride and confidence, forms a fertile basis for our career quest. Ultimately, how we end up is unlikely to be entirely our doing. Fate beckons but the onus is still and always on us.

Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a SAIS graduate from 1992, is a visiting professor in the Southeast Asia Studies Program for the Spring 2011 semester. Professor Pongsudhirak is also an Associate Professor and Director at the Institute of Security and International Studies (ISIS) at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand.

[May 2011 Issue]

By Peter Gruskin

I had studied revolutions and the Middle East but never the two together, until I came to SAIS. This semester changed the landscape of the region—or was it the other way around? Powerful narratives have emerged, but of what doctrine or fate, I am still unsure. As my International Financial Markets course drilled into my head only weeks ago: randomness. Because the opposite doesn’t explain much. This certainly holds for the Middle East these days.

Trying to explain too much in one breath is a massive risk with non-commensurate reward, even at a policy school. We all rely on syllabi for grounding in reality but as events unfolded in the region this semester, we needed more than books and articles. The buzz around the TV in the lobby was bright. The response of expert faculty was rapid and bold. Students of other regions and functions all of a sudden cared about our turf. Hail the changes in the Middle East?, we humbly wondered. Among the student body, as of the day before Tunisia’s uprising, who among us knew Tunisia well beside the professors?

To be sure, we were all equally stunned. It’s amazing how much learning goes on at a school like this outside of the pages of standard history—whatever that is. All to its credit! The recognition of mankind’s inability to accurately see the future is often lost in Washington, but it was dropped in front of us like a grand piano out of a high-rise on more than one occasion this semester.

When Egypt hit, I suppose we knew considerably more about the place: Nasser, a U.S.-brokered peace deal which led to the assassination of Sadaat, Cold War rapprochement with the West, then Mubarak’s dictatorship. I had fatefully read my first Middle Eastern novel about the brutality of life in Egypt just last fall in another Middle East studies course, Politics and Literature. Fortunately for spell-bound students of the world, such stories never end.

A plug for events in the Middle East Studies Program and SAIS more generally:

Lunch-ins with famous scholars and practicioners are a regular occurrence in Middle East Studies Program, and all students are welcome to attend. The plethora of talks and conferences hosted by the other departments at SAIS in any given week is astounding too if you compile them (sais-jhu.edu/events). The SAIS administration sends out a weekly synopsis from “dc.linktank.com” which summarizes everything that’s happening in Washington during the week relating to international relations, policy (divided into all its million subsections), domestic and international economics, human rights, security studies, etc.

Monetary economics, revolutions in the Middle East, development, every war and struggle on earth, the future of China, private equity in frontier states—this is just a random sampling of the multitude of subjects, all with their concomitant cadre of experts, that the SAIS student has access to morning, noon, and sometimes night. You really could stay between 16th and 19th Streets and catch a great lecture and lunch, if not both for free, almost anytime of the day, every single day. Dinners on the other hand, you can count on paying for.

Peter is a second-year M.A. candidate concentrating in Middle East Studies and and International Finance.

[May 2011 Issue]

By Mia Warner

Studying at SAIS for the past two years has been an exhilarating and humbling experience, much unlike anything I could have imagined before I started my studies. I spent my first year of SAIS at the Bologna Center (BC) in northern Italy. I came to SAIS after working in consulting in DC for three years and I was worried that the slow pace of life in Italy would drive me nuts, but instead, it was refreshing to ease back into student life in such an enriching atmosphere. Studying in Bologna gave me the opportunity to learn in every aspect of life—not just in the classroom, but also at aperitivo and in the bakery and on jaunts around Europe with my classmates. One of the first times I realized I was at a special place was during orientation. My newly arrived classmates and I attended a talk given by an EU official and then we schmoozed at a wine and cheese reception. The talk was definitely interesting, but the really fascinating part was listening to my fellow classmates’ questions and comments. I was in awe of the range of perspectives that the other students presented. I would say I have prided myself on trying to listen to and read opposition viewpoints as often as I consider those that line up with my own; however, in that moment, I was encountering opinions that I didn’t even know existed! I knew then that SAIS was going to be an experience of a lifetime.

The perspectives of my fellow classmates turned every impromptu dinner outing into a culture lesson. Each and every student had such an impressive background that I could have never been bored just talking to my fellow classmates about their life experiences and how they shaped their outlook on the world. My roommates alone were some of the most interesting people I’ve ever met. One of my roommates in Bologna was a lawyer from Belgium who speaks five languages, has volunteered in Palestine, and has travelled to a million countries, including Cuba. My other roommate, who is originally from Singapore, had also studied and travelled all over the world. It was amazing to learn that someone who had grown up in a country halfway around the world from mine could be so similar to me. She was pivotal in helping me establish a student organization in Bologna called “Christianity Explored,” where SAISers came every week to share a meal and discuss the book of Mark.

Each week, students from a variety of religious backgrounds raised questions that led to thought-provoking conversations. Despite the diversity among the students in Bologna, we were all incredibly close. Studying in Bologna brings a unique aspect to the SAIS experience because immediately upon arriving at the BC, you gain a family of 200+ students and faculty from all over the globe. There’s something about being thrown into a foreign city with a bunch strangers that makes you want to make friends quickly! People say the “SAIS mafia” is tight, but the Bolognesi students are arguably even closer.

The small, intimate setting of the BC also gave us the opportunity to spend quality time with our professors. At the end of the term, many of our professors hosted us for dinner and shared stories about their lives and careers. My professor for Public Sector Economics (a brilliant yet sweet Italian economist who has advised the Pope) opened his home, and he and his wife cooked lunch for our entire class while they handed out life lessons. Another professor (a prominent art historian, who has advised Prince Charles and who appraises pieces for Sotheby’s and Christie’s) took us on a field trip to see the Accademia, the Uffizi, and the architectural sites of Florence, and then hosted us for dinner at her beautiful home. Beyond travelling to neighboring Italian towns, we also took advantage of Bologna’s proximity to many other exciting locales. One weekend in November, I loaded into a bus with about 50 of my classmates and trekked to Zermatt, Switzerland, where we rented a private cabin in the foothills of the Matterhorn. Two months later, intercession break took us all over the world—people traveled to Egypt, Turkey, Malta, the Canary Islands, and all over Europe and the U.S. I helped coordinate a study trip to Bosnia and Herzegovina, where a dozen SAISers examined the complexities of governance and conflict management through meetings with local officials and international organizations, including a former general of Serbian ethnicity who fought for the Bosniak army, Republika Srpska officials, EUFOR, the Constitutional Court of BiH, and the World Bank. Among my fellow travelers were SAISers from both sides of the conflict: a Serbian and Bosniak who are great friends and who are both now working towards reconciliation in their country.

After the study trip, I took a quick tour of Budapest before meeting up with my classmates at the IAEA Ball at the Hofburg Palace in Vienna. I truly felt like I was living someone else’s life during that week, especially as my well-dressed classmates and I greeted each other at the Palace with double-cheek kisses and exchanged stories of our trips over the break. By the end of the year, I certainly felt like I had spent a “lifetime in the world,” as the SAIS BC website advertises. I had visited 13 countries, tasted innumerable varieties of gelato and wine, and became lifelong friends with some of the most amazing people in the world. As I come to the end of my studies, I’m sad that it’s almost over, but I’m grateful for the experiences I’ve had at SAIS and I’m excited to see where we’ll all go from here. I also can’t wait until the five-year reunion in Bologna, when I’ll get to eat authentic Italian food again and hear about the incredible impact my classmates have made on the world!

Mia is a second-year M.A. candidate concentrating in International Law and Organizations.

[May 2011 Issue]

By Michael Carbone & Ray Wang

Inside the Hopkins-Nanjing Center (HNC), a co-run academic institution which formed in 1986 between Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and Nanjing University in Nanjing, China, SAIS students get to sharpen their Mandarin skills while exploring a country rising on the global stage.

With a student population split evenly between Chinese and international students, the HNC provides a unique environment for interacting with international affairs. Students are offered a variety of classes to better understand Chinese society and related areas such as international politics, law, and economics, with courses challenging international students to take everything they have learned from past language classes and travelling experiences and apply it to contemporary issues in a modern day society in their target language: Chinese. Opportunities to travel around the Nanjing area and beyond, such as doing field interviews in the rural Anhui province for a rural development class, allow students to gain a new perspective in applying their class work to the world around them. While the HNC offers a rich learning environment, there is more to Center life than coursework.

The Center regularly invites speakers to the Nanjing Center to speak about various issues regarding Chinese and international affairs. Speakers this year included New York Times journalist Sewell Chan, former ambassador Chas Freeman, and U.S. Food and Drug Administration County Director Chris Hickey. Topics discussed in these lectures are just as varied, with current American Co-Director David Davies doing a recent lecture on the culture changes at Walmart in China. In addition to these opportunities to listen and discuss, the HNC offers other activities for students to engage in and enjoy.

For sports, the HNC has a long tradition of basketball and dragonboat. The basketball team, a mixture of Chinese and international students, continued tradition and won the annual tournament between universities in Nanjing this year. “At the HNC both Chinese and international students have such an affinity for basketball,” said David Lewis, a certificate student here. “It gives us the edge to be extremely competitive in the tournament.” During the Dragonboat Festival every year, a competitive boat race is held and the Center does its best against amateur and professional racing teams, last year scoring sixth and gaining the quip, “the best of the teams that can’t row straight.” Students engage in the Nanjing community outside the Center in a variety of ways, such as the Migrant School Initiative and the Five Project. Begun this year, the Migrant School Initiative teaches English to the children of migrant workers in Nanjing, whose opportunities for public education in the city are limited due to the hukou household registration system that discourages migration in China. The Five Project in turn works with individuals with developmental disorders in the local community, who are often excluded from local schools. “Everyone seems to really appreciate our efforts,” says Laura Dow, a first-year master’s student at the Center.

Extra-curriculars aren’t just limited to volunteer opportunities. Justin Yang, an HNC certificate student, notes that he is “a firm believer in putting [him]self out there and taking risks,” and it seems that among HNCers the feeling is shared. Three international students this year including Yang have so far appeared on Chinese television shows: one on “Our World,” where the student’s dream of dueling the girl he likes from the gym for a date comes true (unfortunately she’s a blackbelt in gongfu); and two on “If You’re the One,” an extremely popular competitive dating show where both HNC students won free trips to Hawaii.

Appearing on game shows may not be high on the list of things students do, but for HNC students it has proved to be a unique way of immersing oneself in Chinese culture and practicing their Chinese at a much higher level. Although the Center does not specialize in international law, this has not stopped students from taking on the challenge of arguing cases in court, with the HNC participating in the Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition for the first time this year. After successfully arguing for the participation of international SAIS students in the competition, the HNC team faced off against teams from Chinese law schools and specialized law programs and placed sixth in the nationals, with the four team members individually placing first, third, ninth, and twelfth places (no other team had more than one member in the top fifteen). As one of the professors who headed the Jessup team Steven Hill noted, this was “incredible and really unprecedented.” If the group and individual results seems rather disconnected, just remember that one of the components of an education at the HNC is how politics is never too far away in the Middle Kingdom.

Every year seems to bring a new political controversy to the Center, and this year was no different, with protests over the cutting down of historic trees by the new city mayor to help expedite the building of a subway line, which caused much controversy within the city. Add to it the sensitive political environment created by the Chinese government’s over-reaction to the national Jasmine non-protests, and the local arbor protests became that much more sensitive, with some Chinese students at the Center being interrogated by the police. The mayor ended up suspending his new policy. While not as internationally well-known as Shanghai or Beijing, Nanjing’s non-stop high-speed rail link to Shanghai is another effort by the Chinese government to propel the city into the global conscience. The most recent G20 seminar was held in the city, with a group of 19 nations plus the European Union representing around 90 per cent of global gross national product coming together to discuss the international monetary system. Those in attendance included French President Sarkozy, SAIS alumnus U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, and one of our very own HNC students, Laure Pallez, who said that, as expected, “it was extremely interesting with high level discussions on financial topics.”

Although the Hopkins-Nanjing Center is the youngest of the international institutions connected to SAIS, the Center already has a vibrant alumni network, with his year yielding the largest alumni weekend turnout to date, with well over one hundred alumni in attendance. As the Chinese co-director Madame Huang says, “we are a family here,” with Center traditions and a Center network throughout the world, yet the HNC manages also be a unique and an important part of the larger SAIS community. We welcome you to inquire about studying at HNC if China Studies is part of your path at SAIS, and if not, you are still welcome to visit us in Nanjing anytime.

Michael and Ray are SAIS students studying at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center in Nanjing, China.

[May 2011 Issue]

By Lena Diesing

Coming to SAIS as a foreign student is an adventure. There are lots of small things that happened to me that made me say, “Hum, really?“ in daily activities. I am far away from home, I rarely communicate in my most comfortable language, I cannot find my favorite food in the supermarket… And I am only from Europe! If you ask me to summarize all of it, I would say the pattern is change. Granted, this happens with everybody who goes abroad. But as a foreigner at SAIS, there are basically two ways in which I changed: 1) I became internationalized. 2) I became Americanized. Yes, that’s a bit confusing.

Here’s what I mean. You become internationalized because you are not the only foreigner around. That sounds a bit trivial; this is a school for international relations after all. But it is something that I realized changed my personality in a very significant way. Suddenly, facing my graduation and the prospect of moving back to the German countryside, I realized how I became addicted to a place that feels like a global village. At SAIS, you read about some far-away country in a class, and at lunch you run into your classmate from there to have a short briefing on how things were in a time of crazy inflation. You receive emails from friends from another far-off country that detail the revolutions you would have never guessed were possible from TV reports. You celebrate parties for holidays in foreign lands you didn’t even know existed. So, even though I am a foreigner in the United States, I am a citizen of the global village, and my blue student ID is my passport.

And what’s up with the Americanization?, many have asked me. When I went back home over Christmas, one of my best friends told me: “You speak so ‘American’”. I was shocked! I spoke German, didn’t I?—how can I speak American German? Something had changed, my friend told me. Despite the international community, we live in the American capital after all, and we are exposed to all its good and bad cultural nuances. And that means you often do things the American way, even if that means your accent changes.

A discussion about the hot topic in international relations? Not without tuna sandwiches. A beer with your colleagues? Let’s start as early as possible, when it would be the right time for coffee somewhere else. Need a car, a fridge or some ice cream? Take the bigger version (and buy the one where you get something in addition). Well, I could go on like this forever. To all those small things, there are the big things of the capital: seeing three lights settle near the Washington Monument, hearing sirens and thinking: “that’s Obama coming home for dinner”, or counting diplomat’s cars on Mass Ave. In the end, you like it or hate it I suppose—but your friends will know in any case that you have spent time in the United States.

Lena is a second-year M.A. candidate concentrating in Global Theory and History.

[May 2011 Issue]

By President Ronald J. Daniels

With a fantastic trip to the Hopkins-Nanjing Center last fall, a journey across Spain as part of the SAIS International Staff Ride, a whirlwind weekend at the Hopkins Bologna Center, and frequent trips to SAIS’ home here in Washington, I’m lucky to say this has been my “Year of SAIS.” From Washington to Nanjing to Bologna and beyond, SAIS embodies the spirit of our one university. Harnessing expertise between disciplines, among institutions, and across national borders, SAIS is training our future leaders to tackle the 21st century’s most daunting challenges from international climate change to global economic stability.