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July 2006, Volume 2 Issue 2
e-news
Visit our New webpage: International Studies Association - Region South
INSIDE THIS ISSUE
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Looking forward to
Birmingham: About
Birmingham and the
University of Alabama at
Birmingham
Looking forward to Birmingham,
October 20-21, 2006
A Message from the ISA South 06
program chair and ISA-South VicePresident – Dr. Nikos Zahariadis
Special ISA South
Conference Guest
News from ISA South
members
Introducing the
Review Section: the review
editor Elisabeth Prugl, FIU
The first book
reviews
Birmingham is no stranger to ISA South
Conferences. We hope that this year’s conference
will be as successful as those before it.
All of the information about the conference can
be found at the beautiful new ISA South webpage
(click here). You can read there about the main
theme of the conference – the human rights for
which Birmingham, Alabama is particularly an
appropriate venue.
The location is accessible from the adjacent
states by car, (for the map see last page).
Dr.Nikos Zahiaradis,
program chair
About Birmingham
Birmingham Stats:
Though Birmingham stands in the heart of the Deep South, it is not an Old Southern city.
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Founded in 1871 at the crossing of two railroad lines, the city blossomed through the early
1900s as it rapidly became the South's foremost industrial center. Iron and steel production
were a natural for Birmingham; underground lay abundant key ingredients---coal, iron ore
and limestone. As an industrial town, Birmingham suffered greatly in the Depression. After
World War II, the city grew moderately while retaining its strong Southern character.
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Birmingham is the largest city
in the state with a population
currently estimated at 242,820,
and a metro population of
1,079,089
Ranks 13th among the largest
southeastern metropolitan
areas
Represents 24 percent of
Alabama's total population
Represents 31 percent of
Alabama's total payroll dollars
Ranks 48th in population
among the nation's top 300
metropolitan areas
Home to 40,680 businesses
At the same time a profound movement toward diversification was afoot. The huffing and
puffing of Birmingham's legendary iron and steel mills was gradually replaced by a work
force of medical and engineering professionals. Today, Birmingham enjoys a balance of
manufacturing and service-oriented jobs in a thriving work force.
Birmingham Civil Rights Institute
www.informationbirmingham.com
www.bcvb.org
The institute captures the spirit and drama of the countless
individuals--both well known and unsung--who dared to
confront racial discrimination and bigotry. This is a "living
institution" which views the lessons of the past in a positive way
to chart new direction for the future. The institute's permanent
exhibitions are a self-directed journey through the Civil Rights
Movement and human rights struggles of today. BCRI is located
in the historic Civil Rights District surrounded by the 16th Street
Baptist Church, Kelly Ingram Park, and the Alabama Jazz Hall
of Fame.
http://www.bcri.org
An ISA-South Reception
with the UAB President
Dr. Carol Z. Garrison is the 6th and
current President of the University of
Alabama at Birmingham. She was
appointed to the office on July 23,
2002.
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The University of Alabama at Birmingham
International Studies at UAB
The University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) is a 36year-old comprehensive, metropolitan university and
medical center that encompasses 82 city blocks and has a
student enrollment of more than 17,000. UAB also is home
to a large graduate school, a world-renowned healthcare
complex and more than 70 research centers, focusing on
such diverse issues as AIDS vaccines, aging, the
environment, urban affairs, and telecommunications.
The annual meeting is organized by Dr. Nikos
Zahariadis, Director of the International Studies
program, which provides courses leading to an
undergraduate major in International Studies. The
Bachelor of Arts degree in International Studies at UAB
promotes an appreciation of the different values that
exist in societies around the globe and an
understanding of the diverse institutions and policies
that foster a growing interdependence among nations.
The major is headed by a director and is jointly
administered by the School of Behavioral and Social
Sciences and the School of Arts and Humanities.
Interdisciplinary in nature, it draws upon the faculty and
courses of various departments and programs including
Art History, Anthropology, Economics, English, Foreign
Languages, Government, History, Justice Sciences, and
Sociology. By integrating courses on area studies and
world affairs, the major allows students to gain a
broader and more complete understanding of cultures,
organizations, and societies outside the United States
than a more traditional discipline might offer. For more
information, please consult the web site at
www.uab.edu/its
A Special Guest at the ISA-South Meeting:
ISA President Ann Tickner
Ann Tickner cv
Photo/Julius Brown
Ann Tickner, a professor at the University of Southern California, School of
International Relations is the current International Studies Association President
for 2006-07. She is one of the leading feminist scholars focusing on feminist
perspectives on international relations theory. Recently, she has also started
working on the issues of religion in international relations. She will address us at
the Conference’s Saturday luncheon.
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The ISA South members news
In the last newsletter it was incorrectly stated that the only “Southerner” serving on the ISA bodies was Ido
Oren. Ann Tickner corrected us. This is the full “Southern” ticket on ISA
Nick Onuf
chairs the ten-year
book award
Karen Mingst
is also a member of
that committee
Brooke Ackerly
member
of the Carl Beck
Award Committee
SamIdo
Barkin
Oren – Chair of ISA Professional
Nominating
Development
Committee
Committee
Another Appointment of a “Southerner”
Vendulka Kubálková elected Vice-Chair of the Religion and
Politics Committee of IPSA at the 20th World Congress in
Fukuoka, Japan
RC 43 Religion and Politics
Looking forward to contributions
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o Share information about programs and news from
the programs;
o Advertise each other’s programs;
o Advertise positions;
o Inform each other about successes of our faculty
and graduates;
o Develop a platform where all sorts of issues of
concern can be discussed.
o Review books of interest to the region
From the Book Review Editor:
I am pleased to introduce, with this issue of the ISA-South Newsletter, a new book
review section. Thanks to Frank Ortoleva for writing the first review. The purpose of
this section will be to showcase a wide range of scholarly activity in the 98 institutions
with programs in international studies in the fourteen states that make up ISA-South.
In order to make this review section a success, I am calling on authors to let me
know about your recent publications, and I am calling on ISA-South members to
volunteer as reviewers. If you are interested in reviewing, drop me a note and let me
know about your areas of expertise. If you would like to have your book reviewed, let
me know and/or have your publisher forward a review copy.
I look forward to lots of mail!
Elisabeth Prügl
Department of International Relations
Florida International University
11200 SW 8th Street
Miami, FL 33199
Phone: 305-348-3854
Fax: 305-348-6138
Email: prugl@fiu.edu
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BOOK REVIEW
Ido Oren, Our Enemies & US:
America’s Rivalries and the Making
of Political Science. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2003. 234 pp.
The revelation that American political
science is not an objective discipline is not news. In
fact, much scholarship has been devoted to arguing the
notion that politics and the social sciences are
intertwined. This type of endeavor can be traced back
to Max Weber, and more recently to Michel Foucault,
and Edward Said. However, Ido Oren’s book does
much more than repeat this exhausted disclosure and
is, therefore, well worth the read. While Oren does
challenge American political science’s definition of itself
as an objective science, it is his approach that makes
the book both interesting and unique. He looks at the
perceptions that important American political scientists
have had of other countries and illustrates how they
have reflected U.S. foreign policy. He argues that
these perceptions often changed when the U.S.
government’s relations with these countries shifted
from positive to negative as a specific country became
a rival or enemy of the United States. He illustrates this
nicely by revealing the shifting perceptions in scholarly
writing when countries like Imperial Germany, Fascist
Italy, Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union were
perceived as enemies by the United States.
Oren gives us a historical sociology of the
field of American political science, one that is
significant because according to him “political
scientists rarely bother to reflect upon the ideological
character of their own thought” (p.16). To Oren,
“political science in America is a historically and
nationally rooted ideology as much as an objective
science” (p.16). By analyzing some of the writing of
giants in the field -- seminal scholars like Charles
Merriam, Harold Lasswell, Merle Fainsod, Gabriel
Almond, Robert Dahl, Bruce Russett and others -- he
is able to illustrate how the discipline’s perceptions of
foreign powers changed according to the foreign
policy dictates of
Washington.
Oren uses a
perceptual matrix composed of three stylized
ideological configurations. Oppositional political
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science scholars believe that the American
governmental system is in total disrepair and needs to
make wholesale changes. Oren dismisses them as
extreme and not taken seriously in the early years of
the discipline. Accommodationist political science
scholars believe that some select features of a foreign
nation’s political model may be employed in the
United States to mitigate some significant defect in
the American system. Nationalists believe that the
American system is excellent and, therefore, has little
to gain from foreign imports. Oren shows quite
skillfully that much (but not all) of American political
science scholarship shifted from accommodationist to
nationalist positions when the U.S. government
identified a foreign power as being a rival or enemy.
This is capably illustrated by Oren in his discussion of
the academic treatment of the Soviet Union before
and after the Cold War. Before the Cold War, political
scientists like William Bennett Munro, Merle Fainsod,
Carl Friedrich of Harvard University and Charles
Merriam and Fredrick Schuman of the University of
Chicago wrote quite approvingly of the type of
economic equality and “democracy’ that the Soviet
Union had fostered. But during the height of the Cold
War, the discipline increasingly perceived the Soviet
Union as a complete totalitarian state. This
perceptional change was congruent with the
discipline’s strong swing towards ideological
nationalism and its close relationship with the
government.
In the latter part of the book, Oren
concentrates on showing the intimate relationship
between the discipline and the national security
agencies of the U.S. government during the Cold
War. Most illuminating in this discussion is his
treatment of the “dual career” of Gabriel Almond.
Almond held teaching positions at Yale, Princeton,
and Stanford Universities. Oren points out that his
“scholarship was orientated to the American national
security concerns and policies of his time, and his
scholarly success was enmeshed with intelligence
and psychological warfare work in the service of the
U.S. government” (p.134). According to Oren, the
boundaries between the discipline and the politics of
American foreign policy were blurred.
One may argue that in the climate of
post-Vietnam America, most of the political science
establishment had disassociated itself from the
intimacy it shared with the U.S government. But to
Oren, such a move “would not necessarily erase
traces of power from disciplinary scholarship so long
as scholars, distant from power though they might be
themselves, continue to rely, as they inevitably must,
on concepts, data sets, and findings produced by
other scholars intimate with political interests” (p.171).
Even more to the point, political science scholarship
can not be objective in Oren’s opinion if it continues to
be “embedded in the institutional structure of
American higher education, whose sustenance
depends heavily on government and corporate
interests” (p.171).
While some may take issue with Oren’s
strict notion of objectivity, which has been interpreted
to imply that political scientists cannot be objective
unless they avoid any form of intimacy with the state,
this book is important because it forces practitioners
of this discipline to look at and question the identity of
American political science. By challenging the self
image of American political science as a detached
science, Oren helps us recognize that politics and
association with the state has often imposed implicit
limits on the objectivity of our scholarship.
Francesco Ortoleva, Florida International
University.
Another review will come here
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Click here to display a free Alabama Highway Map in PDF format.
Editor: Vendulka Kubálková,
University of Miami, Coral Gables,
Miami, Florida,
www.miami.edu/maia/
Panhellenic Building 108
5200 University Drive
Coral Gables, FL 33146
phone: 305 284 8868
E-mail:
vkubalkova@miami.edu