Arash Abizadeh is associate professor of political theory at McGill University. His research focuses on democratic theory, cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and identity, and on 17th and 18th century philosophy, especially Hobbes and Rousseau. In this talk, Abizadeh will discuss the democratic borders thesis, which holds that a state's regime of border control is democratically legitimate only if the laws governing it result from political processes in which both citizens and foreigners can participate. This is because to be democratically legitimate, the (coercive) exercise of political power must be democratically justified to all subject to it; and both citizens and foreigners are subject to a polity's regime of border control. Abizadeh defends this thesis against three objections. Read more and register at go.osu.edu/abizadeha

Stephen Brooks is associate professor of government at Dartmouth University. His current research spans three topics: U.S. foreign policy in the current era, public opinion about the U.S. role in the world, and how economic factors influence security affairs. He is the author of Producing Security: Multinational Corporations, Globalization, and the Changing Calculus of Conflict (Princeton), and co-author, with William Wohlforth, of World out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy (Princeton). His presentation will delineate why our underlying understanding of the role of economics in international relations is inadequate and how this can be rectified. Read more and register at go.osu.edu/brookss

Hal Brands is assistant professor at Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University. He is a historian whose research focuses on U.S. foreign policy and grand strategy, Cold War history, Latin American security and diplomacy, and other strategic and military issues. Brands is the author of From Berlin to Baghdad: America's Search for Purpose in the Post-Cold War World (Kentucky, 2008). His second book, Latin America's Cold War (Harvard, 2010), was adapted from his dissertation, which won several awards. His most recent book, What Good is Grand Strategy? (Cornell) was released in 2014. Read more and register at go.osu.edu/brandsh

This iteration of the Military Frontiers series of graduate student symposiums focuses on expanding the boundaries from previous conferences. This symposium will feature interdisciplinary panels whose wide array of thematic topics meet through their analysis of change in power structures. The graduate student presenters cover a breadth of history. The topics range from secret interwar period treaties between Germany and the Soviet Union to state formation during civil wars to the efficacy of drone strikes. Parties interested in military or diplomatic history, or political science are encouraged to attend. The keynote address will be "China between Continental and Maritime Global Orders" presented by S.C.M. Paine, William S. Sims Professor of Strategy and Policy, U.S. Naval War College. Organized by Daniel Curzon and Mason Watson, graduate students in history, The Ohio State University. Read more and register at go.osu.edu/militaryfrontiers2015

Ian C. Kelly (left), former ambassador to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, State Department spokesman, current Diplomat-in-Residence-Midwest and nominee to be the next ambassador in Georgia, and Richard Herrmann, chair of the Department of Political Science at Ohio State, will discuss the current tension in the American-Russian relationship and how the Ukrainian crisis has caused and plays into it.  Read more and register

Terrorism and climate change debates are often characterized by worst-case thinking, cost neglect, probability neglect, and avoidance of the notion of acceptable risk. This is not unexpected when dealing with extreme events. The presentation will describe how risk-based and cost-benefit approaches are well suited to decision-making in these uncertain environments. Mark Stewart is director of the Centre for Infrastructure Performance and Reliability at University of Newcastle in Australia. He is the co-author of Probabilistic Risk Assessment of Engineering Systems (Chapman and Hall, 1997) and Terror, Security, and Money: Balancing the Risks, Benefits, and Costs of Homeland Security, with John Mueller (Oxford, 2011).   Read more (pdf)

Dotse Tsikata is a visiting scholar at University of California-Davis School of Law, on leave from the African Development Bank's Legal Department. His areas of research are the law of international organizations and sovereign debt. He is a graduate of the University of Ghana, Legon, Queen's University at Kingston, Ontario, and the University of Toronto. He will speak about the growing number of African governments that have issued bonds in the international markets, reaching record levels in 2013 and 2014. The unprecedented wave of African sovereign borrowing from the bond markets has generated responses ranging from the celebration of new sources of finance for development (the Africa Rising narrative) to warnings about the risk of African sovereign debt crises to come. 

 

Origins has published its new article: "Hacer Am?rica and the American Dream: Global Migration and the Americas," by Steven Hyland.

 

People all over the world are on the move. Some are seeking better economic opportunities; others are fleeing desperate circumstances in their country of origin. Either way, the United Nations classifies over 3 percent of the world's population as migrant -- a staggering 230 million people. Of those, 11.5 million are living in the United States without authorization, most of them from Central and South America.

 

This month historian Steven Hyland examines the current movement of people from south to north in the Americas-and the current U.S. debate over immigration. He reminds us that these processes are not only recent phenomena but are part of a much longer history of global migration to, within, and from Latin America. The whole article can be found at http://origins.osu.edu.

 

About Origins: Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective is a monthly ad-free magazine that features top scholars on today's most pressing topics. Published by The Ohio State History Department, its authors include National Book Award winners and world-renowned scholars. You can also explore reviews of popular history books on the Origins website as well as the new monthly feature Milestones.