Category: Oxford

Today was a lovely day and a good one: bright enough to justify the use of sunglasses, with quite a good amount of work completed, to boot. Before my lecture, I finished this week’s Economist and completed a solid outline (including introduction) for the paper I am writing for Dr. Hurrell. With luck, by the time Emily and I meet on Sunday evening to edit papers, I will have both of the ones due for Tuesday finished.

After today’s advanced study of IR lecture, which was delivered by Dr. Hurrell, I had the chance for a very brief stopover at Wadham before moving onwards to the exam schools and a Changing Character of War Program lecture. It was delivered by General Sir Rupert Smith, on the topic of the utility of force. Most of his points were quite familiar, but the one bit that struck me as quite clever was a rebuttal to something that has become the accepted wisdom with regards to fighting terrorism: namely, that it is an asymmetrical conflict. The idea goes that when states with regular armies try to fight non-state groups with irregular forces, they have a rough time of it. The point General Smith made is that it is a requirement of good generalship to turn any conflict you are involved in into an asymmetrical one, to your advantage. To designate the wars where we are doing badly as ‘asymmetric’ and leave it at that is a therefore both a misunderstanding and a poor excuse.

His more familiar contentions include how terrorist groups and other non-state military actors have adopted the practice of operating below the threshold at which the forces of states have utility. He also talked a lot about generating and maintaining support from both your domestic constituency and within the areas where you are operating, as well as the new role of the armed forces in creating the conditions under which stability can exist, rather than defeating the enemy in a straightforward and conclusive way.

After the talk, I had dinner with Roham at St. Antony’s, watched a few minutes from Pirates of the Caribbean, and had a beer. The film reminded me pleasantly of the first time I saw it, in Montreal with Viktoria P. It’s definitely the sort of trend that it would have been nice to extrapolate for the evening, but my two upcoming essays are wailing at me for completion and there is much else to do besides. Tomorrow, I am determined to spend as much time as possible (aside from the quantitative methods lab and bloggers’ gathering) in the Social Sciences Library reading for the papers and next week’s seminar.

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Miscellaneous other:

• Thankfully, I’ve been able to defer my battels and fees, yet again. Anyone considering coming to Oxford should take note of how astonishingly difficult and time consuming it can be to transfer money here.
• If people in Group B, with Dr. Roberts and Ceadel, could take a look at this thread on the forum, that would be excellent.

This afternoon brought the dream of a British bank account another step closer, though still without any knowledge of when the whole process will be successfully concluded. It also involved grocery shopping, the completion of a preliminary read of this week’s Economist, some reading on Dawes and Locarno, and correspondence with Emily and Kate. The former is heading out into the countryside with friends for the start of the weekend; the latter has returned to the city from the woods, and is processing the data on bears collected while there.

Trying to complete our first quantitative methods assignment has been frustrating. I can see that the second and third question, respectively, would be best solved by means of regression and hypothesis testing, but I don’t perfectly recall how to do either. STATA is definitely an impediment rather than an aid. For the first assignment, I am fairly sure they just want us to ‘eyeball it,’ but I would definitely rather do it in a statistically rigorous way.

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Last night was great fun. The wine drinking event was actually a competition. In each of seven rounds, we were presented with an expensive wine of a particular variety, for instance Pinotage, and a cheap wine of the same sort. The objective was to use your knowledge of wine (of which I have none) and the descriptions of the wines provided to deduce which was which. Given my total lack of familiarity with many of the genres presented, my ambition was to do better than random chance would have suggested. Much to my surprise, I actually won. This is particularly shocking given that the elimination round at the end was based on one’s knowledge of cricket. Asked how many of a particular cricket related statistic a certain cricket player had accumulated in a tournament, I confidently said “twenty-one” without the slightest knowledge of what was actually being asked or what sort of number was likely. In any event, I now have a bottle of white wine from Nuffield’s own cellars sitting beside my Glenlivit. 

Aside from the competition itself, the atmosphere at Nuffield was great fun. I met Carolyn Haggis – presently a D.Phil student at Nuffield, formerly an M.Phil in IR student at Brasenose. She is living proof that the program can be survived, and in such a way that you would be willing to read for a second degree at Oxford.

The event was not at all stuffy and the commentary from the two hosts (and introducers of wines) was rather amusing. We were even treated to a rendition of the South African national anthem, though Margaret tells me that it was not without inaccuracies. All told, it was a night of excellent company and good fun; hopefully, a suitable prelude to getting a lot of work done today. Many thanks to Margaret for the invitation.

This morning, I received an invitation to Sarah Johnston’s wedding, to take place on the 18th of March in a church in Chichester. This will be the second friend’s wedding I attend and I am looking forward to it. It will be good to meet Sarah’s parents again (I did so, very briefly, last summer) and to meet some more of her friends. My congratulations go out to her and Peter. I look forward to when I shall be able to refer to the pair of them as Doctors Webster.

After working for a while on the Commonwealth Scholarship application, making and drinking a half litre of coffee, and inquiring at the domestic bursary about fees, I wandered through a very rainy Oxford to Nuffield. From the eighth floor of their tower, I got my first really elevated look at Oxford. Later, in the Nuffield Library, I read Dr. Hurrell’s article: “Global Inequality and International Institutions” (Metaphilosophy Volume 32 Issue 1&2 Page 34 – January 2001). I appreciate the normative character of his argument and his determination that world politics can be changed for the better. Reading something that is heavy on references to political theory is a welcome contrast to wading through hundreds of pages of unfamiliar history written by academics unknown to me.

Despite its apparently excellent politics and economics collections, the library was quite empty. I mustn’t have seen more than three people during the three hours I spent inside. Cornmarket Street is consistently the only part of Oxford that really gets crowded. While there are often throngs of tourists marching along the High Street, they only rarely seriously impede passage. I always feel a bit odd walking past tour groups in Wadham. I feel as though I am on display as a sample of Animalia Chordata Vertebrata Mammalia Primate Hominidae Homo sapiens studentis graduatis Oxfordius. I try to look very clever for them.

By the time I left the library to meet Dr. Hurrell, it had become quite beautiful out – in that way which can only quite be managed after a proper downpour, when the trees are still dripping and the warm colouration of sunlight comes as a surprise. Today featured both the heaviest rain I’ve seen in Oxford and the most stunning emergence from rain into one of those slightly sodden afternoons where the sun is welcome rather than unpleasant.

My meeting with Andrew Hurrell went very well. From what other students had told me, I expected meeting one’s supervisor to discuss a paper to be something akin to facing an inquisition. In actuality, he both complimented and criticized the paper and we had quite a good hour-long discussion about some of the theoretical issues involved.

In particular, we identified the character of domestic German politics as an area of exploration that wasn’t well treated in the paper. Recently unified, Germany both had an unusual impetus to engage in some kind of national project (say, colonization) and an unusually broad dialogue about what that project could be. As Dr. Hurrell pointed out, the phrase “a place in the sun,” which is constantly used to refer to Germany’s ambition to develop a place for itself as a rising power in the international system, possesses a vagueness that underscores the lack of definition behind what such a project could involve. We also discussed that issue of how states perceive themselves internally and as components of an international society in the contemporary contexts of Russia in the G8 and the matter of nuclear proliferation. Those are the big tables around which great powers sit today and, given things like the rise of China, understanding how developing powers can be peacefully and effectively integrated is of immense value. The conversation increased my conviction that Dr. Hurrell is a man with whom I will be able to work well.

I also indicated to Dr. Hurrell that I would like to write one of my two optional papers on some issue having to do with nuclear weapons. For years, nuclear politics has interested me insofar as it represents an unusually explicit arena to examine the structure of the international system, as well as the psychologies of individual leaders. He suggested that I keep my eye on what the Institute for Strategic Studies in London is doing, and that perhaps they will hold an interesting conference or seminar on the matter this year.

During the next ten to fourteen days, I am to write another paper. It should either be on the topic of last week’s core seminar or this week’s and Dr. Hurrell insists that this one should be most historical and less theoretical. Helpfully, he recognizes that we do not necessarily have much background in these time periods. The assignment is therefore an explicit test of my ability to work in an uncertain area. Walking across the Nuffield quad, right after the meeting, I had my first solid sense that I have what it takes to be a graduate student.

After the meeting ended, I met with Margaret and we spoke in her room for a while before walking to New College to see the mound erected there in honour of those hurled over Oxford’s city walls after dying of the plague. As she demonstrated to me, it manifests a peculiar acoustic property if you clap at it.

In February, it seems that my mother will be going to Iran. Either on the way out or back, she will visit me in Oxford. A few years ago, she began teaching English as a second language to people who have recently immigrated to Canada or who are seeking to do so. Many of her students have been Iranian and it is at their invitation that she will be going. Having living in Pakistan for many years, and having visited Turkey a few years ago, it’s not a part of the world with which she is unfamiliar. She has actually lived in a remarkable number of places: from Czechoslovakia to Antigua to the United States.

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Also in the news:

• I may be forced to change my primary email address due to a trademark dispute in the U.K.
• Anyone who wants or needs a GMail invitation, just ask. I have 94 of them.
• Did you know, entries posted at “12:01” were almost certainly posted before then, but with a modified timestamp to maintain the one-entry-per-day format?
• Here is a blog with some powerful photos

I had five straight hours of class today: the core seminar from 11:00am to 1:00pm, a seminar on the changing character of war between 1:00pm and 2:00pm, and then our quantitative methods lecture from 2:00pm to 4:00pm. Above all, it was the fine company of my fellow M.Phils that made the whole length of it pleasant. In particular, I appreciated the company of the St. Antony’s group, which includes Emily and Roham¹.

This morning, on the way to the seminar, I was delighted to find a letter from Meghan Mathieson in my pigeon hole. It’s the first piece of physical matter transferred to me in Oxford by a friend of mine. The letter was sealed with the wax and stamp which she bought in my company in Italy and it included a small bag of the tea I’ve made such frequent reference to drinking with her and Tristan back in Fairview. It’s good to hear about how her new job is going, how her family is doing, and the holiday festivities they had with Matt’s family. Receiving a handwritten letter is always a special event, despite the frequency with which I communicate with friends by electronic means. There is an undeniable romanticism to it, as well as a sense of permanence that can be both thrilling and daunting. I shall be sure to respond in kind once I get my hands on some loose leaf paper.

The core seminar discussion seemed more accessible and productive this week. The topics under examination were Wilson, the Paris peace settlements, and the Middle East. Emily ended up presenting on our topic, and can now savour the knowledge that she will not have to present again for the next five weeks. Since there are eight weeks in the term and seven people being assigned each question, it seems the last week will be another open contest. For next week, I need to read about whether the Dawes Plan and Locarno Pact offered only the illusion of peace, or whether they represented a re-emergence of a concert of the great powers. I have a general recollection from Gossen’s History 432 class of what Locarno was, though I can’t remember a thing about the Dawes Plan. Some research is clearly in order.

After the core seminar, we immediately headed upstairs to one of the lunchtime seminars being put on by the Changing Character of War Program. Today’s was on the changing character of war crimes and it seemed to be universally considered less than entirely compelling or useful. The speaker was unforgivably vague in a number of areas and generally failed to interrogate his own theoretical grounding, or even make clear what exactly he was trying to do. That said, the free sandwiches were much appreciated.

Today’s quantitative measures lecture was a big improvement over last week’s. While several concepts were still defined in unnecessarily vague and wooly terms and some of the maths were sprung out abruptly rather than decently explained, it managed to convey some essential ideas about sampling, bias, distributions, and the like. For those who would want to actually use much of this information, the class is absolutely tearing forward. Our two hour lecture next week is meant to finish up sampling distributions and cover the whole idea of hypothesis testing. I wouldn’t expect a non-genius without prior statistical experience to have a very good idea of the specifics of what is being taught, unless they are doing a good bit of outside reading and practice. The first statistics course I took at UBC covered this stuff over a few weeks worth of one hour lectures, with plenty of hands on activities.

After the last lecture, I walked with the St. Antony’s group to their college. As we turned from Manor Road onto St. Cross Road, I was quite surprised to see Evren walking up the road. Many of you may remember him as my first roommate at UBC as an undergraduate. We shared a two-bed room in Totem Park from September of 2001 until he moved out of residence early the next year. As you can tell from me not knowing his last name, we were not particularly close. All this was back during the time when Sarah Johnston lived in Totem, as did Lindi. I appreciatively recall her treating me, on some nights, to lovely renditions of Pachelbel’s Canon in D on the piano. Having run into his friend Guillaume in Montreal twice now, I was quite startled to find Evren in Oxford, apparently working on an M.Phil in Economics (like Margaret).

In anticipation of the next two batches of scholarship applications, I printed thirty passport sized photos today. Due to the odd pricing system at the photo shop on Cornmarket street, thirty cost the same amount as five would have, and they were finished more quickly as well. I’ve used twenty-two of these little photos in Oxford so far, and I need six more just for the Commonwealth Scholarship application. Having thought about it more than was really worthwhile, I maintain that there is no legitimate reason for which a scholarship committee should request photographs. It can only contribute to bias.

The Domestic Bursar has given me a three-day extension, until the 21st, to pay my battels. It seems extremely unlikely that it will happen by then, as I only mailed the authorization yesterday and, even once the electronic transfer occurs, the bank will hold it for some unspecified period of time before being willing to release it. I am now very close to having completed the lengthiest screening for money laundering risk that a reasonable person could be asked by a bank to endure. To celebrate, the bank sent me a fake bank card (I am not joking) and instructions that I should walk over to my home branch to get a real one. Astonishingly, the Bank of Montreal tells me that the issue of whether or not to transfer money internationally “is at the sole discretion of the branch.” No, no – I don’t think we’re going to let you withdraw money from your account right now. You see, we’ve grown rather fond of it.

After making dinner and running errands (including the purchase of a French press and coffee), I went to meet some IR students at The Eagle and Child: the pub that CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien used to frequent. I arrived about twenty minutes after Anna advised us to and, despite two thorough sweeps, found it to be as devoid of IR M.Phil students as the web forum I have been trying to cajole them into using. It was the first time in Oxford when I’ve wished I had a cell phone. Wherever they wandered to or ended up, I hope they had a good time. It was probably befitting of a graduate student to spend the evening reading Hedley Bull, anyhow. After spending C$56.00 today on a coffee press, quarter kilo of coffee, and set of photographs, it’s probably a better idea for my finances as well.

Tomorrow, I am invited to make another foray into the Oxford library system with Emily. It will be good to get my hands on some of the required books before everyone else descends upon them. Helpfully, they have now scheduled the two seminar groups to cover different topics in different weeks. The Social Sciences Library is definitely the best resource, in terms of materials available, though my fondness for the Codrington as a place in which to read continues to grow.

On Thursday, Emily has invited me to come to dinner at St. Antony’s. Speaking of that elegant and animated young woman: when introducing someone on the blog, I’ve learned to be cautious in how much I say about them. It can be quite hard to anticipate how people will respond to having information about them splashed about in the wilds of the internet. Emboldened by her comments on the matter today, I feel at liberty to disclose a little more.

I’ve found that one of the more interesting things about Canadians introducing themselves in Oxford is what part of the country, if any, they initially describe themselves as being from. Some refer to specific cities, others to provinces, others to regions. My standard answer is ‘western Canada.’ From what I have heard, Emily doesn’t seem to identify exclusively with one region of Canada or another, though she has spent a lot of time in British Columbia. It must be interesting to have such peripatetic parents as hers, not to mention a pair of artists for forebears. Emily herself I know fairly little about, though I appreciate the vitality which she projects. To write more now risks misrepresenting her, and embarrassing myself, through speculation.

Emily suggested, as we were walking into our quantitative methods lecture, that I ought to sell editing services to undergraduates, as opposed to being experimented on for small amounts of cash. Having worked for the history, political science, and international relations journals at UBC, as well as having looked over dozens of essays for friends, I suppose it’s something I could do fairly well. My concerns would be, firstly, the negative association that exists with regards to “essay editors” at university. Some, it cannot be denied, are little more than plagiarism assistants. Secondly, I worry about the amount of time such work might take up. It’s one thing to look over a paper for Emily which is based on readings I have generally done, a topic which I am in the process of examining, and an area that I will have to discuss in the future. It’s rather another to be thrown into some unfamiliar discipline. Still, it bears consideration as a possibility – especially during the vacations between terms. Coming up on my first monthly financial analysis, it is evident that a few extra Pounds would not hurt at all.

Aside from library explorations with Emily tomorrow, I am meeting Dr. Hurrell at four, before which I should definitely review my paper and perhaps a few of the key readings which I make reference to in it. It seems a bit odd to me how nervous people become about meeting their supervisors. After all, these people have seen phalanx after phalanx of graduate students march nervously past them. Getting agitated about interacting with them seems like a mechanism for diminishing a collegial spirit and the development of an effective and equitable relationship.

Immediately after meeting him, I am to meet with Margaret, which I am sure will be both pleasant and interesting. It seems that she may be taking up an offer to teach in South Africa during the period between the two years of the M.Phil. The idea reminds me that I really need to make an effort to find a decent job for myself during that period. Minimum wage, service sector toil is no longer an acceptable option.

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[1] I am guessing that his GMail username is a more accurate spelling of his name than the one on our class list. (On a related note, I was amused today to find a piece of mail that butchered not my name, but that of the college. Mail from a bank in Oxford.)