I was assigned Max Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation, Science as a Vocation” my first quarter in college back in 2000. It has stuck with me vividly ever since, especially its discussion of how politicians must balance the ethic of conviction with the ethic of responsibility. That seems as important and pressing now as ever. Read it all, but here are a few excerpts:
This is a very interesting report on changing patterns of control and governance in southeast Burma/Myanmar by the Karen Peace Support Network (shared with all appropriate caveats about how hard this stuff is to measure).
From Bhabani Sen Gupta’s 1972 article in China Quarterly about China and the Indian Communists:
“Maoism, for the CPI [note: this is post-split and in contrast to the CPM, which was on uneasier ground], was not Marxism-Leninism but a narodnik deviance fortified by petit-bourgeois chauvinism” (p. 285)
This is a fascinating piece that tries to map out different types of neighborhoods in Chicago. Well worth a read for any past, future, or current Chicagoan.
Bangladesh is one of the most under-studied countries in political science, certainly in American political science, and the kind of data that exists for other countries is either unavailable or un-used. This is why it’s particularly interesting and exciting to have a new International Republican Institute survey, run in April 2023.
For my IR/foreign policy purposes, I was especially glad they asked about views of foreign countries, giving a rough sense of how different major international players are viewed by Bangladeshi respondents. In the full report PDF, they also compare these responses to the same question in 2019 to see if there are trends. The key findings are on pp. 42-45.
Overall comparison in 2023:
When looking at the three 2019-2023 comparisons, the main trend is a major drop in the proportion of respondents with “Don’t Know/Refused to Answer” responses. The allocation of new responses varies a bit across countries but seems broadly similar with the slight exception of India (which didn’t pick up any favorability bump: -2, compared to +8 for PRC and +9 for US, but some of this may simply be that fewer DK answers were given for India in both 2019 and 2023, so there was less potential “floating” opinion yet to be decided). This shift since 2019 could reflect some shift in survey methodology, or a greater awareness and interest in these foreign powers at a time of growing major power competition that touches on Bangladesh.
As a next research step, it would be fascinating to learn whether these views are correlated with variables like intended vote choice, priority political issues, views of the Prime Minister, etc – do domestic political cleavages map onto foreign policy preferences, or are they largely autonomous?
Paul Staniland 