Teaching
Preparing graduate students for pressing global challenges
The field of international relations during the second half of the 20th century focused on nation-states as they forged and broke alliances, competed for influence in the developing world, and danced around the superpowers. It was a world of Cold War spies and intrepid diplomats – all very much defined by their country of origin.
But the realities of the 21st century, in which even powerful nations find themselves constrained by turbulent global forces and institutions that defy national branding, are far more complex. This is the world embraced by the Division of Global Affairs in Newark, which was founded more than a decade ago.
“In recent years, the way we’ve been thinking about things has become inadequate. States and governments have ceased to be the only important actors,” said Richard Langhorne, founding director of the division. The former director and chief executive of Wilton Park, part of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Langhorne was recruited in 1996 to help set up what began as a master’s-level program but soon after expanded to include doctoral students.
“At all levels, the sheer complexity of problems, like those now roiling financial markets, has them moving faster than the solutions,” added Yale Ferguson, co-director of the program since 2002 and a political science professor at Rutgers for 41 years, who doesn’t hesitate to say that his last 10 years here “have been the best.”
As Langhorne and Ferguson prepare to hand off the division to new leadership next year, they look back with some amazement at how quickly it has flourished, with justifiable pride at its success. The Ph.D. program, founded in 2001, was ranked fifth in the nation for international affairs and development in the Benchmarking Academic Excellence Survey of Top Universities in social and behavioral sciences disciplines for 2006–2007. The division now hosts 170 students, with more than 100 enrolled in the master’s program and nearly 70 pursuing Ph.D.’s, hailing from institutions as far-flung as Beijing University and the Turkish National Police College.
“What started as a small program just took off,” said Ferguson, who noted that it was founded, initially as the research-oriented Center for Global Change and Governance, after a period of self-scrutiny in the 1990s in which Rutgers–Newark decided to build on the advantages of its location near a major port, airport, numerous transnational corporate headquarters, and the international finance hub in New York.
“We had to convince the faculty that what our program offered was not a threat, but an opportunity, and one that enabled them to teach at the graduate level,” Langhorne said. He added that it gave students in traditional fields an exposure to a multidisciplinary set of core courses that broadened them, enhancing their understanding, for example, of the workings of multinational corporations like Citibank that are “global enterprises, both in terms of their business and their presence.”
These insights become ever more critical as policy experts seek to understand recent global perturbations, such as the subprime mortgage crisis. Understood by many as a problem that began with bad loans in the United States and spread to other countries, the picture is, in fact, far murkier, according to Langhorne and Ferguson. They note that foreign banks also issued subprime securities, which U.S. and foreign banks bought.
Besides multinational corporations, the division assesses the role of nongovernmental organizations such as Doctors without Borders and institutions like the World Health Organization and the World Trade Organization, as well as topics with global implications, such as climate change, world financial markets, migration, and pandemics.
Many of these institutions defy easy categorization. The World Health Organization, an arm of the United Nations, has evolved from an agency representing the interests of the U.N.’s individual members to a global institution with more independent stature. The European Union is a political entity that cannot be adequately described by such familiar categories as unitary state, federation, or confederation.
And Ferguson and Langhorne note that organizations such as Doctors without Borders assume a political role when they make deals with local warlords, for example, to set up infrastructure. In an intriguing example of NGO activity, Langhorne recalled how the International Rescue Committee, a U.S. charity organization, reassembled – and helped run – the justice system in Rwanda in the 1990s. In attempting to examine the condition of prisoners in the country following the 1994 genocide and subsequent government collapse, the agency discovered that all prison records, among other documents, had been destroyed.
“Nobody knew any longer why prisoners were in prison or what their sentences were,” Langhorne said.
At its founding, the then Center for Global Change and Governance offered four core subject areas, including the evolution of global systems, global governance, global environment, and global political economy. The program has since added culture and globalization, including social movements, international business, international economics, and international law. Students who have graduated from the program – about 150 so far with master’s degrees and 20 with doctoral degrees – have landed positions in international organizations, government service, business, NGOs, academia, and journalism.
Langhorne and Ferguson, who plan to continue with teaching and research at Rutgers and elsewhere, said they expect to see the global environment, violence, turbulence in financial markets, and population migrations assume even more prominence as fields of study.
Langhorne, who focuses on the effects of globalization on diplomacy, among other research areas, noted of recent migration trends, “It’s a global phenomenon. The world population is on the move, with significant consequences for the global economy and global labor markets.”
To those who see these trends as new and impenetrable, Ferguson, one of whose projects focuses on ancient history, would only add that the modern era resembles the Mediterranean world of antiquity, “in the sense that it is unclear where things are headed in the midst of shifting identities and ideologies, religious conflicts and mass migrations.”
“It’s a scary, but a fascinating time,” Ferguson said with relish.