CenterpieceNewsletter of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University • Volume 18 • Number 3 • Fall 2004

FROM THE DIRECTOR

Continued page 2

The Center’s Web address is: http://www.wcfia.harvard.edu© 2004 President and Fellows of Harvard College

INSIDEContemporary

Borders3

Jinbao QianIn Memoriam

4Of Note/

New Books5

Fellows’ Lives Lived6

Study AbroadAmanda Pearson

8Working Papers

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The Weatherhead Center’s annual open house forundergraduates attracts dozens of Harvard Collegestudents every fall. Here, student programcoordinator Clare Putnam (center) providesinformation to a few new visitors.

The Weatherhead Center for InternationalAffairs supports a central mission of HarvardUniversity—research—both directly and

indirectly. It supports large-scale collaborative re-search endeavors through its Weatherhead Initiativegrants as well as individual faculty research semes-ters and other means. It also constructs venues forthe exchange of ideas, the refinement of concepts,and the diffusion of knowledge. That is why a keyconstitutive feature of this Center has been its pro-gram for conferences. Three of the conferences thatthe Center’s steering committee has just voted tosupport illustrate the scope of the Center’s mission.These examples cross the disciplines of the socialsciences, and two of them exemplify efforts to lever-age support from a variety of sources to advance animportant research agenda.

In May 1997 the Weatherhead Center co-spon-sored a conference to launch a large multi-author,multi-country project, the Cambridge EconomicSurvey of Africa, which is a study of Africa’s growthperformance in the second half of the twentiethcentury. The Africa Economic Research Consortium(AERC) has been the Survey’s principal source offinancial and administrative support. The Survey’sleaders include Weatherhead Center Faculty Associ-ate Robert Bates, Paul Collier (Oxford), CharlesSaludo (Director, Bank of Nigeria), and BennoNdulu (Director of Research, World Bank). Fromthe beginning, this joint work played an importantrole in the development of aspects of African studiesat Harvard. Professor Bates formed a network tosupport the research of his students in Africa andidentify promising young scholars who have visitedor come to study at Harvard. In this way graduatestudent dissertations and undergraduate senior the-ses—many of which were also funded by theWeatherhead Center or the Harvard Academy forInternational and Area Studies also housed at the

Center—have flourished.In 2005 the Weatherhead Center will join AERC

to support another conference to present and dis-cuss research findings and to help shape the finalrevisions for this project. Thus the Center will co-sponsor the close of an effort that it had helped tolaunch and bring to fruition. At this conference, weexpect that scholars will contrast countries thatsuffered from experiences of predation and violencewith those that were free from that syndrome. Theywill compare countries that have suffered from statebreakdown, misuse of resource booms, or particu-larly harsh regimes as well as countries under differ-ent geographic circumstances (e.g., coastal orlandlocked). They will assess synthetic works thatexplore the impact of ideas, redistributive schemes,and policy innovation or plunder. This conferencewill bring together principally political scientists andeconomists.

A second conference just approved for Centersupport focuses on the strategies that members ofminority groups follow in order to reduce gaps of

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From the Director ...

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Jennifer Chan-Tiberghian, anadvanced research fellow of theProgram on U.S.-JapanRelations, and her husband,Yves Tiberghian, an AcademyScholar, attended the Center’sorientation in the Faculty Clubon September 13, 2004.

disadvantage between themselves and dominantmajority groups—gaps that stem from symbolicand social boundaries of variable permeability. Ledby Weatherhead Center Faculty Associate MichèleLamont, the conference will examine the cases ofAfro-Brazilians and Francophone Québécois, whichare examples of relatively porous and flexible inter-group boundaries, as well as the cases of NorthernIrish Catholics and Israeli Arabs that exemplify morerigid or impermeable group boundaries.

The Québécois were the most successful at de-stigmatizing their collective identity in the closingdecades of the last century. They improved theireconomic status, claimed political autonomy, and atthe same time affirmed the value of their culturaldistinctiveness. The Afro-Brazilians, enveloped inofficial rhetoric of multiculturalism, experience amore permeable interracial sociability than is thecase in other countries where the black/white distinc-tion is prominent, but they suffer, nevertheless, frompervasive and at times severe race-based discrimina-tion. Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland faceimpermeable group boundaries. Although their eco-nomic exclusion has declined, interpersonal rela-tions remain tense and political circumstances aredeeply problematic. Religious institutions assert andpromote autonomy and separation. Finally, IsraeliArabs live in acute tension within the Jewish state.They enjoy civil rights as Israeli citizens but social andpolitical boundaries are otherwise rigid. They arefurther strained through economic inequalities.

The conference on ethno-racism and the trans-formation of collective identity seeks to launch a newinternational collaborative project aspiring to ob-tain additional funding from other sources. Scholarsengaged in the study of ethno-racism will interviewand observe with care in each of the four pertinentsettings, employing a common research agenda andpurpose. Brazilian, Canadian, Irish, and Israeli schol-

ars, among others, will be involved in this project,anchored at Harvard, engaging members of ourintellectual community as the research unfolds overthe next several years. Sociologists and social anthro-pologists are at the core of this work.

A third conference authorized by the Center willfocus on the new comparative economic history. Ledby Weatherhead Center Faculty Associate JohnCoatsworth, this major conference will explore theaccomplishments of this “new” history as it hasevolved over the past several decades. In comparisonto its predecessors, the new economic history is moreself-consciously theoretical in conception, quantita-tive in methods, and rigorous in data collection. Itasks questions pertinent not just to individual coun-tries but situates economies in a broader compara-tive framework in order to understand how theyfunction, and why and in what ways they differ invarious parts of the world. It also has expanded thecoverage of research in economic history beyondWestern Europe and toward other parts of Europeas well as Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Recentresearch underscores variations in trade or financialregimes, democratization, mass migrations, and thelosses from war. A key purpose of the conference isto engage scholars in interdisciplinary conversation.Led by historians and economists, the conferenceinforms path-breaking thinking in the social sci-ences.

These three conferences, as well as others al-ready authorized or in the process of coming tofruition, should enrich the world of scholarship,engage experts in these fields from all ranks of thefaculty, bring to Harvard experts on these subjectsfrom other institutions and many countries, connectHarvard students to the leading lights of these pro-fessions, and advance and improve the quality ofeffective research. These activities are at the core ofthe Weatherhead Center’s mission.?

FALL 2004 • 3Continued page 11

E arly last academic year, interest arose amongthe Fellows of the Weatherhead Center on thefunctions of contemporary borders. The class

decided to convene a study group to meet approxi-mately once a week, open to members of the Harvardcommunity. The 2003-04 Fellows organized four-teen sessions in all during the spring term. Keycontributors were Eva Åkerman-Börje, Mark Devlin,Caroline Dumas, María Cristina Fernández, AdrianFortescue, Gerhard Kuentzle, Philippe Le Corre,Valerie Lofland, Masilo Mabeta, Pasi Patokallio,Stephen Pattison, Robert Rooks, Michael Small, andFellows Program Director Kathleen Molony. Guestscame from Harvard as well as from Brown Univer-sity, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, andNortheastern University.

A number of useful conclusions emerged fromthese sessions.

The general theme of borders is intellectuallychallenging to scholars from many disciplines:

· The study of borders invites robust com-parative analysis. The case studies we discussedranged from one extreme, Canada, which has onlyone land border, to China, which has no fewer thanfourteen. The United States, which was the focus ofone of our discussions, has two land borders. Thecontrasts and similarities between them readily in-vite comparative analysis.

· Every border and border region has itsown specificity, which invites more detailed areaanalysis of the border itself and the border regionson each side. This became particularly apparent in apresentation given to the Fellows about the German-Polish border, as seen from the vantage point of theViadrina University, which was re-established in theeastern German city of Frankfurt am Oder, underthe motto “where borders meet.”

· All borders can be analyzed by the particu-lar mix of political, economic, social and psychologi-cal functions they perform. The study of any borderarea usually involves an understanding of how thatborder is shaped by one or more other cross-borderrelationships, which in turn reflects national, re-gional or global flows.

· This means that the study of borders offersopportunities to examine where area studies andfunctional analyses intersect. For example, discus-

sions of the Canada–United States border presenteda clear-cut case of the policy choices between enhanc-ing security and promoting freer trade. Discussion ofthe Eastern European borders in the twentieth cen-tury generated many examples of how shifting bor-ders after World War I and II defined and redefinednational minorities, and how tensions over minorityrights in their own state, and their relationship totheir “national homeland,” were managed usinghuman rights instruments as mechanisms of con-flict prevention.

· Even when one takes a purely functionalperspective of specific kinds of cross-border flows—such as refugee movements, or international childadoptions, or remittances—a consideration of thesedisparate “global trends” from the perspective ofborders brings them together under a commonframe. All borders create barriers or bottlenecks tothese flows. But as a matter of policy choice, someborders are much freer to certain flows than others.The clearest example is in the movement of people.Barriers to the movement of people create a host ofexternalities, inviting a wide range of evasion strat-egies. These in turn generate complex policy prob-lems across a range of fields—from the universalapplication of human rights norms, to national-vs.-regional security arrangements, to patterns of hu-man capital formation and internationaldevelopment. States usually put in place one kind ofborder-control policy to deal with a specific prob-lem, with little attention to the spillover effects thiscan create (both positive and negative) in other areasof policy interest.

Political scientists traditionally have studiedborders as sources or zones of conflict. This remainstrue in some of the most volatile regions of the world,e.g. the contested border between Israelis and Pales-tinians, or the “cease-fire line” between India andPakistan in Kashmir. However, these sessions re-vealed that just as the number of inter-state wars hasdeclined radically in the late twentieth century, sohave the number of cases of continuing, unresolveddisputes between states over where they should drawtheir borders. Even when borders were completelyarbitrarily drawn—as in Africa during the colonialera, or in Central Asia by Stalin—newly independentstates have rapidly concluded that the costs of con-

contemporary BORDERS

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In Memoriam

J inbao Qian, a scholar of Chinese-Japanese relations, died suddenly on October 22,2004, after collapsing while playing badminton with friends from Harvard and MIT.He was 37 years old. When Jinbao left his native China in 1994 to pursue doctoral studies

at Harvard, he had already made his mark in the field of history. As an archivist at the SecondHistorical Archives of China in Nanjing, he had been part of a team that had painstakinglydocumented one of the most shattering events in China’s turbulent wartime relations with Japan,the Rape of Nanking. He sought to deepen his expertise by studying abroad, embarking on a paththat led ultimately to his receiving a Ph.D. in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard inJune 2004, working under the supervision of William Kirby, a leading specialist on twentiethcentury Chinese history. Among Harvard scholars of Chinese studies, he was widely heralded forhis encyclopedic and unparalleled knowledge of archival materials throughout China. His extensiveties among archivists in his home country gave him unprecedented access to research materialsthere, and he was generous in helping researchers from the United States and other nations gainaccess as well.

Jinbao was a highly valued Graduate Student Associate of the Weatherhead Center from2000 through 2003. “He was not only hard working but always kind and full of great humor,” saidClare Putnam, the coordinator of student programs. When the current academic year began inSeptember, Jinbao stayed at Harvard to take up a postdoctoral fellowship with the WeatherheadCenter’s Program on U.S.-Japan Relations, where he intended to investigate the wartimenegotiations between Japan and China from 1937 through 1945 and to publish his dissertationas a book. Well known among his friends for his athletic prowess, the Somerville resident left manycolleagues and acquaintances greatly saddened by his sudden and unexpected death.

He is deeply mourned by his friends here and by his family members in Sheyang County,Jiangsu Province, China.

Jinbao Qian Memorial FundJinbao came from a smallvillage in Sheyang County,Jiangsu Province, and heleaves his parents who stillreside there, as well as twobrothers also living in China.Naturally, his sudden deathat such a young age is adevastating loss to his familyin China. Over the pastweeks, we have heard from somany who have expressed awish to do something to helpJinbao’s family cope with thistragedy. We have establishedthis fund in order to givefriends, colleagues and otherswho knew Jinbao theopportunity to make acontribution, which will go inits entirety to Jinbao’s family.If you would like to make acontribution to this fund,please send a check made outto the “Jinbao QianMemorial Fund,” c/o ClarePutnam, WeatherheadCenter, 1033 MassachusettsAvenue, Cambridge, MA,02138, USA.

JINBAO QIAN1966-2004

A Memorial Service to celebrate the life of Jinbao Qian was held on Tuesday, November 23. Those whowere unable to attend but wish to convey their recollections and tributes, are invited to do so by e-mail toShinju Fujihira (sfujihira@wcfia.harvard.edu). We will translate all messages and convey them to the family.

FALL 2004 • 5

This book offers an up-to-date account of the changes in women’s,children’s, and minority rights in Japan in the past decade. Since thelate 1990s, several legal and political changes took place in Japanincluding the revision of the Equal Employment Opportunity Law, thelegalization of the pill, the first Basic Law on Gender Equality, theChild Prostitution and Pornography Prohibition Law, the Child AbusePrevention Law, the Anti-Stalking Law, the Law to Promote HumanRights Education, and finally the Domestic Violence Prevention Law.Predominant conceptions of the Japanese state, focusing onbureaucratic dominance, party politics, and interest groups, fail toexplain these extensive changes. This study ties the global to the localand examines how Japanese nongovernmental networks have been ableto effect change through issue reframing, advocacy education, andleverage politics. It further provides a contrasting case of the limitedadvancement of minority rights for Burakumin, Ainu, Okinawans,Koreans, and migrant workers in Japan.Jennifer Chan-Tiberghian is an advanced research fellow ofthe Program on U.S.-Japan Relations.

Why did President John F. Kennedy choose a strategy of confrontationduring the Cuban missile crisis even though his secretary of defensestated that the presence of missiles in Cuba made no difference? Whydid large numbers of Iraqi troops surrender during the Gulf War eventhough they had been ordered to fight and were capable of doing so?Why did Hitler declare war on the United States knowing full well thepower of that country? War and Human Nature argues that newfindings about the way humans are shaped by their inherited biologymay help provide answers to such questions. This seminal work byformer Defense Department official Stephen Peter Rosen contends thathuman evolutionary history has affected the way we process theinformation we use to make decisions. The result is that human choicesand calculations may be very different from those predicted bystandard models of rational behavior. Human emotional arousal affectshow people learn the lessons of history. For example, stress and distressinfluence people’s views of the future, and testosterone levels play arole in human social conflict.Stephen Peter Rosen is director of the John M. Olin Instituteof Strategic Studies and the Beton Michael Kaneb Professor of NationalSecurity and Military Affairs at Harvard University.

Gender andHuman RightsPolitics in Japan:Global Normsand DomesticNetworks

byJennifer Chan-Tiberghian

War andHuman Nature

byStephen PeterRosen

NEWBOOKS

This section presents recentpublications byWeatherhead Center affiliates.

OfNOTE

Dan Ziblatt, faculty associate, was selected by the American Political Science Association (APSA) for the Gabriel AlmondAward for 2004 for the best dissertation in comparative politics written in 2003 or 2002. “Constructing a Federal State:Political Development, Path Dependence, and the Origins of Federalism, 1815-1871.”

Jim Cooney, executive director of the Weatherhead Center, spent a week in early November in Germany explainingthe U.S. presidential election on national television and radio and in panel discussions in Berlin, Cologne, and Munich.He was part of the official American delegation invited by the U.S. Embassy in Germany.

The Kennedy School of Government approved the promotion of Weatherhead Center faculty associate and John M. OlinInstitute for Strategic Studies assistant director Monica Duffy Toft to the rank of associate professor of public policy.

Eliot A. Cohen was awarded the first Huntington Prize on Monday (March 22) for his book Supreme Command:Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime (New York: Free Press, 2002). The $10,000 prize is awarded for the bestbook published each year in the field of national security studies. According to the Huntington Prize Committee, “SupremeCommand” speaks to our time by laying forth the enduring dimensions of the interactions between great leaders of democraciesand their senior military officers. Cohen is professor of strategic studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced InternationalStudies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University. The Huntington Prize was established by the students and friends of SamuelP. Huntington, the Albert J. Weatherhead University Professor and former chairman of the Harvard Academy of Internationaland Area Studies.

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Adrian Fortescue, a Fellow in 2003-2004, died unexpectedly on August 17, 2004, in Londonat the age of 63. Adrian had devoted his life to public service, having first served for 20 yearsas a British Foreign Service Officer, with diplomatic postings in Lebanon, Jordan, Paris, Brussels,Washington and Budapest. In 1985, he was seconded to the European Commission as chefde cabinet to the Commission’s British vice president, Lord Cockfield, and he thus played apivotal role in the creation of the Single Market. Adrian was invited in 1989 by theCommission’s then-president, Jacques Delors, to oversee the project to remove frontiercontrols on people moving between EC countries. A decade later he became the first directorgeneral of the newly created directorate general for Justice and Home Affairs. In a recenttribute, Neil Kinnock, vice president of the European Commission, wrote that the directorategeneral “in developing an effective European area of justice and freedom will be a lastingtestimony to [Adrian’s] civilised convictions, his sense of vision, and his personal andprofessional dedication.” In recognition of his many contributions as an international publicservant, Adrian was knighted recently by HM the Queen. His colleagues at the Center, saidFellows Program director Kathleen Molony, remember Adrian for “his intelligence, charm,creativity, wit, friendship, humility, patience, and skill at negotiations. They have fondly recalledso much: from his good-humored ‘thank you’ to one of our hosts on the Fellows’ study tripto Canada; to his expertise on European migration and border issues; to the moment whenhe donned high boots and witnessed an auction of the daily tuna catch in the Japanese fishmarket, tsukij; and finally to his expression of appreciation to the Program and Center at thefarewell dinner in May.” Adrian’s deep convictions and his years of professional experiencewere reflected in all that he accomplished during his year as a Fellow. In a carefully craftedresearch paper submitted just weeks before his untimely death, he considered the effective-ness of the newly created U.S. Department of Homeland Security in ensuring the safety ofAmericans, examining what lessons the department’s establishment might hold for theEuropean Union. He is survived by his wife, Marie, and by his children, James and Geraldine.

Fellows’ Lives Lived

AdrianFortescue

The Fellows Program; Adrian’s, Ann’s, and Pedro’scolleagues; the Weatherhead Center; and theuniversity community were deeply enriched bythese Fellows’ presence among us.

FALL 2004 • 7

?

Pedro Pick

Elizabeth AnnSwift Cronin

Pedro Pick, a Fellow in 1981-82, died at home in Vermont on October 4, 2004, after a valiantfight against cancer. He was 69 years old and passed away peacefully, surrounded by his wife,Barbara; their children; and his brother, Pablo. Born in Prague, Pedro was a Venezuelan citizenwho was educated as an undergraduate at New York University. Before coming to the Centerfor International Affairs he served at CORIMON, C.A., a leading Venezuelan industrial group,through which he managed various chemical companies. During that time he was also presidentof the Venezuelan Chemical Association, president of the Venezuelan Foundation for theAdvancement of Science, director of the Venezuelan Industrial Council, and was the founderand coordinator of the Santa Lucia Civic Group. Later he was a vice president of Arthur D. Little,International, Inc., based in Cambridge. In the mid-1990s Pedro moved to Prague where heserved as chairman of Patria Management, chairman of Spolchemie, director of PragueBreweries, and consultant to A.T. Kearney. For many years Pedro was a member of this Center’sVisiting Committee, and he was a co-founder and a decisive promoter of the Center’s NOMOSGroup, a seminar that brought together business, government, and academic leaders to examinekey issues in Latin American economies and polities. For Harvard he also served as a memberof the Dean’s Council of the John F. Kennedy School of Government, and was vice presidentof the Harvard Club of Prague. In recent years Pedro was on the advisory board of IDE-Madridand was director of the Lípa Civic Forum. In 1980, before becoming a Fellow, Pedro expressedan interest to then-director Ben Brown to dedicate the rest of his life to the simultaneousadvancement of management science for financial profit and the cause of human welfare. Hislife is testament to the fact that these goals can, indeed, be achieved together.

Elizabeth Ann Swift Cronin, a Fellow in 1981-82, died in a horseback riding accident in Rectortown,Virginia, on May 7, 2004, at the age of 63. A native of Washington, D.C., she graduated with a cumlaude degree in history from Radcliffe College in 1962 and from Cornell University with a master’sdegree in Southeast Asian history. Joining the Foreign Service the following year, she served in thePhilippines, Indonesia, and in Washington before she was assigned as deputy political counselor inthe U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979. Ann spent 444 days in Iran as a hostage, from 1979 to 1981,as one of two women among the 52 diplomats held by supporters of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.After returning to the U.S., Fellows director Benjamin Brown recruited her to spend a year as aFellow, “as in some ways a homecoming in familiar surroundings among some familiar faces… toget her bearings after her long captivity.” She ruled out one subject of study at Harvard, herexperience as a hostage. “I want to put it behind me and study other areas,” she said at the time(although she did write an account of her captivity and her conversations with student revolution-aries). After her year as a Fellow, Ann Swift continued to work for the State Department, movinginto consular affairs and working in Athens, Kingston, and London. (It was suggested by a colleaguein the Fellows Program during her year that she had come to feel that the State Department wasmisrepresenting its support of human rights abroad and that consular affairs would be a lesscompromising branch of service.) While in London she assisted the families of the victims of thebombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. She retired from the Foreign Service in 1995.Paul D. Cronin, her husband of ten years, two stepsons, and a step-granddaughter survive her.

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Old buildings lining thestreets in Habana Vieja, thetourist sector of the city. TheCuban government is slowlyworking to restore the facadesof many of the old colonialstyle buildings that line thebusy streets.Photo Susan Mathai.

T here is no real substitute for time spent inanother country. For more than three de-cades the Weatherhead Center has celebrated

the importance of international education by pro-viding summer travel grants to undergraduates whoplan to conduct senior thesis research on topicsrelated to the core interests of the WeatherheadCenter. Study abroad provides the opportunity forundergraduates to make connections between whatis studied in the classroom and what is experiencedin the outside world. These observations are broughtback to campus to further enrich a student’s ongoingstudies and worldview.

At the outset, most undergraduates whoreceive summer travel grants from theWeatherhead Center expect their researchgoals to be both straightforward and obtain-able: to improve their foreign language skills;to conduct interviews and collect data; todevelop new academic interests as a capstoneto their undergraduate experience. Of thetwenty grant recipients in 2004, nearly everystudent reported that they subsequentlyamended their senior thesis to reflect moreclosely their cultural observations, whichdiffered from their preconceived notions abouta topic that had been previously limited tolessons learned in the classroom.

For the past few years Harvard College hasinstituted an effort to encourage students topursue an alternative cultural experience duringtheir undergraduate careers. The Harvard CollegeCurricular Review (HCCR) recently recom-mended that twenty-five percent of students—about 200 per class, per semester—should have a“significant” international experience during theirundergraduate careers. But why celebrate theimportance of international education? DeanWilliam Kirby noted in his recent letter tomembers of the Harvard Community onNovember 10:

That the world has grown closer—throughtechnology, political alliance, shared economic

structures, and the spread of both culture anddisease—is undeniable. But we remain differentsocieties, for all our interconnection. We can gaintrue mutual understanding, both through rigorousstudy and personal relationships built at home andabroad. All the world’s students—our futureleaders—and all of us involved in higher educationhave a stake in this effort.

Josh Stenberg’s recent letter to theWeatherhead Center—selections of which appearin this article—attests to the importance ofinternational experience. Highlighted here also arereport excerpts from four Weatherhead CenterUndergraduate Associates, who are in the processof writing their senior theses.

Susan MathaiMy experience in Cuba was both enlightening

and frustrating. I did leave the island after twomonths with a multi-dimensional understanding ofnormal, everyday life for Cuban families and of thecomplicated social, political, and economic situationin which Cubans are trying to construct meaning

and hope for the future.I had originally intended to focus my study on

the national immunization programs in Cuba, pri-marily because they have been a source of pride forthe island nation, having provided for many yearsnearly 100% of Cuban children with protectionagainst approximately 13 different illnesses. TheCuban health system was, and still is, an example tome that the goals of comprehensive medical care(even from the primary care level) is possible in thedeveloping world, especially in the context of apolitical commitment to “social justice” in health

STUDY

ABROADby Amanda Pearson

I am writing to thank the Centerfor the support and opportunities itoffered throughout my time inCambridge.

highlights of my undergraduate studies.“My interaction with Weatherhead formed one of the

“My name is Josh Stenberg; I am a June ‘04 graduatefrom Harvard College. Now that my time atHarvard is at an end,

“I worked as research assistant to Dr. DragoStambuk, a Fellow at the Weatherhead Center.

I was able to see him again; he took me and myfriends in a whirlwind

introduced us to the academicians, poets, andpresidential candidates who wandered past.“

This summer, while visiting Croatia,

historical tour of Zagreb,

FALL 2004 • 9

Left: During a capacity-building session, theinstructor tries on a shirt made by one of themicro-entrepreneurs. The workshop for the day ispresentation and quality of products. The womenhave braved a torrential rainstorm and a busstrike to attend training, even though they had tocome on foot. Photo Mika Morse.

Protestors, the March Against Violence,Guatemala City, August 13, 2004.Photo Christina Givey.

and medicine. I lived in Havana for approximatelytwo months, between June 10 and August 10, 2004. Iwas hosted by Dr. Jorge Pérez and Lic. Alicia Reyesfrom the Instituto de Medicina Tropical—PedroKourí (IPK), one of Cuba’s premiere medical insti-tutions, which focuses on the study of infectiousdiseases, most notably HIV/AIDS.

Towards the end of my time in Cuba, I was ableto spend my time accompanying physicians onrounds at the hospital at the IPK, which focuses onthe care of HIV positive patients suffering fromserious opportunistic infections. I was also able toaccompany some neighborhood primary care phy-sicians during their daily work. This included“terreno,” home visits, a particularly patient-cen-tered aspect of the extensive primary-care system andone of the reasons that Cuba continues to be able toimprove health statistics (e.g., infant mortality, ma-ternal mortality) despite severe economic and politi-cal problems. This experience gave me a morethree-dimensional vision of what health in Cubaentails, and also makes me more confident in mypotential future writings on the subject. I have alsomade many friends and contacts at IPK and in Cuba,and I think that this will be invaluable in continuingto research and write about the island.

I learned innumerable lessons about how Cu-bans have been able to survive and make do in anidiosyncratic “planned” economy, how Cuba and LaRevolución continues to be a potent political symbolfor other Latinos, and how the U.S. continues toinfluence Latin American and Cuban politics in waysthat most Americans (including myself) fail to recog-nize and continue to understand poorly.

Mika MorseThanks to the grant I received from WCFIA, I

was able to travel to Nicaragua for six weeks toconduct research for my senior thesis on women’sexperiences with micro-credit. The easiest part of myresearch was the degree of openness and accessibilitythat I encountered in the micro-credit sector. Women,organizations, and government representatives were

eager to share their experiences and were interestedin my research. For example, one organization of-fered to take me along on trips to remote ruralvillages to talk to women who have received micro-credit. Some of the most insightful conversationsoccurred informally. We would talk for hours in thecar as we waded through flooded dirt roads andclimbed steep mountains to towns like Las Rivas andLa Concha.

The observation aspect of my research was alsoincredibly valuable. Each organization that gives outsmall loans to women to help them maintain theirinformal business has a different philosophy andthus a different methodology. Some emphasizedpoverty alleviation while others were more con-cerned with women’s empowerment, while still oth-ers focused on national development. I found thatorganizations with a gender focus also integratewomen’s empowerment, self-care, resolving do-mestic conflict, and self-esteem workshops into theirtraining programs to improve genderrelationships between wives and hus-bands.

In addition to researchingwhether training is in fact a usefulcomponent of micro-credit pro-grams, I became interested in how it isused to accomplish the mission the organizationsubscribes to. In what ways does it empower women?How far does it go in alleviating poverty? Are busi-nesses more successful and more productive becauseof it?

The experience of doing field work was entirelynew to me, but my relationship with my thesisadvisor, Professor William Fisher, made things easier.We were in touch about once or twice a week so Icould tell him about my recent discoveries and askhow he recommended I proceed. I sent him samplesof interview notes and field observations, and re-ceived back notes of my questions and suggestionsfor issues to focus on.

I am also in close contact with many of thepeople and organizations that helped me while I was

Continued page 10

It was an eye-opening summer. “

“I was very fortunate to receive a summertravel grant for my thesis project, which dealtwith the society of Chinese migrants on theRussian side of the Amur River.

10 • CENTERPIECE

in Nicaragua. My field work component was the bestexperience I have had at Harvard and I look forwardto my thesis as a final product of this incredibleprocess of original research.

Christina GiveyActually “being there,” as [Clifford] Geertz so

famously put it, gave me much more “unofficial”and nuanced insights and enormously complicatedthe theories I knew about truth commissions, justice,and reconciliation. My research questions focusedon the impact and perceptions of the CEH andREHMI processes: how they have affected differentGuatemalans’ ideas about justice, healing, and rec-onciliation, and how the recommendations of thecommissions have (or have not) been implemented.I spent eleven weeks in country; the first three I livedwith a family in Guatemala City and the others I livedwith a family in Chimaltenango.

It was not easy to talk about these issues; forexample, upon meeting me for the first time, manypeople would tell me what they thought about theirchurches (Catholic or evangelical) or what theythought about immigration, since so many people Iknew there had family in the United States. Further-more, it was obvious that security threats were a veryreal part of the lives of the people I got to know whowere involved in human rights work.

Besides people directly involved in human rightsorganizations, I brought up the themes of my projectwith others, although I was very cautious about whoI talked to and only did this after I had known themfor several weeks and had established that they weretrusted and safe to talk to, and that it was safe forthem to talk to me.

It was very interesting that most of these peoplehad never heard of either of the truth commissions,and although they did remember when Gerardi wasassassinated, they did not know why. All of thepeople who worked in human rights organizationsin Guatemala City knew both commissions, andmany had actually worked on them and given testi-monies. They shared with me many opinions aboutthe usefulness of the truth commission process.However, most other people in and aroundChimaltenango, both indigenous and ladino, hadnever seen the reports and were not very interestedin talking about them—this was both in areas hitvery hard by the violence (San Juan Comalapa,Tecpan), and others that were not that affected(Patzicia).

The divisions between evangelicals and Catho-lics were very clear, and sometimes this was delicateto navigate, as I was neither an evangelical nor apracticing Catholic. This is something that futurestudents should be aware of. Also obvious were the

divisions and inequalities between ladinos and in-digenous peoples, and rural and urban divides.

Peter McMurrySitting at Harvard, I had assumed that people

would know the necessary academic terminology todiscuss their own identity. But through interviews, Irealized that many of the labels (Muslim, Bosnian,Bosniak, Serb) had completely different meaning forevery individual, and some made no sense at all for them.

My thesis has started to move into a morestrictly literary realm specifically because of thoseconversations. As I’ve looked back to those inter-views, it became clear that I was undertrained toreally sort through the litany of issues bundled up inthe identity of Slavic Muslims (Bosniaks) in the area.I feel I barely began to elicit answers to many of thesociological and anthropological questions that sur-round my topic: on race, ethnicity, religiosity, reli-gion-as-nation, language and nationality, etc. Andyet, these interviews were not a waste of time; farfrom it, they opened my eyes to the rich blend ofcultural forces at play in the folk literature of the area.They also challenged any attempts I might havemade to address the region as being culturally static,which can be especially tempting in discussing folkart as though it came from “the Bosniak people” or

even “Bosniak singers in the Sandzak.”So in short, these interviews have set a cultural

backdrop of sorts for the literary work that I am nowundertaking. And also, they have created a sort oftheoretical “audience” in thinking about the perfor-mance and reception of these folk artforms. Thisinterplay between social awareness and politicalthought, and the creation of traditional art is prov-ing to be both problematic and challenging for thereasons I mentioned before, as well as very reward-ing.

Of equal importance, I believe, was that I madea number of strong friendships that will survive overlong distance. Aside from the purely academic en-gagement of field research, I believe it is very impor-tant that the community “studied” be a part of theentire process.

Christina Givey (right) andMagdalena in the office of theGerardi Association, a humanrights organization,Chimaltenango, Guatemala,August 2004.Photo Christina Givey.

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“Throughout the writing process I found the meetingsand conferences with Weatherhead affiliates very useful.

That the thesis was well-received in thedepartment and awarded the Hoopes Prize

is a testament to the generosity of Weatherhead’s staffand affiliates, without whose funding, support andadvice my research, let alone my thesis-writing, wouldhave been impossible.“

FALL 2004 • 11

Contemporary Borders...

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Today, the focus of border policing is on clandestine, transnational flows of people, drugs, and weapons.Conventional security forces are of minimal use in dealing with these threats, despite the disproportional resourcesspent on them compared to the services required to promote homeland security.

testing these borders is very high, and their strongpreference is to build a coherent state within what-ever borders they inherited. Thus the study of bor-ders today is much less about the science of where todraw lines between nations. It is much more aboutwhere jurisdictions meet, overlap, and influence eachother—and not just at the border, but also at thebilateral, regional or even global level.

The politics of border policing and bordercontrols was a poorly studied subject prior to Sep-tember 11, 2001. Despite the huge increase in policyattention to security of borders since that day, thesubject is still in its infancy. Today, the focus ofborder policing is on clandestine, transnational flowsof people, drugs, and weapons. Conventional secu-rity forces are of minimal use in dealing with thesethreats, despite the disproportional resources spenton them compared to the services required to pro-mote homeland security. At the same time, there aredisproportionate degrees of public tolerance forsecurity failures in dealing with these different kindsof clandestine threats. The expectation and accep-tance of failure to interdict smuggling of migrants isquite high, and of drugs somewhat lower; whiletolerance for cross-border movements of terroristsis zero. Yet no border control can achieve a 100%success rate. Existing U.S. strategies to respond to amajor cross-border terrorist event (e.g., plans toclose all ports) would have catastrophic conse-quences for the global economy. Instead a riskmanagement approach is required, which regardsborder controls as providing one of many layers ofsecurity, rather than an ultimate guarantee.

Achieving this goal requires changing publicacceptance of the risks entailed by maintaining openborders and the costs of not doing so. It involves agreater burden sharing of the costs of border securitybetween the public and private sectors. It can alsoinvolve widening zones of free movement of peoplebetween states, provided the public can be assuredthat equally secure alternative arrangements, usuallyinvolving a strengthened common external border,can be put in place. This has been shown by thestrong, continuing public support within the Euro-pean Union for the Schengen process of eliminatinginternal border controls, despite post-September 11concerns. Alternative political models exist to ac-

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commodate the basic human desire to be able tomove more freely across borders with the publicconcern for greater protection against new trans-national threats.

Nevertheless, increased post-September 11 in-ternational preoccupations with security have height-ened an underlying trend, that as borders worldwidehave become more transparent to the movement ofgoods and services, borders have become less trans-parent to the movement of people. The asymmetrybetween the right to leave one’s own country and thelack of rights to travel to or settle in another countryis at the core of this complex phenomenon. New andproblematic patterns of migration challenge theexisting legal and institutional arrangements forglobal governance, such as the surge in the traffickingof people, or the small but growing number ofindependent child migrants who have no fixed home.Human capital flows have now become a majordriver of international development, for both thesending and receiving countries. And just as peoplewill find a way to move to jobs across borders, jobswill find a way to move to people, as the currentdebate over outsourcing shows.

These sessions concluded that the much-her-alded “borderless world” has not arrived and maynever arrive. We live in a world in which the same oldborders shape, constrain, and facilitate new kinds offlows across state boundaries. Studying the func-tions of contemporary borders remains a rich fieldfor further academic inquiry and policy analysis.

12 • CENTERPIECE

1033 Massachusetts AvenueCambridge, MA 02138

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E-mail correspondence regardingthe Centerpiece or other mattersmay be directed to:

Jim CooneyExecutive Directorjcooney@wcfia.harvard.edu

Steven BloomfieldEditorAssociate Directorsbloomfield@wcfia.harvard.edu

Amanda PearsonDirector of Publicationspublications@wcfia.harvard.edu

The Center’s Web address is:http://www.wcfia.harvard.edu

04-07 Jeffrey A. Frankel ,“External Opening and the World

Trading System”

04-06 Larry Hamlet andDevesh Kapur , “Where You Sit is

Where You Stand: The BehavioralImpact of Geography on International

Organizations”

04-05 Mark Copelovitch,“Private Debt Composition and thePolitical Economy of IMF Lending”

04-04 Jean-Louis Zoël,"Is There an African Curse?"

04-03 Richard N. Cooper ,"A Half Century of

Development"

04-02 Richard N. Cooper ,“Is ‘Economic Power’

a Useful Operational Concept?”

04-01 Jeffrey A. Frankel ,“The UK Decision re EMU: Implications

of Currency Blocs for Trade andBusiness Cycle Correlations”

2004

Submissions ProcedureThe Weatherhead Center invites faculty associates, graduate student associates,visiting scholars, Fellows, and affiliates of the Center to submit manuscripts to itspeer-reviewed Working Paper Series, which publishes up to ten papers every year.The editorial board selects papers based on their relevance to contemporary issuesin international affairs, originality of research, rigor of analysis, and significance ofconclusions.

All submitted manuscripts will be reviewed anonymously for quality by at least onescholar of the Center and produced as quickly as possible.

The manuscripts can be 20 to 80 pages in length, and must include an abstractof no more than 150 words. Please direct all submissions, or question, topublications@wcfia.harvard.edu

WorkingPaperSeries