I’ve already been here about a week, and already I’m too tired to dredge up the energy to begin writing these blogs. It’s by the grace of sheer will that I’m forcing myself to recollect the journey and adjustments of the last week and a half. But over the next few weeks, I hope to slowly put them in written form. It’s rather a lot, and I don’t think I can recall everything that has frustrated, befuddled, or amazed me.

As some of you may know, I’m working for the UNHCR in Juba Town, South Sudan. I work in a compound office by day and live in a camp by night. The camp, called the Swedish camp in acknowledgment of the Scandinavians who constructed our island of rustic living, is a walled (by walled, I mean constructed of sticks) compound housing quite a few tents. Some of the tents are single occupancy while others can house up to four individuals in separate rooms. For example, I live in a four person tent but have my own room (you could say it’s a tent within a tent) replete with a nice, firm and sturdy bed, a little bedside stand, lamp, and chair. As there’s electricity, I can also plug up to three appliance. Unexpectedly, we have air conditioning that switches on at about 7pm every night, blasting cool, sweet air into the tent. Imagine that! Not bad for only five bucks a night. Even more surprising, there’s laundry service (free), breakfast and a hearty dinner (about five dollars a day) typically consisting of rice, meat (lots of goat), vegetables, and some fruit.

Overall, I find the accommodations quite sufficient and comfortable. However, I’m only slated to live here for about six to eight months, compared to some UNVs (UN volunteers) who have lived or will be stationed here for longer than that time. I suspect that living in this camp for more than a year may eventually become tiring. But I suppose the infamous UN paid R&Rs (Rest and Relaxation) of seven days that staff receive every six weeks, which allow them to jet off to neighboring countries or even back to their country of origin (a fellow camp inhabitant, for example, flies to the Philippines every time), can help mitigate the stresses of living in a “hardship” station. But alas, as a lowly intern on the UN totem pole, I don’t receive any paid R&Rs. Instead, I will have to fend for myself in the coming months…

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I promised in my last entry to elaborate on Disorientation and what this actually entails. Fortunately, post-finals and pre-graduation, we have about a week and a half off, which gives us lots of time to have fun and spend quality time with all of our friends. The people at Fletcher are truly what make the program great and I will certainly miss all of them the most when I graduate this upcoming weekend. Disorientation involves lots of parties, such as the Green House Luau my roommates and I hosted last week, and lots of exploring Boston. Check out all of the pictures below to see what Fletcherites are up to this week.

The Diplomats Ball
Technically, Dip Ball is not part of Disorientation, but it was held on May 4, 2007, this past year, so it was close enough. Dip Ball is basically the Fletcher Prom and allows everyone to get dressed up and compliment each other on how nice we all look.

Katy, Priya, Sandhya, Perla and Emily at the Diplomat’s Ball

The Green House Luau
Along with Sandhya, Perla and Ale, I live in the Green House, which is just across the street from Fletcher. It’s a house that’s passed down to other Fletcherites every year and comes with certain social obligations. Fortunately, as a bunch of “diplomats” in training, it’s usually not hard to convince people to host parties at Fletcher, particularly my roommates and me!

Nathan, Conor and David

Teuta, Divya, Ken and Evelyn

Alex, Lucy and Priya on the Duck Tour of Boston

The Hess Picnic
Each semester, Professor Andrew Hess is kind enough to host a picnic for all Fletcher students at his home in Dartmouth, MA. It’s right on the water and this year we reveled in the beautiful weather and company.

Evelyn, Akshay, Nathan, Stephanie and Alessandro

Dancing at Middlesex with my girls

Katy, Perla, Sandhya and Nora

Katy, Angie, Alison and Amber

I’ll be sure to post more pictures as Disorientation continues and Graduation is upon is.

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My time at Fletcher is rapidly coming to a close. We recently finished classes and finals and I’m now enjoying spending time with friends in the week or so before graduation. It’s been great–full of Disorientation activities that I will elaborate on more later. In the meantime, I recently finished my thesis entitled: An Independent Kosovo–Implications for Regional Stability and the International Community. Overall, I was pleased with the results of my efforts and my thesis advisor, Professor William Martel, was, too.

Alas, I can’t post my entire thesis here (although I may publish it soon on the Fletcher website), but for now, feel free to read the op-ed I wrote for Professor Drezner’s Statecraft class below. I’d never written an op-ed before and it was actually a fun exercise. Of course, I still need practice as op-ed’s are a fine art, but, like my thesis, I’m pleased with this effort. I welcome any comments or suggestions for improvement.

The Birth of One Nation and the Shrinking of Another: An Independent Kosovo and a Dejected Serbia

By early June, the international community will likely see the birth of its newest nation: Kosovo. The Serbs have tried to delay a decision on Kosovo’s future status for some time, but the risk of violence among the Kosovar Albanian community increases with further postponement, making it imperative to determine Kosovo’s fate as soon as possible. At this stage, independence is the only viable option for Kosovo. Despite strong objections from both the Serbs and the Russians, Kosovo’s future status will most likely be imposed, and Serbian opposition will ensure many implementation headaches. What, then, can the international community do to ensure the solution lasts?

Most importantly, the international community must not forget about Serbia. On March 27, 2007, UN Special Envoy to Kosovo Martti Ahitsaari proposed to the Security Council that Kosovo receive supervised independence, making provisions for the protection of the Serb minority population within Kosovo as well as the preservation of Serbian Orthodox Church sites. Both the U.S. and the EU support these measures, but, to the dismay of Serbia, they have also long been strong advocates of Kosovo’s independence. In order not to alienate Serbia further, the U.S. and the EU must be careful not to overlook or underestimate the degree of Serbian opposition to Kosovo’s independence.

Ignoring Serbian unhappiness with Kosovo’s independence will only embolden radical factions within Serbia more, pushing them farther away from the path to European integration. Leaving Serbia to languish outside of Europe in a black hole of poor economic development and radical politics will dramatically increase the risk of violence and instability in the Balkans. Even Frank Wisner, U.S. Special Envoy to Kosovo, concedes that the future of both Serbia and Kosovo “lies inside of Europe not as some island off the shore with no association with Europe.”

Right now, both the EU and the U.S. must provide proper incentives for Serbia to cooperate with an independent Kosovo. First, economic assistance should be increased to bring down high unemployment rates and to foster a more positive climate for foreign direct investment. Second, political parties in favor of cooperation with Europe and the U.S. should receive additional support to strengthen their cause and to increase their number of supporters. Third, civil society groups need more backing to fight the status quo and to create a more informed populace, who can serve as a government watchdog. These initiatives will help propel Serbia forward on its path to reform and lessen the blow of Kosovo independence.

To be sure, critics will contend that Serbia has not done enough to cooperate with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) or with the formal Kosovo negotiations process to warrant such assistance. But, the international community must recognize that Serbia risks slipping farther into the hands of the radicals if the Serbian people see no viable alternatives in their future. Serbs must become vested in the development of their own country in order to achieve progress. The EU cannot lower its standards to discuss talks on a Stabilization and Association Agreement–the first step to joining the EU–but the EU, along with the U.S., must help Serbian politicians create the political will and desire needed among the people to join the EU.

Having recently worked in Belgrade, Serbia’s capital, I am well aware of the existence of groups within Serbia that will actively oppose Kosovo’s independence and EU integration. Nevertheless, it is important to fight against these forces to reach a peaceful, lasting coexistence between Serbia and Kosovo. Coexistence does not equal getting along, but it does involve cooperation and interaction and should help Serbs and Albanians overcome the conflicts of both the past and present.

Kosovo is the last Balkan conflict of the 1990s to be settled. Unfortunately, the Balkans will remain a troubled region for many years to come–one where history is very much alive in the minds of its people. The U.S. and the EU can do much to help push Serbia and Kosovo forward. Now is not the time to let Serbia struggle on the path to progress alone.

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This semester I’ve been taking a class on Islamic Finance in the Global Economy – its been one of the most interesting class I’ve taken so far, with an excellent combination of some of the hottest topics in international finance and the cultural and religious developments in the Islamic world. Islamic finance isn’t very well known in the mainstream world yet, but its rapidly become quite important both because of the large populations of Muslims living in many Western countries and the newfound wealth of many nations in the Gulf, among other reasons.

The basic idea of Islamic finance is that it tries to create a financial system which is in line with the ethical and business principles established in the Quran and the Islamic legal tradition. Perhaps the best known part of Islamc finance is that standard interest is forbidden – based on in large part principle that risks and returns should be shared in commerce. There are a range of other ethical principles which also frame finance in the Islamic tradition

This creates a major challenge for developing alternative methods to charge for the cost of capital, since so much of conventional finance involves interest based transactions. However, the last 20 years have seen a major explosion of new financial forms which are Shariah compliant and also replicate the risk and return profiles of conventional financial instruments, including Shariah compliant leases, mortgages, futures, options, and mutual funds.

The class has been especially interesting because our professor is one of the leading experts on the field, and has been able to give us a good understanding of both the moral economy of Islam that underlies these new products, the political and cultural environment in different regions that is shaping the development of the Islamic finance, as well as the products themselves.

I’ve been working on my final paper for the class, on frameworks for handling financial distress and bankruptcy in Islamic law. I handed the topic in some depth last year in a class on corporate restructuring at Harvard Business School. It’s a rather underdeveloped part of the field at the moment, but I’m looking at ways of possibly applying classical law on transferring debts and contributing debts t commercial partnerships as a framework to replicate the distressed debt market, debt restructuring, and debt to equity swaps.

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I was going to start rapid-firing excuses for not posting in so long and then I saw that Ben, easily our most prolific poster of late, has been working on his thesis. I can make no such claim to a single debilitating project, though the culmination of all my work is nearly putting me out of commission (seriously, I’ve got some weird combination of a mild cold and allergies whereby I feel quite lucid, but cough and sneeze a lot – folks in the library love it).

And I, of course, am in the library now, and happen to come across something worthy of a quick blog post: that Barack Obama may have just earned my vote. You see, Lawrence Lessig and a bunch of geeks (and by geeks I mean some of the smartest, most progressive, and truly visionary people on the planet) challenged both major US political parties to essentially liberate this year’s debates. No, not by taking on that wacky French format, but by liberating the debate footage from copyright restrictions so that the rest of us geeks can better engage with the political process. Read Lessig’s request to the party chairmen here. Now reread Barack’s response.

“So big deal, Barack’s ‘willing to help’ – people would post the debate on YouTube and create mash-ups anyway, that’s all your vote’s worth?”

Well, I’d be lying if I said that Mr. Obama wasn’t already a contender for many reasons, but yes, this is big. He clearly gets it:

“We have incentive enough to debate. The networks have incentive enough to broadcast those debates. Rather than restricting the product of those debates, we should instead make sure that our democracy and citizens have the chance to benefit from them in all the ways that technology makes possible.”

As it stands now, intellectual property on the Internet is a free-for-all. A digital mess where record companies sue teenagers, copyright holders overreach, definitions of ownership are expanded beyond comprehension, and digital history is at risk. As it stands now, Viacom, Disney or whoever broadcasts the debate could order YouTube to take it down or sue you if you used it in your next video blog or podcast.

That doesn’t sound much like democracy, but it is the reality of 20th century industrial copyright law operating in the 21st century digital environment. It’s a bit coded, but I read Obama as saying, “hold on a second – copyright has done great things, but it looks like the terms we’ve established may not make as much sense anymore, particularly when it comes to political debate and vital features of our democracy.” Hopefully he and many others are willing to expand that logic so that it includes libraries, broader definitions of education, political speech, and digital art.

Yes, digital copyright is one issue that has bound me to the library for these past weeks, so perhaps it’s all part of the allergic delirium, but I’ll still think it’s an important statement in the morning. For now, Obama is at least earning my vote.

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One of the most recent and popular threads on Fletcher’s “Social” Listserve–an optional list that can flood inboxes with 20-60 emails a day–was regarding undergraduate use of the <a href=”http://www.library.tufts.edu/ginn/index.html”>Ginn Library</a>.  This is an issue that comes up during finals at the end of every semester.  Fletcher’s Ginn library is many a Fletcherite’s choice place to study.  I especially like the “Harry Potter Room”–the bookshelf-lined room with a high, beamed-ceiling, and paintings of important Fletcher folks on the walls.  You can’t help but feel intelligent when you walk in there, which was a good morale-boost as I prepped for the Development Economics final exam.   Apparently, Tufts undergraduates feel the same way about Ginn, and they flood in at final exam time, much to the dismay of many Fletcher students.

Complaints on the social list ranged from overcrowding to increased noise to smelly feet.  Of course–as always on the social list–there were dissenting opinions as well, which called the undergrads “adorable” or simply argued for their right to use Ginn.  As for me, I feel rather ambivalent.  Fletcher’s relationship to the rest of Tufts interests me though; it’s remarkable how much we’re able to isolate ourselves from the beautiful campus on The Other Side of Packard Avenue.

I’m not sure whether to attribute this isolation to our close-knit community, to an age-gap, to a difference in academic focus, or to a slight elitism at Fletcher.  In any case, I’ve felt pretty lucky to have been a teaching assistant this past year, in the fall for the “Sociology of War and Peace” and this semester for the “Introduction to Peace and Justice Studies.”  I’ve actually been very impressed with the undergrads at Tufts.  They’ve got strong programs, and I’m consistently blown-away by the work of Tufts students in the <a href=”http://www.epiic.org/”>EPIIC</a> program.  I’m sure that it’s nice for IR undergrads like those in EPIIC to have a resource like Fletcher on-hand.  And I do think that Fletcher benefits a lot from its relationship with Tufts.  Of course, I also understand the frantic, stressed-out desire to stake a Fletcher territory during final exams.

So, I think I’ll hold off on weighing in on this Social List email discussion.  The latest thread on the Social List though, is a new one about <a href=”http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/”>Greg Mankiw</a>’s (Harvard Professor of Economics) paper, “<a href=”http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/mankiw/papers/Optimal_Taxation.pdf”>The Optimal Taxation of Height: A Case Study of Utilitarian Income Redistribution</a>.”  At four-feet-eleven-and-a-half-inches, I think I owe it to my petite friends to do some representin’ in this debate.

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