Instructor Name Dr. James E. Van Arsdall Office: 289-1359

Instructor Name Dr. James E. Van Arsdall Office: 289-1359

Home: 558-6931

Email:

Term Start Date:07/13/05

Term End Date:08/15/05

SYLLABUS HANDOUT

POS 150 Contemporary Social and Political Issues

4.5 Hours

Course Description

Topics in this course will vary depending on changing world events and may include areas in politics and government that are of interest to students and faculty.

Prerequisites:None

Textbook: State of the World 2005

POS 150 Comtemporary Social and Political Issues

SECTION I: THE CLASS AND THE INSTRUCTOR

Instructor:s: James E. Van Arsdall, Ed.D

Office: 289-1359 Home: 5586931

Home Address: 5814 Western Avenue, Omaha, NE68132

Internet:

LOCATION OF CLASS:SOC Room 513

LOCATION OF LABS:None

METRO OFFICE LOCATION:EVC Room 332

METRO OFFICE HOURS:SOC Room 513, 4:30 – 5:30 PM

IMPORTANT DATES:

DATE CLASS BEGINS:07/13/05

DATE CLASS ENDS:08/15/05

LAST DATE TO DROP CLASS:08/06/05

DATES CLASS DOES NOT MEET:NA

SECTION II: THE COURSE

COURSE DESCRIPTION

This course will examine through readings, study circle discussions, media, and formal presentations the social and political issues relevant to 21st Century.

COURSE PREREQUISITES

POS 150 requires no prerequisite. However, you should be capable of critical collegelevel reading and thinking.

Any success this class has in terms of stimulating your thinking and participation depend, in no small part, on the readings and preparation that each individual class member brings to our meetings. It is to your advantage to allot the necessary time to complete the needed readings.

COURSE OBJECTIVES

As a result of this course the student should be able to discuss critically the following topics and others:

Chapter 1: Security Redefined

Michael Renner

Security concerns are once more at the top of the world’s agenda, but terrorism is only symptomatic of a far broader set of complex problems that require more than a military response. Acts of terror and the reactions they provoke are often the result of profound socioeconomic, environmental, and political pressures—forces that together create a less stable world. Among them are endemic poverty, convulsive economic transitions that cause growing inequality and high unemployment, the spread of deadly armaments, large-scale population movements, recurring natural disasters, ecosystem breakdown, new and resurgent communicable diseases, and rising competition over land and other natural resources.

Weapons do not necessarily provide security, and real security in a globalizing world cannot be provided on a purely national basis. With world military expenditures rising to close to $1 trillion a year, the war on terror is draining resources that could be used to combat the root causes of insecurity. Furthermore, policies that seek security primarily by military means but fail to address underlying factors of instability will likely trigger a downward spiral of violence and chaos, and quite possibly a collapse of international rules and norms. The need for international cooperation has grown stronger, even as new rifts and divides have opened up.

Solutions to current security concerns lie in policies that strengthen civilian, rather than military, institutions; policies that are preventative in nature, which address the root causes of insecurity; and policies that draw on the strengths and insights of different disciplines, transcending academic and bureaucratic boundaries.

Chapter 2: Examining the Connections Between Population and Security

Lisa Mastny and Richard P. Cincotta

Over the past few decades, countries from every major political and religious background and in virtually every world region have experienced momentous change in their numbers and the structure of their populations. Yet the global demographic transition—the transformation of populations from short lives and large families to longer lives and small families—remains woefully incomplete. Roughly one third of all countries, including many in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and South and Central Asia, are still in the early stages of the transition, with fertility rates above four children per woman.

Studies show that these countries bear the highest risks of becoming embroiled in an armed civil conflict. Most are bogged down by a debilitating demographic situation: they are home to large and growing proportions of young people, many of whom are entering the ranks of the jobless or the underemployed; many are experiencing rapid urban population growth; and many face exceedingly low per-capita availability of cropland or fresh water. Meanwhile, the rising pandemic of HIV/AIDS is striking lethal blows to the basic services and government operations of several countries, mainly in Africa. Alone and in combination, these conditions act as “demographic risk factors” that can contribute greatly to the cycle of recurrent conflict and political deterioration inhibiting economic and social progress in the world’s weakest and most unstable countries.

Chapter 3: Containing Infectious Disease

Dennis Pirages

The biggest threat to human security, when measured by premature deaths and associated physical suffering, is infectious disease. All of the wars of the twentieth century are estimated to have resulted in the deaths of an average of 1.1 million combatants and civilians per year. But at present, communicable diseases are killing fourteen times that number of people annually. Advances in medical research have led health officials to repeatedly claim victory in the campaign against infectious disease; yet over the last three decades, old maladies such as tuberculosis, malaria, and cholera have spread geographically and more than thirty previously unrecognized diseases such as Ebola, HIV, Hantavirus, and SARS have emerged as new threats to human well-being.

Large-scale disease outbreaks occur when something happens to disturb the evolutionary equilibrium that normally exists between people and pathogens. More than one-quarter of the estimated 57 million deaths worldwide in 2002 were due to communicable disease, with a major impact on life expectancy. The “healthy life expectancy” for newborns in Japan, Sweden, and Switzerland was more than 73 years, while it was less than 34 years in poor and disease ravaged countries such as Sierra Leone, Lesotho, Angola, and Zimbabwe.

Scientists, physicians, and health officials are faced with evolving challenges from the microbial world caused by the accelerating pace of globalization. At present, a slow-moving HIV/AIDS virus has killed more than 20 million people, and it is infecting an additional five million people per year. Additionally, there is deep concern among health officials that an influenza virus, perhaps a communicable and lethal variant of the avian flu that has swept through Europe and Asia, could spread rapidly around the world leading to millions of human casualties before an effective vaccine could be developed.

Chapter 4: Cultivating Food Security

Danielle Nierenberg and Brian Halweil

For many people around the world, poverty, soil degradation, population growth, and water shortages continue to be the main causes of hunger. But the biggest threats to global food security in coming decades will likely be quite different; on top of these traditional concerns are a range of new and unprecedented threats that will challenge food production at both the local and national levels, including the loss of crop and livestock diversity, the emergence of new agricultural diseases, and the interplay between agriculture and climate change.

The disturbing pictures of Asian farmers recently forced to incinerate millions of chickens because of avian flu foreshadow the variety of new farm diseases—like Nipah virus and mad cow disease—that have emerged in recent years, and that threaten both the food chain and human health. At the same time, uniformity in our crop fields and livestock herds not only invites new diseases, but also leaves our farms wide open and vulnerable to the spread of food-borne pathogens and malicious bio-warfare attacks. Perhaps the most important new threat, however, will arise from the interplay between agriculture and climate change. Plant scientists from Asia have found that rising temperatures may reduce grain yields in the tropics by as much as 30 percent over the next 50 years.

Yet just as the current and evolving threats to food security are numerous, so are the solutions. Our most important tool is not new chemicals or fertilizers or genetically engineered seeds, but a new approach to farming that depends on the knowledge of farmers and the sophisticated use of the environment around them.

Chapter 5: Managing Water Conflict and Cooperation

Aaron T. Wolf, Annika Kramer, Alexander Carius, and Geoffrey D. Dabelko

Farmers, hydropower generators, recreational users, and ecosystems often compete for finite water supplies, both within and between nations. Despite this fact, water is rarely the single—and hardly ever the major—cause of violent conflict. But it can exacerbate existing tensions and therefore must be considered within the larger context of conflict and peace.

From the Middle East to New Mexico, the problems remain the same. So however, do many of the solutions. Human ingenuity has developed ways to address water shortages and cooperate in managing water resources. In fact, on the international level, cooperative events between riparian states outnumbered conflicts by more than two to one between 1945 and 1999. Institutional capacity—the ability of international institutions to successfully manage cross-boundary water resources—is a key factor in preventing conflicts and finding cooperative solutions.

Water has also been a productive pathway for building confidence and, arguably, preventing conflict, even in particularly contentious basins. In some cases, such as in the Middle East, water provides one of the few paths for dialogue in otherwise heated bilateral conflicts. In politically unsettled regions, water is an essential part of regional development negotiations, which serve as de facto conflict-prevention strategies.

Chapter 6: Changing the Oil Economy

Tom Prugh, Christopher Flavin, and Janet L. Sawin

Industrial civilization is defined by the staggering abundance of energy it utilizes. To date, most of that energy has come from fossil fuels, of which oil is the most highly prized. But oil has become a liability that threatens global security in three broad ways.

First, oil threatens global economic security because it is a finite resource with no clear successor and the gap between supply and demand is growing. Oil (most of it imported) accounts for a large share of energy budgets in most industrial countries: 36 percent in France, 39 percent in the United States, and 49 percent in Japan, for instance. (Developing countries are even more vulnerable because their imports are larger in relation to GDP.) Growing evidence suggests that rising demand, especially from nations such as China and India, will soon permanently outpace supply, leading to a long-term rise in prices.

Second, oil threatens security by undermining peace, democracy, and human rights in many regions. Great powers (including the United States) have long wielded their military and economic strength to secure access to oil supplies, interfering in the affairs of other countries and supporting repressive regimes when useful. Many nations with oil resources have also found themselves afflicted with the “natural resource curse”—the tendency of mineral wealth to support corruption and conflict rather than growth and development. Oil has recently been linked to terrorism, most obviously in the Wahhabist schools, funded by Saudi oil revenues, which helped train the Islamic radicals of al Qaeda.

Finally, oil undermines climate stability because its use as the world’s dominant transportation fuel produces over two-fifths of total emissions of carbon dioxide, the chief human-caused greenhouse gas. Although the huge global reserves of coal remain a larger threat to climate stability, ending oil use is imperative if greenhouse warming is to be controlled.

Chapter 7: Disarming Postwar Societies

Michael Renner

About 300,000 people are killed by small arms (handguns, hunting rifles, machine guns, etc.) each year in armed conflicts; another 200,000 people are killed annually in non-war gun violence, and 1.5 million are wounded. The dispersal of guns to private armies and militias, insurgent groups, criminal organizations, and private citizens feeds a cycle of violence. No one knows how many of these weapons exist; estimates run to 639 million, of which military-style weapons are believed to number 240 million. Global production is estimated at 7.5–8 million units per year. Weapons flow through government and commercial channels, but illicit flows include the capture of arms by insurgent forces, the looting of military and police depots, and transfers from one hotspot of the world to another.

An array of regional agreements addressing arms manufacturing, transfers, and stockpile management are now in place, though most are not legally binding. Tackling the small arms scourge requires not only tighter export controls, codes of conduct and embargoes, but also a reduction in the number of weapons in circulation through gun buyback programs and other collection methods. More than eight million surplus arms from government stocks have been destroyed since 1990.

In countries recovering from armed conflict, demobilizing ex-combatants is essential. Reintegrating them into civilian life is difficult where warfare has destroyed a large portion of public infrastructure, economic activity remains handicapped, and national treasuries are depleted. Many former combatants have limited or inappropriate skills and the world’s 500,000 child soldiers require special support.

It has proved easier to secure funding for disarmament than demobilization. The reintegration component, which tends to have less visibility and requires longer-term commitments on the part of donors, has been particularly shortchanged. In the interest of human development, disarmament needs to proceed; in the interest of disarmament and security, sustainable development is indispensable.

Chapter 8: Building Peace Through Environmental Cooperation

Ken Conca, Alexander Carius, and Geoffrey D. Dabelko

A growing array of initiatives—including peace parks, shared river basin management plans, regional seas agreements, and joint environmental monitoring programs—blend ecology and politics in the service of peace. Environmental peacemaking uses cooperative efforts to manage environmental resources as a way to transform insecurities and create more peaceful relations between parties in dispute. As such initiatives become more frequent and gain momentum, they may transform both how people approach conflict and how people view the environment.

As a peacemaking tool, the environment offers some useful—perhaps even unique—qualities that lend themselves to building peace and transforming conflict: environmental challenges ignore political boundaries, require a long-term perspective, encourage local and nongovernmental participation, and extend community building beyond polarizing economic linkages. Where cooperation does take root, it may help to enhance trust, establish cooperative habits, create shared regional identities around shared resources, and establish mutually recognized rights and expectations.

Recognizing the potentially critical linkages between the environment and insecurity, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called for integrating environmental contributions to conflict and instability into the U.N.’s conflict prevention strategy and the deliberations of his High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change. Surprisingly, however, relatively little is known about the best design for environmental peacemaking initiatives or the conditions under which they are most likely to succeed. Without better knowledge and a stronger commitment to study current efforts, the international community may be missing powerful peacemaking opportunities in the environmental domain.

Chapter 9: Laying the Foundations for Peace

Hilary French, Gary Gardner, and Erik Assadourian

Laying the foundations for lasting peace will require international cooperation on a broad range of fronts—from resisting aggression to combating terrorism, mediating peace settlements, and addressing underlying causes of conflict and instability such as poverty, overpopulation, disease, and environmental degradation. At the same time, the experience of recent decades has made it clear that building a secure world will require extensive interactions among a broad range of actors, including visionary and committed national and local politicians and government officials as well as engaged, globally-minded citizens.

In September 2000, the members of the United Nations agreed to reduce global poverty, disease, and societal inequities significantly by achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015. The targets adopted two years later at the World Summit on Sustainable Development rounded out the picture by addressing how countries can further improve social conditions by protecting critical natural systems. These goals were primarily adopted in order to address growing global inequities in a sustainable manner. In the post–9/11 world, however, where security threats have become the dominant concern, the MDGs can equally be seen as a means to increase national and global security.

Success in creating a more peaceful and secure world is far more likely if the civil sector is involved in the effort. Fortunately, the record of the past 15 years suggests that actors from civil society have emerged as skilled players in global politics and even as leaders on the broad range of issues relevant to global security

COMMANDING HEIGHTS: The Battle for the World Economy
A three-part, six-hour PBS documentary based on the book
by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw

Filmed over the course of two years on five continents, COMMANDING HEIGHTS: THE BATTLE FOR THE WORLD ECONOMY is the first in-depth documentary that tells the inside story of our new global economy and what it means for individuals around the world.
The series is built around dramatic stories, unique film footage, and extraordinary interviews with world leaders and thinkers from twenty different countries--including former President Bill Clinton, Vice President Dick Cheney, former USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev, Mexican President Vicente Fox, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, Singapore's Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew, former Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin, and President George W. Bush's Economic Advisor Lawrence Lindsey
9. A Review of the United States Constitution