better for reinforcing defensive self-pride
I think this is a great point. This idea reminds me of Jamie Mayerfeld's negative outlook of group identity. Specifically the subset titled "Snobbish Pride." He says snobbish pride is "in inheriting as a birthright a valued identity that other people can never attain, or can attain only by special effort or dispensation."
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0032-3497%28199822%2930%3A4%3C555%3ATMOBGI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-E
trying to plow or divide them withbarriers is futile.
I think this is where the purpose of Said's article is stated. His claim is that the problem with Huntington is that his paper is too divisive. Because Huntington wants the West and Islam to be separated, the rest of his work is invalidated because he was writing for an ulterior motive.
hese are tense times, but it is better tothink in terms of powerful and powerless communities
I think it depends. Just because a community does not have "power" in a conventional sense does not mean they deserve unwavering support.
Not surprisingly, then, Muslimsand Christians speak readily of crusades and jihads, both ofthem eliding the Judaic presence with often sublimeinsouciance.
Showing the flaws of both sides.
not one of them by any means a monolithic
A point that should be taken seriously by everyone.
Beginning with Judaism and Christianity, each is a successorhaunted by what came before
What does this mean?
Arab-Islamic conquests
I feel like Said is unintentionally backing up the idea that religion divides culture with this particular example.
Did he canvas 100 Indonesians, 200Moroccans, 500 Egyptians and fifty Bosnians? Even if he did,what sort of sample is that?
This is a legit criticism however what he seems to be targeting is the treatment of Muslims and not arguing the thesis.
for Osama bin Laden and hisfollowers in cults like the Branch Davidians or the disciplesof the Rev. Jim Jones at Guyana or the Japanese AumShinrikyo
I don't like this idea of comparing tragedies. This is like making the false equivalences to the Holocaust. It only serves to demonize that victims of the original tragedy.
someone who wants to make "civilizations" and"identities" into what they are not: shut-down, sealed-offentities that have been purged of the myriad currents andcountercurrents that animate human history,
I do see this being one of Huntington's underlying goals. As a member of the West, Huntington appears to want to isolate from the cultures of other peoples.
by a tiny band ofcrazed fanatics for criminal purposes
I don't know if this is something that I can agree with. Said is trying to minimize the 9/11 terrorist activities to a small group of criminals. He is denying the concept that this is a large scale terrorist attack. While I do agree that Huntington is overplaying this in his analysis, Said is completely dismissing his argument on the grounds that it has the potential to demonize Arabs or Muslims.
slam and the West, gets the lion’s share of hisattention.
The major conflict that Huntington talks about.
The faultlines between civilizations will be the battle lines of thefuture.
The main point of Huntington's claim.
a newphase" in world politics after the end of the cold war,Huntington’s terms of argument seemed compellingly large,bold, even visionary.
Claims the purpose of Huntington's thesis was to be eye catching so that it would become popular.
With the end of the Soviet Union, however,political considerations gave way to religious ones
The most important identity in determining culture
Islam has bloody borders
maybe but also comes off as slightly oriental
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/node/1113268 1/32 e Clash of Civilizations?
on icts of the future will occur along thecultural fault lines separating these civilizations from one another.
Huntington claims that conflict will occur where cultural fault lines exist. I think it is important to keep in mind his previous statement that civilizations can be widespread.
Civilizations may involve a large number of people, as with China ("acivilization pretending to be a state," as Lucian Pye put it), or a very smallnumber of people, such as the Anglophone Caribbean. A civilization mayinclude several nation states, as is the case with Western, Latin Americanand Arab civilizations, or only one, as is the case with Japanese civilization.
A civilization does is not bound by borders
neither of whichwas a nation state in the classical European sense and each of whichde ned its identity in terms of its ideology
Is making the claim that neither Russia or America qualify as a typical nation state.
" e wars of kings were over; the wars of peoples had begun.
This seems like it could mean a war of ideologies or a war of communities had begun
con icts of the Western world were largely among princes-emperors,absolute monarchs and constitutional monarchs attempting to expand theirbureaucracies, their armies, their mercantilist economic strength and, mostimportant, the territory they ruled.
Basically non democratic states
ern world to get them out, if necessary through military interventions
The responsibility to protect and democratic peace
This is what we call, for short, the “three I’s” problem:
But the real question is how do we stop the three I's from happening
But, once a seat that had been reserved went back to being open,women were more likely to be elected again: The share of womenelected increased to 13 percent for currently unreserved seats that hadbeen reserved once in the past and to 17 percent if they had been re-served twice.
"Women hold 126, or 23.6%, of the 535 seats in the 116th U.S. Congress" and that number increases to about 28% for Statewide Elective Executive Offices. This statistic, although presented in a groundbreaking manor is relatively close to the American numbers.
The villages were randomly chosen
Who keeps putting on these trials. It seems like systems are being imposed on the local population whether or not they want it.
The women who are elected areoften related to someone who was in politics before. They are lesslikely to chair the village meetings, and they speak less at them. Theyare less educated and less politically experienced
A key criticism of Feminist IR Theory
In Indonesia, in some randomly selected villages,people were formally invited to meetings through letters.
This is actually an interesting method and I am somewhat shocked that it worked. I am curious how long that statistic would be true for. Would people stop going if they lost faith in the instituion?
who is invited to the meetings, who speaks, who isin charge of implementing the project on a day-to-day basis, how theseproject leaders are selected, and much more.
The details matter, not the headline
The num-ber of invalid votes was 11 percent lower in the municipalities that in-troduced electronic voting than in very similar municipalities that hadnot yet converted to the new system.
This is interesting. Trying to make it easier rather than harder for people to vote.
4 Indian police stations are evaluated on the basis of the num-ber of unsolved cases, that is, the more unresolved cases, the worse theevaluation. Therefore, an easy way to get better evaluations is to registeras few cases as possible. In our first set of decoy visits, only 40 percentof the cases actually got to the point where the police were willing toregister them (at which point our decoys were required to reveal that itwas just a test). It is therefore no surprise that the poor rarely attemptto report any petty crimes to the police
The cause of corruption might is not always because of the individual but the system makes it too difficult to be honest there forth forcing this to become a systemic issue.
asterly is consis-tent: He points out that freedom cannot be imposed from outside, oth-erwise it would not be freedom.
I am confused. Is he saying that military is necessary to create a democracy for them and then also saying that the west should not impose a democracy on others?
they were built less well, and therefore more liable to be washed awayby the next rains
The effect of the corruption is not purely monetary. It results in a half ass job that will negatively effect the constituents the institution was designed to serve.
The reforms havetypically been met with skepticism in the West: The elections are oftenrigged, and the elected officials have very limited powers
And yet, a "strong democracy" such as the United States, experiences these same struggles.
autocratic regimes sometimesleave some limited space for citizen participation.
I think this is important. Just because a regime is autocratic does not mean that they are inherently evil.
Countries would hand over an empty strip of territory to a for-eign power, who would then take the responsibility for developing anew city with good institutions
I feel like this is so black and white. Where are you going to actually find "an empty strip of territory"?
Acemoglu,Robinson, and Simon Johnson showed that former colonies where thedisease environment prevented large-scale settlements by Europeanstended to have worse institutions during colonial times (because theywere naturally picked for being exploited from afar), and these bad in-stitutions continued after decolonization.
Is this saying extractive colonialism does more harm than settler colonialism in the long run?
po-litical institutions put enough constraints on rulers to ensure that theycannot deviate too far from the public interest.
The purpose of political institutions
it is not necessaryto wait for the overthrow of the government or the profound transfor-mation of society before better policies can be implemented
I feel like this says a lot in how easily the author said that it might not be "necessary" to overthrow the government as if a coup is the only way to bring stability.
At the other extreme, Jeffrey Sachs sees corruption, perhaps not sur-prisingly, as a poverty trap: Poverty causes corruption, and corruptioncauses poverty
Spending money won't stop the poverty if there is all ready corruption. What can be done to stop the corruption should be the top priority.