In This Issue

Mershon Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Public Policy

March 27, 2014

Professor of Slavic and East European Studies

March 24, 2014

Associate Professor of Geography

March 30, 2014

Professor of Economics

April 4, 2014

Mershon Memo is a weekly e-mail newsletter distributed by the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, a unit of the Office of International Affairs at The Ohio State University.

   

Charles Hermann is founding director of the George H. W. Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, where he is now Brent Scowcroft Chair in International Policy Studies and International Affairs. He is currently a visiting scholar at the Mershon Center, where he served as associate director beginning in 1970 and then as director from 1980 to 1995.  In this presentation, Hermann will use four case studies to examine how government leaders who have invested heavily in a particular foreign or security policy respond to signals that the policy is failing. Read more and register at go.osu.edu/hermannc

Mary Habeck is a professorial lecturer in strategic studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where she teaches courses on military history and strategic thought. Her publications include three forthcoming sequels, Attacking America: Al-Qaida's Grand Strategy (Basic Books, 2014), Managing Savagery: Al-Qaida's Military and Political Strategies (2015), and Fighting the Enemy: The U.S. and its War against al-Qaida (2016). She will discuss how al-Qaida has managed not only to survive but thrive despite being under constant pressure from almost every country on the globe. Read more and register at go.osu.edu/habeckm

 

Geoffrey Parker, Andreas Dorpalen Professor of History, spoke on March 19 about his latest book, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (Yale, 2013). The book examines how a fatal synergy between climate change and human inflexibility eradicated one-third of the planet's human population and unleashed an unparalleled spate of wars, invasions, and revolutions. Personal accounts and scientific data alike show how extreme weather disrupted growing seasons and destroyed harvests, bringing hunger, malnutrition, forced migration, and disease, and then, as material conditions worsened, economic chaos, political anarchy, and social collapse. The event included a panel discussion with Alex Thompson, Daniel Sui, and Lonnie Thompson. Read more and view video 

 

Trevor Brown is director of the John Glenn School of Public Affairs. He served as the U.S. Project Manager for the Parliamentary Development Project (PDP), a U.S. Agency for International Development funded organization that provides technical assistance to the Ukrainian parliament. He currently serves as the Associate Project Executive for the PDP. Myroslava Mudrak, professor emeritus of art history at Ohio State, specializes in Russian and Ukrainian avant-garde art of the 1910s and 1920s. A native-born Ohioan, Mudrak was raised in the Ukrainian immigrant community of Cleveland, which shaped her identity as a Ukrainian-American. In her professional life, Mudrak has traveled extensively and regularly to Ukraine since the fall of the USSR.  Read more and register

At least a third of all people die prematurely from causes that access to better medical treatment could avert. One culprit is the existing regime for rewarding pharmaceutical innovations. It seems clear that public funds should be mobilized to complement the present regime so as to give poor people access to advanced medicines at affordable prices and to bolster research efforts against diseases concentrated among the poor. But what is the best way to achieve these objectives? One proposal, which relies on incentives to private innovators, is the Health Impact Fund, which would give pharmaceutical innovators the option to be rewarded according to the incremental health impact of their product rather than through patent-protected mark-ups. Thomas Pogge is Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs and director of the Global Justice Program at Yale University. Read more

 

Mershon affiliate Bruce Weinberg, professor of economics, is the lead author of a new study published in the journal Science that finds university research is a key component to the U.S. economy, returning the investment through enormous public value and impact on employment, business and manufacturing nationwide.

 

"The main purpose of science funding isn't as a jobs program or a stimulus program, but this study provides the first detailed information about the short-term economic impacts of federal research," Weinberg said.

 

Weinberg and his colleagues tracked investments at nine large, Midwestern universities. In total, the schools received $7 billion in research and development funding in 2012, about half of which came from the federal government. The economists found that $1 billion of that investment was spent on equipment and services from U.S. vendors. Of those expenditures, 16 percent stayed in the university's home county; another 16 percent remained within the state.

 

Weinberg's results also shed light on a diverse workforce. Most of the workers supported by federal research funding are not university faculty members. In fact, fewer than one in five workers supported by federal funding is a faculty researcher. Using a new data set, the researchers also found that each university that receives funding spends those dollars throughout the United States -- about 70 percent spent outside their home states -- supporting companies both large and small.  Read more

 

Dramatic events have signaled new hopes of democratization and development across the Middle East. Where have these developments come from?  History 4350H, taught by Mershon affiliate Carter Findley, will seek their origins in Middle East history and culture from 1914 through the Arab Spring of 2011. 

 

The readings will start with a comprehensive history for continuity of background and continue with books that illustrate new approaches to the study of the region. In addition to reading and discussing these books, the course will draw on the growing wealth of films that enrich our understanding of Middle Eastern cultures.  Course flier