Most of my postings are related to concepts and issues of relevance to students of political science. I try to offer a perspective as a "political scientist," which does not mean that my entries are meant to be objective or unbiased. Rather, they are meant to highlight the ways (or at least one way) in which we can use political science to analyze the world around us. I update my blog very, very sporadically.
Thursday, October 8, 2009
"Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and Comparative Analysis
According to this article (which is discussed in a recent LA Times column by Megan Duam--I will post the link below), the author relies at least somewhat on comparative analysis to show that having openly gay soldiers in the military does not have demonstrably negative impact on unit cohesion (which is the primary argument against allowing gays to openly serve).
Col. Om Prakash, the author, points out that countries such as Australia, Britain, Canada and Israel, which have lifted bans on gays in the military, have seen "no impact on military performance, readiness, cohesion or ability to recruit or retain"; instead, the don't ask, don't tell policy "forces a compromise in integrity" that is ultimately "damaging to the unit cohesion its stated purpose is to preserve."
I have not read the original article, so I cannot say how well Prakash carries out his comparative analysis, but, clearly, a good part of his argument is premised on comparisons.
Here is a link to the article by Megan Daum: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-daum8-2009oct08,0,6727164.column
Thursday, October 1, 2009
The Subculture of Fundamentalism
The conservative backlash against President Obama has, I think, many sources, but one source is clear: the subculture of religious fundamentalism. This point is made clear in a recent interview of Frank Schaeffer on the Rachel Maddow show. Schaffer is a former founder of the "religious right." As Schaeffer explains, the religious right constitutes a distinct sub-culture in American society.
There are undoubtedly very clear, very powerful values and beliefs that shape how members of this culture see the world; these values and beliefs, more importantly, have a direct impact on behavior. One might say that they dictate, to a large extent, what people say and do. How else, for instance, can one explain the fact that one in three conservatives in New Jersey believe that Obama is the anti-Christ?
As students of political science and of comparative politics, the point is not to ridicule or condemn such beliefs, but, instead, to understand where they come from, why they thrive, and how they impact the world. As a comparativist, we can start to answer some of these questions by looking around the world. For instance, we can see if there meaningful parallels between fundamentalism in the US and fundamentalism in other countries. Identifying such parallels may help us understand better why fundamentalist ideas take root and how they spread. In particular, a little comparative thinking allows us to see how fundamentalism relates to other social, political and economic processes. Looking around the world also allows us to see what happens when fundamentalists occupy positions of dominance in the political and social system--as in Iran. We are also forced to confront uncomfortable questions, such as this: Despite differences in religious beliefs, would an American fundamentalist regime be meaningfully different the Iranian theocracy?
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Here is the link to the interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPwGV1h4lW8
Monday, September 14, 2009
South Korea and Global Sex Trafficking
The following is an excerpt from a longer article, which will be published this fall in the Korean Quarterly.
South Korea clearly does not fit the profile of most major source countries for sex trafficking. For South Korea is the world’s 13th largest economy and a member of the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development). Its real per capita income, according to the World Bank, is just under $27,000—about the same as Greece and Italy. In mid-2009 (at the height of the global recession), moreover, the country’s employment rate was only 3.9 percent, one of the lowest in the industrialized world at the time. Significantly, too, in terms of the United Nation’s Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM), South Korea ranks fairly high: 26th in the world, which is comparable to Germany, Israel and Greece and one of the best in Asia (behind only Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore). Yet, as I just suggested, South Korea is a major source of trafficked and smuggled women in the global commercial sex trade. The major destinations, not surprisingly, include some of the wealthiest countries and regions—the United States, Japan, Canada, Australia, and Western Europe. But, other significant destination countries include those with a level of development very similar to South Korea, such as Hong Kong and Taiwan, and countries that are much poorer: Vietnam, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan.[i]
Minimally, there are tens of thousands of Korean women involved in global sex trafficking at any one time, and perhaps hundreds of thousands over the past several decades. In the United States specifically, there are likely at least five to ten thousand sexually exploited Korean women in total, and as many as 20,000 (perhaps more). Unfortunately, it is impossible to provide a precise estimate. It is also important to note that, rather than decreasing as the country has become richer, sex trafficking (including smuggling for sexual exploitation) from Korea, by all accounts, is steadily growing. There are several reasons for this, which I will talk about shortly. First, though, it is also worth emphasizing that South Korea is not only an important source of global sex trafficking, but is also a significant destination. Since the 1990s, in particular, thousands of women primarily from the Philippines, Russia, China, and Central Asia, have been “imported” into South Korea to work as prostitutes near US military bases for American soldiers (since the mid-2000s, though, the US military command has attempted to stamp out this practice through an anti-human trafficking campaign). At the same time, wealthy and middle class Korean men are increasingly fueling the demand for foreign sex workers in South Korea,[ii] for just as American men demand easily exploited, “exotic” foreign women, so do Korean men.
South Korea, however, is not unique. There are a number of countries that are both major sources of and destinations for global sex trafficking (it is also important to recall that all countries have their own, internally generated source of sex trafficking). Still, it is likely that South Korea stands alone as the most prosperous “supplier” of sexually exploited women to the rest of the world in general, and to the United States more specifically.
[i] Dong-Hoon Seol and Geon-Soo Han, “Korean Migrant Women in Entertainment Business in the United States, Japan, and Australia,” Report prepared for the Bombit Women’s Foundation (Seoul, South Korea, 2009).
[ii] Dong-Hoon Seol, “International Sex Trafficking in Women in Korea: Its Causes, Consequences and Countermeasures,” Asian Journal of Women’s Studies 10, no. 2 (June 30, 2004).
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Sticks, Stones, and . . . Socialism?
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Hard Times Ahead for CSUs
Friday, July 24, 2009
Who is Korean? Migration, Immigration, and the Challenge of Multiculturalism in Homogeneous Societies
This is arguably most apparent with “Amerasians,” who, in South Korea, are primarily children born to a Korean woman and an American man, usually a U.S. soldier. It is important to note here that it was only in 1998 that non-Korean husbands gained legal rights to naturalize, while non-Korean wives have long had this right. At the same time, up until 1994, most “international marriages” in Korea were between a foreign man and Korean woman. According to the ethno-racial and patrilineal logic of belongingness in South Korea, then, Amerasians have been viewed as decidedly non-Korean interlopers who belong, if anywhere, in the land of their fathers. The ill treatment of Amerasians was, as Mary Lee and others have argued, exacerbated by a patriarchal and hyper-masculine sense of national identity: Amerasian children were associated with the “shame” and “humiliation” of a dominant Western power conquering and abusing Korean women for sexual pleasure. Not surprisingly, then, Amerasians have been ostracized from mainstream Korean society; they were not only subject to intense and pervasive interpersonal and social abuse, but also to institutional discrimination—Amerasian males, for example, were barred from serving in the South Korean military, which is mandatory for every other Korean male and is “an institutional rite of passage which enables access to citizen rights” (emphasis added) (This law was revised in 2006 so that “mixed-blood” Koreans could voluntarily enlist for military service.) In concrete terms, the discriminatory treatment of Amerasians has resulted in unusually high school drop out rates (and much lower levels of educational achievement overall), significantly higher rates of unemployment and underemployment, and much lower pay.
This is a full-length article. The rest can be viewed online on Japan Focus.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Why California is Not too Big to Fail
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
America: A Culture of Violence?
"Four off-roaders shot; couple held A couple has been accused of opening fire and wounding four people, including a 7-year-old boy and a 5-year-old girl, who they mistakenly thought were trespassing on their property near Dayton. The victims, who were off-roading near a residential area about 40 miles northeast of Houston, were struck with shotgun pellets late Thursday after stopping their vehicles near the Trinity River so the children could go to the bathroom, said Liberty County Chief Deputy Ken DeFoor. Police said Sheila Muhs, 45, fired once with a 12-gauge shotgun, then handed it to her husband, Gale, also 45. DeFoor said Sheila Muhs called 911 and told the dispatcher, 'They're out here tearing up the levee, so I shot them.'
The Muhs are charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. Donald Coffey Jr., 7, was in critical condition after being shot in the head. Patrick Cammack, a friend of the boy's father who was driving a separate vehicle, was also shot in the head and in critical condition."
The story--at an admittedly anecdotal level--helps to support the view that there is something unusual about American culture. It is a culture where at least some otherwise normal people (but probably not an inconsequential number) believe that it is appropriate to shoot at a family, including two small children, because they were "tearing up a levee" (instead of, say, calling the police or simply yelling at them to stop).
Culturalists might tell us that such actions cannot be considered rational, because they are fundamentally based on a particular process of enculturation that shapes people's views and perceptions of what is appropriate or inappropriate behavior. Does this prove the cultural perspective? Certainly not. But if we could find that such attitudes and perceptions shape the behavior of a significant part of the American population (especially in relation to other societies), we may be on to something.
Monday, May 18, 2009
The Double Movement and Foreign Workers
One reason for this is obvious: foreign migrant workers are viewed as unwanted or barely tolerable interlopers; they are certainly not citizens, and therefore, most people do not believe that they are deserving of any rights whatsoever. As a result, there are few objections when foreign migrant workers are, in fact, treated as commodities--as nothing more than an undifferentiated "product" that should, rightfully, be subject to the laws of supply and demand. In the Marxist view, people become commodified when their value is determined solely "exchange-value" as defined by money (a special type of commodity).
All of this was brought to mind after I read a article titled, "Sri Lanka: Unions Strike Landmark Deal to Protect Migrant Workers." The article discussed a recent agreement between Sri Lanka on the one hand (which has sent more than 1.6 million workers to the Middle East, Asia and Europe) and Bahrain, Jordan and Kuwait on the other hand. The agreement gives Sri Lankan workers "internationally recognized labor rights," the implementation of which will be ensured by local unions in the receiving countries. The new agreement is based on a model developed under the aegis of the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and its Bureau for Workers’ Activities. It is also the first of its kind covering Asian migrant workers in Arab states
One sentence in the article stood out: "A key clause in the agreement is that, in line with ILO conventions, labourers will not be treated as a ‘commodity.'"
This is, I think, an important development and also one that is of relevance to American workers. For a significant aspect of the global political economy is the gap between the different segments of the global workforce. The larger that gap, the more power global corporations have in setting wage rates; the smaller the gap, the more power workers have.
Is this a good or bad thing? I'll leave that up to you to decide. But, one critical point to remember is that we do live in a world where power matters. Students of political economy need to keep this firmly in mind.