Cornell International Affairs Review - Volume 05, Number 2 (Spring 2012)
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Item The Awakening: How Revolutionaries, Barack Obama, and Ordinary Muslims are Remaking the Middle EastBergen, Peter (Cornell University Library, 2012-05-01)Item Banning Evil: Cluster Munitions and the Successful Formation of a Global Prohibition RegimeGarcia, Denise (Cornell University Library, 2012-05-01)The rise and entry into force of the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) that prohibits cluster bombs constitutes a global prohibition regime. I argue that this new prohibition regime and the arising new international norm set by the CCM, i.e. the prohibition of the use, development, production, acquisition, stockpiling, retention or transfer of cluster munitions developed due to a strong moral opprobrium, initially elicited by commanding moral force of International Humanitarian Law as a robust and compelling previously existing normative structure and then by the success of the ban on landmines that acted as a model of activism and fast-track diplomacy a decade before. The ban on cluster bombs is about military doctrines succumbing to the higher authority of moral and humanitarian concerns propelled by activist non-governmental actors and a few forward-looking states.Item The Consequences of Rape During Conflict in the Democratic Republic of CongoDettke, Elizabeth (Cornell University Library, 2012-05-01)“I rape because of the need. After that I feel like a man.” These are the words of a rebel soldier who ruthlessly roams the forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in search of his next victims. Rape has been used in the past during warfare to weaken populations and ruin communities and family bonds but never to the extent witnessed in the DRC today. Literally, tens of thousands of women have been raped and this number is most likely largely underestimated. The conflict has been called Africa’s First World War and one of the deadliest since World War II with the death toll reaching 5.4 million in a decade. Ending sexual violence as a weapon of the DRC war remains one of the greatest challenges to the protection of women’s rights. The psychological and physical repercussions of the mass rape of women, children and sometimes even men in the DRC will undermine the capacity of the Congolese people to trust each other. It is possible that the experience of rape and violence could prevent the country from ever being capable of effectively building a nation state.Item Deconstructing the Camarena Affair and the Militarized United States-Mexico BorderSchenk, Benjamin (Cornell University Library, 2012-05-01)Recently, the state of the United States-Mexico border has assumed primary importance in American domestic politics. And with that, the border has been conflated with notions of security. This paper will investigate the root causes of the border’s securitization by grounding the case study of the Camarena Affair within The Copenhagen School’s burgeoning constructivist literature on securitization. The paper will conclude by discussing the legislative fallout from the Camarena Affair’s legacy, and arguing that the successful linkage between border and security occurred long before the events of September 11th, 2001.Item Korean LGBT: Trial, Error, and SuccessKim, Jonathan (Cornell University Library, 2012-05-01)South Korea does not have a strong and visible lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender social movement in the public, despite active issue advocacy organizations, political representation from the Democratic Labour Party, and popular television shows that portray LGBT characters and themes. The LGBT movement has had a difficult time growing in South Korea because, as some have argued South Korea has long been ignorant about homosexuality and awareness of ‘gay’ had not been discovered until the early 1990s. I will look at three causal reasons that best describe the dearth of a growing social movement pushing for LGBT rights.Item Hot Cocoa: Agricultural Economics and the Ivorian Civil WarsBiberman, John (Cornell University Library, 2012-05-01)For roughly a decade, Côte d’Ivoire has been bitterly divided by a civil war between its dry Muslim north and its fertile Christian south. Many commentators have attempted to ascribe cultural or social origins to this war, casting it as an example of wider conflict between the Christian and Muslim worlds, while others see it as yet another example of the failings of weak, divided and tribalistic African states. I go beyond these narrow categories to explain the civil war as the natural outcome of a series of rational economic and political choices.Item The War Lovers (Again): What the Foreign Policy Advisers of Presidential Candidates May Tell Us About Future U.S. Foreign PolicySanders, Elizabeth; Emberton, Caroline (Cornell University Library, 2012-05-01)Evan Thomas's recent book, The War Lovers, chronicles the "monumental turning point" of the U.S. declaration of war against Spain in 1898, and the small circle of men who pressed for war, and for an American empire. The central figures, for Thomas, were Theodore Roosevelt, Assistant Secretary of the Navy; his friend Henry Cabot Lodge, hawkish senator and foreign policy adviser to President McKinley; and William Randolph Hearst, editor of the New York Journal, whose paper did its upmost to fan war fervor in 1897-8. These men were inspired by, and had the strong support of Alfred Thayer Mahan a naval officer, history professor, and influential author of The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. Though President McKinley hesitated about war with Spain, Roosevelt and Lodge had long dreamed of a war that would establish the United States as a major player on the world stage. When another prominent politician, Speaker of the House Thomas Reed, opposed substantial increases in naval funding that he thought "invited conflict," Lodge promptly accused him of harboring "extreme pro-Spanish prejudices."Item Cornell International Affairs Review: Spring 2012Cornell International Affairs Review, Editorial Board (Cornell University Library, 2012-05-01)