Author: Milan

In the spring of 2005, I graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in International Relations and a general focus in the area of environmental politics. In the fall of 2005, I began reading for an M.Phil in IR at Wadham College, Oxford. Outside school, I am very interested in photography, writing, and the outdoors. I am writing this blog to keep in touch with friends and family around the world, provide a more personal view of graduate student life in Oxford, and pass on some lessons I've learned here.

Published from 2 Church Walk, Oxford

One of the reasons for which the journey tale is an archetypal genre of fiction is because it is intuitively obvious that traveling can lead to new understandings and possibly enlightenment. The two kilometre trek from Wadham College to Church Walk has already done so; I can tell that I am going to have to change my life.

Firstly, I can see that in any room that has a decent supply of shelving, the supply of books I have here is absolutely pitiful. If you walked into the room of a thirteen year old with as many books as I have, you would become concerned about his life prospects and strongly suspect that he spends too much time playing video games.

Secondly, I am going to need to learn to rise with the dawn, at the same time as I am unlearning any immodest behaviours I have picked up. This is because my room lacks both bedsheets and curtains, though I do have a lovely view into the back yard and the houses around us.

All told, this place is really nice, and it was very kind of Kai to help me move. Between the adjacent kitchen and the large amounts of natural lighting, this place strikes me as much nicer than Library Court, all told. I am excited about living here, and inviting people for tea and such. First, I need to go write that damnable practice examination.

Farewell to Library Court

Everything from my strategic loose change reserve – an incoherent mix of Canadian, British, Maltese, American, Estonian, and Finnish coins – to my tea kettle is now packed. Hopefully, my brain is equally packed with practice QT appropriate knowledge, rather than my account number at a bank I stopped using a decade ago and have never been able to forgot. (This was before they would give me a bank card, so I had to write it out every time.)

My fellow denizens should know that I’ve enjoyed living in their company, and that the shift to Church Walk has much more to do with long term accommodation needs than any dissatisfaction with living in Wadham. Doubtless, I will come around and lurk dangerously once in a while, with collar up and hat brim low.

Exam dress rehearsal tomorrow

Today concluded both packing and first wave studying, with enough time left over to walk with Louise for a bit in the Wadham gardens and appreciate a couple of the brief but intense hailstorms that have been a feature of this variable day. In Shakespearean fashion, the weather is demonstrating the existence of changes afoot.

I have now re-read all my notes, all my papers, the comments on my papers, as well as many of the papers which I’ve exchanged with my classmates. I feel familiar, overall, with the type of questions being asked about the first world war, the middle east, and China and Japan. Any question on the United States would be a gift to me, since I did so much US history and foreign policy at UBC. On the theory side, I think I have a strong grasp on everything except international society – partly because it is somewhat vague as a discipline, when compared with the neos, constructivism, and such. I’d like to answer a question on Gramsci’s Marxism, because I think his ideas are really interesting.

The biggest question weighing upon my mind at present does not have to do with the content of either of the core seminars being examined. Rather, it has to do with the stylistic requirements of a formal Oxford examination. For instance, I am uncertain about how important it is to discuss the ideas of theorists with reference to their names, or whether we can answer the question in relatively non-annotated ways. In some cases, it’s easy: “As constructivist theorists like Wendt identify, the iterated interplay between states serves to constitute their identities over time,” for instance. When it comes to topics that I’ve read a huge amount about in many different sources (for instance, humanitarian intervention), it becomes almost impossible for me to remember who exactly said what. Thankfully, the questions on the qualifying tests are quite open ended. Here are some examples from past exams, courtesy of Alex Stummvoll:

‘The First World War was the logical outcome of imperialism.’ Do you agree? (QT 2003/Easter)
Was the peace settlement of 1919 doomed from the start or was it undermined by the Great Depression? (QT 2003/Easter)
Was there a better case for appeasing Japan rather than Germany in the 1930s? (QT 2002/Easter)
Does ‘self-interest’ mean the same thing to neorealists and constructivists? (QT 2003/Trinity)
Is it correct to say that while democracy produces peace, democratization produces war? (QT 2000/Easter)
‘The expansion of international law into areas that involve fundamental conflicts of interest has usually resulted in the weakening of law rather than any real constraint on the practice of states.’ Discuss. (M.Phil 2000)

That diminishes the importance of knowing each and every fact, but increases the importance of getting the style and structure right. We need to answer three such questions over the course of the three hour exam, including at least one from history and one from theory.

I really wish Blogger had categories incorporated in the way that WordPress does. Then I would feel less guilty about how eclectic these postings can be. If I could mark things obviously as ‘boring day to day life,’ ‘reflections on Oxford,’ ‘world politics,’ ‘environmental politics,’ ‘photography,’ ‘literature,’ and such, people would have an easier time reading only what they care to. That said, I’ve been making an effort to separate discussions of different fields into distinct posts or sections, with comprehensible titles. Topic posts (usually without photos) are more focused than there were in previous times and daily posts (usually with photos) capture the bulk of the day-to-day stuff that some readers find intolerably boring.
Are there any other formatting suggestions people have? One possibility is to actually separate the substantive discussions in my area of core academic competence – world politics and environmental politics – and put them into another blog.
In my inbox, there are a collection of the kind of emails I am always excited to receive: lengthy, substantive ones from friends that I want to respond well to. I shall do so after the move and practice QT are done. You are not being ignored.

Brief comment on Iran

The idea that the United States is planning to attack Iran seems to be gaining currency in the media. Let us hope that this is an intentional strategy of intimidation meant to bolster efforts to deal with the Iranian nuclear program diplomatically. Compared to Iraq – which had been crippled by sanctions and frequent military interventions in the years leading up to the second Gulf War – Iran certainly retains the offensive capability to inflict considerable direct and indirect damage to American and other western interests.

Consider the single possibility of rendering the Strait of Hormuz impassable. Given the sheer volume of oil that passes through there, a disruption could cause severe economic problems worldwide. Between air power and missiles, Iran also has the capacity to strike targets throughout the region. Any military action in Iran would lead to casualties that make the 2000 or so in Iraq so far look like nothing: and that’s just if the strikes are based around conventional forces. There is apparently talk of using tactical nuclear weapons to strike embedded facilities, such as the uranium centrifuge cascade that is supposedly under construction. Even without nuclear weapons, Iran could inflict massive casualties in retaliation for such an attack: an attack that would also be a gross violation of international law and any reasonable code of morality.

Anyone who is as terrified as I am by recent revelations that the United States may be planning an attack on Iran, or who maintains a general interest in the Middle East region, might want to take a look at a new Oxford blog: Middle East Wonks. Among the contributors is my friend and fellow M.Phil student Roham Alvandi, who I was impressed to learn writes about Iran for the Economist Intelligence Unit.

Study strategies

Most of my fellow students will understand what I mean when I describe the point in time, before a test, when your strategy switches from that of best practice to that of last ditch defence. This is the point where studying (or revising, as it is called here) becomes cramming.

As a strategy, it’s not too bad. There will always be details that you cannot retain in the long term: because they aren’t interesting to you, because they are very specific, or because they just refuse to stick. The revising phase cements the major themes, concepts, and ideas that can be easily remembered in both the short and the long term. The cramming phase sprinkles the desperate remnants on top, where one hopes they will not be jostled off before the exam.

Evening enormously more valuable than revising

Happy Birthday Chris Yung

Many thanks to Leonora and Lucy for inviting me over for a very enjoyable dinner party. It included excellent vegetarian pasta, wine, and the kind of superb company one hopes to encounter at Oxford. The gathering was the sort of Kitsilano basement suite event that was becoming standard among my more sophisticated friends during my last year at UBC. The contrast with an evening in a smoky pub is considerable, and the differences much appreciated. The other contrast – with a day spent orbiting between reading venues and guiltily checking email – likewise put me in a mood to especially appreciate the party. Meeting some more of Lucy and Leonora’s friends was one of the nicest things I’ve done in Oxford for a long time. Hopefully, it shall not prove a lone occurrence.

For some reason, cycling home through a cold and recently inundated Oxford – after such an event – felt like a quintessentially graduate school experience.

Tomorrow will be my last day living in Wadham. That means I need to pack all the things that I use almost constantly. I also need to finish revising for my practice QT. In truth, I am nowhere near ready for the history segment. There is a huge amount to know about international history from 1900 to 1950, and it isn’t anywhere so fresh in my mind as the theory from last term was. That said, if I write two theory papers and one on history, I should do well enough to not embarass myself too badly in front of my supervisor. It will also allow him to give me useful direction for the real exam on the 20th.

Questions of governance and respect

While I was revising IR theory, I found myself wondering how we establish whether an approach to development assistance is patronizing or not. For example, we can send a team of economic advisers to help create macroeconomic stability in a developing country. As Jeffrey Sachs’ role in ending hyperinflation in Bolivia seems to show, this is a strategy that can yield results. Of course, this kind of ‘we know better’ approach might hamper the development of governance structures and new ideas in the long run.

That said, leaving countries to sort things out for themselves could still be considered patronizing. Not only do we know better, but we know even better than that: we know to allow countries to make their own mistakes in the interests of developing legitimacy and their own capacity. Maybe, by that point, the patronizing aspect has become neutralized or non-corrosive.

These questions are relevant to my research when we start thinking about environmental governance and development. No problems crop up where new technology is both more economically efficient and cleaner. The trouble comes when situations like China’s growing need for energy and its huge reserves of coal are considered in combination.

There are situations where choices that would not be made in the rich world might make sense in the developing world, even at the cost of a somewhat damaged environment in those countries. Look how many forests were cleared in Europe during the period of industrialization. The trickiest issue is in places where the ecological harm is borne, in some measure, by everyone. How do we reconcile the teleological objective of a healthy planet with the deontological imperative to respect the freedom of states to make their own choices?

Maddening little bits

Whoever designed the expensive electronic devices that ship with these tiny plastic doo-dads must have been aware, on some level, that there were people out there who would actually try to keep track of them. As such, it can only be understood as an act of cruelty that they were made so small and, in many cases, actually transparent.

Without exaggeration, I can affirm that I have spent at least one hour of my life looking for each of these, and many more in a state of paralytic anxiousness about them. That’s particularly true of the tiny, soft, black things. If I lose one of those, my expensive headphones become worthless. Once, after being up all night, I spent almost an hour searching the main road beside the Nanaimo Skytrain Station, looking for one of these that had fallen off while I was crossing. I did find it, but nearly got killed by passing cars a half dozen times, while crossing the road looking straight downwards over and over again.

£1 coin included for scale.

One weekend before the move and practice exam

Everything aside from studying moved forward well today: working on taxes, dealing with the bank and college, and packing. I now have essentially everything that I don’t use many times a day packed into fruit boxes from Sainsbury’s. I also went for a solid forty minute bike ride, up the Cowley Road and back to Wadham. It is becoming a truism that I am never so productive in non-school areas as when some big school deadline is looming.

The practice exam plan is to write the thing immediately after moving my stuff to Church Walk on the morning of the 10th. I can start unpacking afterwards, after I have hand delivered it to Nuffield. That way, I will have all of tomorrow and Sunday to revise. Naturally, I will be less than entirely prepared when I write the practice exam. I will have another ten days afterwards and – critically – those ten days won’t include moving or the other miscellaneous projects that are cluttering my personal ecosystem.

To those who have received one of the letters I’ve written lately with a fountain pen: does it improve the legibility of my printing? If so, I may use it for the qualifying test, in place of the four-coloured ballpoint pens that are the workhorses of my note taking.

Tiny new toy incoming

I ordered a one gigabyte iPod Shuffle from the Apple Store today. I am sick of having nothing to listen to during my 20GB iPod’s frequent trips to service depots. Also, it only cost a bit more than the service charges NatWest imposed on me in exchange for a bank draft to give to Wadham. The tiny size and twelve hour battery life are selling points. I tried about twenty shops in Oxford, looking for one, and discovered that they cannot be had here for love or money. It should arrive early next week.

When you’re used to studying with music, it’s surprisingly difficult to do so without it. Naturally, trying to use my computer as a music source leads to inescapable distraction. Spending so long without a working iPod has also proven to me how intolerable human babies are. I am personally astounded that parents can endure such shrieking on a continual basis. It can only really be explained with the endorphins and other opium-like chemicals our brains and glands see fit to flood us with, in order to ease the process of procreation.

Within twenty years, there will doubtless be a sub-dermal version of the iPod that charges using energy it draws from your body and downloads songs wirelessly off your iTunes library, which will probably be stored online by then. It will be a good day when that comes about. Hopefully, it won’t be necessary to ship one’s arm back to Apple every year or so, because the hard drive keeps failing.

PS. Lee Jones has a good post sharing my indignation about the Department of Politics and International Relations actually being commended by the ESRC for our quantitative methods training.

Great power history

While revising, I have realized that ninety percent of all the history I have ever done has been the history of six countries between around 1900 and the present. Here they are, complete with a crude trend line for their overall influence/affluence:

United States (Up)
Britain (Down)
Russia (Down, Up, Down)
China (Down, Up)
Japan (Up, Down, Up)
Germany (Up, Down, Up, Down, Up)

Top performer: USA
Most improved: Japan
Most troublesome: Germany
Most dramatic: Russia / China, tie
Most graceful decline: Britain

The history of other countries has mostly been bound up in their importance, vis a vis this crew. For instance, the transition from British to American hegemony in the Middle East, the role of France in developing and maintaining the interwar order in Europe, India as the jewel of the British Empire, American containment strategies in Europe and Latin America, or the various imperial phases of all and sundry.

I am fairly sure you could get a distinction on my International System 1900-50 qualifying test without mentioning any other states.