Ideas, Identities and Decisional Processes that Affect Security

The Mershon Center's second area of focus in international security studies is the ideas, identities, and decisional processes that affect security. This encompasses a cross-section of projects in politics, economics and cultural studies, including:

• Colonization in Reverse: Diaspora, Diplomacy, and the 'People's Art', examines how Trinidadians used the Notting Hill Carnival to negotiate their identity in modern Great Britain.
• Immigrants, Assimilation, and Cultural Threat:  A Political Exploration, explores how American citizens view issues of immigration and "successful" assimilation.
• Sudanese Perspectives on the Darfur Conflict, investigates current Sudanese views of and responses to the conflict in Darfur.
• Radicals on the Road: Third World Internationalism and American Orientalism during the Viet Nam Era, explores the lives of Americans who criticized their government's intervention in Southeast Asia.
• Race Frontiers: Indian Slavery in Colonial New England reconstructs the little-known history of Native American enslavement by European colonists in the 18th century.
• The Marxist Rhetoric, which asks how Marxism gained such wide influence in the 20th century despite the failure of its major propositions.
• Turkey: Islam, Nationalism and Modernity, which examines the interactions between three reference points in Turkish history.
• Living Jerusalem: Cultures and Communities in Contention, which studies cultural identity and conflict in the disputed territories of Israel and Palestine.
• Public Sector Capacity and Political Stability, which uses four case studies to explain why some Latin American countries maintain stable democracies while others succumb to political unrest.
• Economic Insecurity: Meaning and Measurement, which uses focus groups to determine what economic insecurity means to the people affected.

To learn more, please click on the links above.