INTL 1100 - Introduction to Global Issues

Summer 2007 (course id: 02-133)

Quiz answers: • Quiz 1; • Quiz 2; • Quiz 3; • Quiz 4
Exam answers: • Midterm 1; • Midterm 2; Reminder: my grading breakdown (both in individual tests and overall) is non-standard:
85 and over is an A, 65-84 is a B, 45-64 is a C, and below that is a D (with pluses and minuses at even intervals).

Additional reading / viewing: • New York Times Magazine article & feature on graphic novels:
article and feature
• Anti-German cartoon propaganda: Disney's "Der Fuehrer's Face" (poor copy, on Youtube)
• Anti-Japanese cartoon propaganda: Popeye in "You're a Sap, Mr. Jap", Superman in Japoteurs(!), and the Looney Tunes' Tokio Jokio (Youtube & Google video).
• Racist stereotypes & WWII propaganda: "Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs" (Youtube).
(Opinions on this last cartoon vary widely. It is very offensive but also funny and well-crafted. In 1994, it made a list of the 50 best cartoons ever made, but it is also part of Warner Brothers' 'censored 11', cartoons that are deemed too offensive to present-day audiences and thus will never be shown on public TV. Some well-reasoned discussions of the cartoon, from positive to negative, can be found here, here, here, and here.)
Note: these videos get taken down for copyright reasons from time to time, but you should be able to track them down by title on Youtube or Ifilm or similar sites.

July 9: Terrorism & Radical Islamism: outline.
July 10: Counter-Terrorism: outline.
July 11: Aghanistan & Nation-Building: outline.
Additional reading / viewing: •Christian Science Monitor multimedia presentation: Perspectives on terrorism: Defining the line
•Very good article about life & journalism in Saudia Arabia in The New Yorker,
January 5, 2004. The Kingdom of Silence by Lawrence Wright. Get it through EbscoHost Academic Search Premier. •Article in the Christian Science Monitor: The myth of Muslim support for terror
(Related info: Muslims believe U.S. seeks to undermine Islam)
•Excerpts of transcript of a video tape in which Osama bin Laden addresses the American people
•The degeneration of the terrorist target list: Miniature Golf Course on Terrorist Target List, and Come One, Come All, Join the Terror Target List (from the New York Times). See also an article in USA Today on this topic which gives a partial numerical breakdown of potential terrorist target sites.

July 12: Oil politics & Revolutions: outline.
July 13: Iran & Anti-Americanism: outline.
Additional reading / viewing: •Interesting article by Tom Friedman: The First Law of Petropolitics (on the correlation between oil prices and politics in oil-exporting countries)
•Article on the 'exportability' of the revolutions in Georgia, the Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan: What Comes after Rose, Orange, and Tulip?
•Iranian (& other) TV clips at Memri TV (I showed clips 1390, 1499, and 1388, in that order)
•Thorough and well-documented paper on Anti-Americanism

July 16: Communism, Empire, and the Soviet Union: outline.
July 17: Central Asian Politics & Personality Cults: outline.
Additional reading / viewing: •Nice overview of The Communist Manifesto (with a link to the full text of the pamphlet).
•The Imagery of Revolution & Socialism: Soviet-era Political Posters.
•A good discussion of the dying Aral Sea with some pictures.
•The Frontline/PBS documentary on wife kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan (the link to watch the video is at the right, near the top of the page).
•Page with some pictures of Turkmenbashi's statues in Ashgabat (Turkmenistan's capital).
•Recent article by Ted Rall on the development of a personality cult in Tajikistan.

July 19: Yugoslavia & Populist Authoritarianism: outline.
July 20: Bosnia & Genocide: outline.
July 23: Kosovo & Ethnic Politics: outline.
July 24: Macedonia & Peacekeeping: outline.
Additional reading / viewing: •A wikipedia page with a number of highly useful ethnic maps of Bosnia-Herzegovina, some of which I showed in class.
•An interesting article in the British paper The Guardian offering an update on Bosnia 10 years after the Dayton accords (with useful further links to related stories.
•The well-produced but highly disingenuous excerpt from a Bosnian Serb propaganda movie we watched in class, which claims that Bosnian Muslims staged attacks in Sarajevo during the war in Bosnia.
•Interesting article from the AP newswire about Skopje's Millennium Cross and the politics surrounding its construction (scroll down to the article titled "Stakes are high, swords are out...")

July 25: North Korea & Totalitarian Ideology: outline.
July 26: Nuclear Proliferation & International Diplomacy: outline.
Additional reading / viewing: •The International Institute of the Juche Idea for those interested in seeing non-North Koreans who take this cult seriously.
•The Center for International Trade and Security at UGA, which does a lot of excellent research on weapons proliferation.

INTL 1100 - Introduction to Global Issues / maurits@uga.edu
Last updated 25 July 2007.