Sunday, September 7, 2008
Reflection #2
Friday’s class has been my favorite so far. I thought it was really neat that we applied the different theories on world politics to class without purposefully doing so, and I also found it pretty interesting that almost everyone except for group 1 went for the realist point of view while group 1 advocated more of an idealist theory. Perceptions seem to change quite a bit depending on the circumstances of the people involved. Even though we all knew that we were only going to be there for an hour the debates got pretty heated.
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I agree: I think its a lot easier to maintain idealism when you're at the top of the world and don't have to cope with the realities of insufficient resources, of famine and disease and destitution. I'm reminded of the simulation I did at Model United Nations last year, recreating the breakup of Yugoslavia as the Bosnian defense minister. My fellow ministers and I quickly realized that we could not fight a more powerful Serbia head-on, and world powers preferred high-handed idealism - denouncing the violence, distributing aid, and imposing an arms embargo on all actors. All three countries realized that victory meant playing dirty: although Bosnia committed less egregious violations than Croatia and Serbia, we still purchased weapons from the Tamil Tigers, recruited Islamic paramilitaries from Iran, assassinated domestic opposition leaders, and massacred our own civilians in order to frame Serbia and draw international condemnation.
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