I have begun working on the Capstone project again – I’m finally ready to finish assembling it for final submittal to the Center for Global Affairs, create and make the video of our final presentation publicly available, and put the whole thing up on the web in a more user-friendly format.

While I am admittedly ever-the-optimist, I do believe this will be an excellent start towards something greater.

It has occurred to me that I never posted this prior to now and that it is critical to the focus of my work this semester. This is the proposal that we submitted for our Capstone project at the end of January. While our focus has changed slightly as we have researched, it gives a good overview of our goals and the direction we are aiming for.

There are six of us in the group, all in the final semester of our Master’s degrees at NYU’s Center for Global Affair. We are working together to establish a framework for the international system that incorporates the desirable qualities of good governance, economic development, cultural sensitivity, and environmental sustainability. We believe this is becoming increasingly realistic with the growth of collaboration between governments, businesses, and civil society.

Once this framework is developed, we will then apply it to three global issues to show its utility. These issues are corruption, the illicit drug trade, and global warming.

1. Machinery of US Foreign Policy. This is fascinating specifically because of the discussion concerning thosee factors external to the government bureacracy. How do the media, think tanks, and NGOs affect US foreign policy?
2. Human Rights Law. When I realized that I was shying away from this class, it made me question my rationale. What I discovered is that, while much of my interest in the international arena technically falls under the heading of “human rights,” there is something about the title that I find objectionable. What better way to understand my own objection (and perhaps that of others) than while learning about the essence that underlies “Human Rights”?
3. Europe in the 21st Century. I had to take this because the title is so reminiscent of Buck Rogers.
4. Conflict Assessment. A course dedicated to how international groups assess conflict and thereby, the methods they employ in dealing (or not) with it. I’m fascinated by the notion of having multiple theories or contexts within which to place a conflict, each of which may result in a different response. It seems that there is too much categorization of particular events, and I hope that this course will give me some additional tools with which to broaden the discussion of any particular event.