Welcome to Fall 2017!

The Mershon Center for International Security Studies has a busy schedule of activities this semester. Below is a listing of our events in September. To read more and register, simply click on the links. We hope to see you soon!

Jesse Driscoll is associate professor of political science and chair of the Global Leadership Institute at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at University of California-San Diego. He is an area specialist in Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Russian-speaking world. Driscoll is author of Warlords and Coalition Politics in Post-Soviet States (Cambridge, 2015), winner of the Edgar S. Furniss Book Award, given annually by the Mershon Center to an author whose first book makes an exceptional contribution to the study of national and international security. The book maps the processes by which well-functioning domestic hierarchies emerged after relatively short periods of anarchic violence in Georgia and Tajikistan. In this talk, Driscoll will argue that conflict in Ukraine can be best understood as a civil war. Read more and register at go.osu.edu/driscollj

Soviets occupied Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989 to prevent the country from collapsing. Currently Russia is treating Syria as a client state in similar ways. Afghanistan remains a struggling democracy, often falling into "failed state" category. The Syrian state is almost nonexistent in terms of functional central institutions. This symposium will dig deeper into the two countries' situations, answering such questions as: What are the similarities and differences with regard to the relationship with Russia? What role do regional rivalries (Iran and Saudi Arabia) or intervention (Turkey) play? The panel features Amr al-Azm (pictured), associate professor of Middle East history and anthropology at Shawnee State University; Alam Payind, director of the Middle East Studies Center at Ohio State University; and Richard Herrmann, professor and chair, Department of Political Science. Read more and register at  go.osu.edu/clientstates

Paul D. Miller is associate director of the Clements Center for National Security at University of Texas-Austin. As a practitioner, Miller served as director for Afghanistan and Pakistan on the National Security Council staff; worked as an intelligence analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency; and served as a military intelligence officer in the U.S. Army, including a deployment to Afghanistan. His most recent book, American Power and Liberal Order: A Conservative Internationalist Grand Strategy, was published by Georgetown University Press in 2016. In this lecture, Miller argues that U.S. security depends on active sustained support of the international order. Read more and register at  go.osu.edu/millerp

This project aims to explore the impact of the culture on the development of effective military organizations and therefore its impact on security from 1861 to the present. The effectiveness of military organizations is dependent on a number of components, among them organization, doctrine, training, weapons technology, leadership, morale, discipline and cohesion, endurance, and the ability to adapt to volatile and uncertain combat environments. Underlying these factors is organizational culture, a vital wellspring of the effectiveness of armies, navies, and air forces throughout history. Yet organizational culture has been largely understudied as a component of military effectiveness. This project aims to fill that void. Organized by Peter Mansoor, Gen. Raymond E. Mason Jr. Chair in Military History. Read more and register at go.osu.edu/militaryorgs

 

Mershon affiliates Craig Jenkins (right), senior research scientist and professor emeritus of sociology, along with Maciek Slomczynski, professor emeritus of sociology, and Irina Tomescu-Dubrow, visiting scholar in sociology, have received a four-year, $1.4 million award from the National Science Foundation for the project, "Survey Data Recycling: New Analytic Framework, Integrated Database and Tools for Cross-National Social, Behavioral and Economic Research," starting Sept. 1, 2017.

 

The award will support the development of a harmonized database derived from more than 3,000 national surveys administered over five decades to more than 3.5 million respondents from more than 150 countries. The project will enable innovative data-intensive research on major substantive topics of social science interest and advances the fields of comparative methodology and of survey data harmonization. Additional principal investigators include Spyros Blanas and Han-Wei Shen from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.

 

The award grew out of a conference held at the Mershon Center in May, "Democracy, the State and Protest: International Perspectives on Methods for the Study of Protest," organized by Jenkins, Slomczynski, and Tomescu-Dubrow. The event examined the relationship between protest and democracy, with an emphasis on measurement and methodology. Read more at go.osu.edu/protestdatabase

 

The Mershon Center has a new visiting scholar for 2017-18 academic year: Efe Tokdemir, a postdoctoral fellow with International Studies Association's James N. Rosenau Fellowship, who will be working on projects examining causes and consequences of non-violent strategies of both state and non-state actors at the micro-level.

 

Tokdemir's research interests lie at the intersection of international relations and comparative politics. His primary research agenda examines how state and non-state actors strategically develop policies in relation to their audience in order to achieve their goals, and how individuals respond to these policies in return. While he focuses on the impacts of state actors' foreign policies to win "hearts and minds'" abroad in his dissertation, he also studies violent non-state actors' reputation-building strategies by bridging individual- and group-level studies.

 

Tokdemir received his Ph.D. (2017) and M.A. (2015) in political science from Binghamton University, SUNY; and B.A. (2012) in political science and international relations from Bogazici University in Istanbul, Turkey. His work has so far appeared in various journals including Journal of Peace Research, Conflict Management and Peace Science, International Political Science Review, and Electoral Studies.

What makes a belief, practice, or community "religious"? Should religious freedoms be given more protection under the law than secular ones? What should we do when the exercise of religious freedom collides with the public interest?

 

8:45-9 a.m. - Welcoming Remarks
Don Hubin, Director of the Center for Ethics and Human Values

 

9-10:30 a.m. - Session 1: What (if anything) is special about religious freedom?
Speakers: Jason Josephson-Storm (Religion, Williams College)
Winnifred F. Sullivan (Religious Studies, Indiana)
Moderator: Sarah Iles Johnston (Classics and Comparative Studies, Ohio State)

 

11 a.m.-12:30 p.m. - Session 2: What are the proper limits of religious freedom?
Speakers: Andrew Koppelman (Law, Northwestern)
Steven D. Smith (Law, San Diego)
Moderator: Isaac Weiner (Center for the Study of Religion and Comparative Studies, Ohio State)

Nations engage in spaceflight for many reasons - prestige at home and abroad, scientific inquiry, as a means to fortify and maintain a high-technology economy, and for national security. On all of these fronts, China has demonstrated global leadership. China has its own human-tended space station, and has launched significant scientific research satellites, including most recently the establishment of a research satellite for quantum-encrypted communications in space. In this lecture, John Horack, Neil Armstrong Chair in Aerospace Policy at Ohio State, will highlight Chinese accomplishments in spaceflight, address China's future plans in space, and explore how an integrated and thriving space program is a key part of China's global strategy. Read more