Discussion Board writing assignment for Week Two

1. Describe some of the historical influences that impact North Korean narratives and social identities, and their perceptions of Americans and South Koreans. 

2. What do North Koreans say about their reality in relation to the world around them?

3. Describe some of the ways that cultural analysis is applied in the military today. (Use Week One and Week Two readings to support your answer).  

4. The editors of Practicing Military Anthropologydescribe Christopher Varhola’s (“Ethnicity and Shifting Identity”) arguments in favor of increased collaboration between military operations and anthropologists and other social scientists as “nested in linkages between analysis of specific cultural patterns and military operations.” What cultural patterns does Varhola believe could have been better understood (to the benefit of military operations) in Iraq, Sudan and East Africa?

Discussion Board writing assignment for Week Three

1. How does the production of cocaine impact the wider economy in Bolivia (particularly in rural areas), and in turn, impact other aspects of social life?

2. How are economic livelihoods and access to resources intertwined with the history of conflict in the Mindanao region of the Philippines?

Discussion Board writing assignment for Week Four

Q1: Outline and describe the system of segmentary lineage of the Nuer of Southern Sudan.  

Q2: How are social relations, kinship, age and status and religion reflected in the traditional system of Nuer Politics? 

Q3: Briefly describe some of the basic patterns of leadership, customary law and traditional conflict resolution techniques in Mindanao? In what situations might people in Mindanao use traditional customary law, and in what situations might they might they make appeals through formal state legal institutions?

Discussion Board writing assignment for Week Five

1. John Mueller argues “that the whole concept of ‘ethnic warfare’ may be severely misguided.” How was the “banality of ethnic war” borne out in the cases of Croatia and Bosnia, and Rwanda, according to Mueller? 

2. According to Hutchinson, how has Nuer ethnicity been militarized?  What behavioral and social changes does Hutchinson cite as evidence of this militarization of the Nuer? 

3. In “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War,” Fearon and Laitin critique “an influential conventional wisdom [which] holds that civil wars proliferated rapidly with the end of the Cold War and that the root cause of many or most of these has been ethnic and religious antagonisms.” What did Fearon and Laitin find to be the direct causes of civil conflict?  What did they find to be indirect causes, in other words, which factors did they find to be more weakly correlated with civil wars?

Discussion Board writing assignment for Week Six

Q1: Summarize how, according to Rodney Stark, social movements arise and how they succeed?  Describe where a “shared grievance” might arise from a population. 

Q2: In The True Believer, Eric Hoffer opines, “Discontent by itself does not invariably create a desire for change.”According to Hoffer, what other factor(s) have to be present to create a desire for change? What is required for success? Is Hoffer different from Stark? Explain why or why not.

Q3: Why in Toth’s view, did Islamism take root in Southern Egypt? What political, economic and social conditions does Toth attribute to the rise of Islamism in Egypt?  What does Toth cite as the catalyst for the shift of some Islamists in Egypt from pacificism to militancy?   

Q4. What is the “strategic logic of suicide terrorism,” according to Robert Pape?  Describe the five principal findings of Pape’s study.  What evidence did Pape find for “the apparent success of suicide terrorism?”

Discussion Board writing assignment for Week Seven

Q1: What is “strategic culture?” According to the authors for the week, what does strategic culture consist of? 

Q2: How does China perceive itself? What threatens China’s national security in the eyes of its influential elites?  How does China seek to address threats to China’s national security? 

Q3: Norvell De Atkine writes, ” Arabic-speaking armies have been generally ineffective in the modern era,” and gives examples of outcomes from military confrontations with Iran, Western militaries, and Israel to support his claim. 

Why does De Atkine believe the U.S. army, i.e. military, “has a poor legacy” in assessing the national character and culture of opposing forces? What evidence does he provide?

What cultural attributes of Arab armies does De Atkine believe affect combat performance?  Provide your assessment of De Atkine’s claims.  Are there any factors (political, economic, environment, etc,) not covered by De Atkine which might have significantly (or at least somewhat) impacted the outcomes of the military confrontations he uses to support his cultural attributes theory? 

Q4: Describe the three perspectives of Indian strategic culture as outlined by Kanti Bajpai.