Week 2 Reflection

So I’ll be honest, I waited until last minute to write my blog. I was struggling over what to write about, how I wanted to work t, ad what part of the week I wanted to draw from. However, upon returning home tonight I decided that there really is only one thing that I want to say at present, and I am fairly certain that I can even relate it back to world politics.

I tried a few times to find eloquent wording, but I don’t know that I find it necessary in this case. Basically what I want to say is that we all live together, we are going to disagree, but we need to learn to deal with it as mature adults and try not to start bigger problems. In Thursday’s class it was mentioned that unlike the classroom model, sovereign states do not get to return home at the end of the day. Sovereign states live in the same world all of the time, this is also true for the Leonard 7 community. When we think about world politics and international relations it all seems very complicated, there are so many precautions that need to be taken to not disrupt the balance and to try to come to majority agreements. In a sense we must also treat our little community with the same care. If we are not careful about the manner in which we react to one another then chances are some form of argument will break out. Let’s think of an argument as a sort of mini war, even though it may be between two countries the repercussions are going to affect the entire globe in some way shape or form. The situation is no different here, even if it is on a much smaller scale. So if we are going to use UC as a little microcosm of the world let’s just try to increase the peace, refrain from using any nuclear weapons, and maybe even clean up the environment (or the hallway) if we’re feeling really ambitious.

Reflection Week 2

I felt like this week’s classes furthered my understanding of international relations theory in ways I had not previously considered. The role playing situation that we acted out on Tuesday accurately reflected how resources determine power within the international system. At first I just accepted that the less powerful “nations” would bind together to oppose the larger ones. However after reading the articles assigned for Friday I thought of this situation as reflecting the realist philosophy of blocking in which the less powerful nations joined together in order to block the more powerful nation or nations. After the reading I saw this phenomenon as a international relations theory that has flaws as well as truths rather than simply an aspect of human nature applied to nations on a global scale.

Furthermore on Friday I thought it was beneficial to examine an idea brought up in one of the blogs. It gave us each a chance to examine our views on this metaphor and how much it realistically applied to international politics. The metaphor of the classroom was just that, a metaphor, and in many ways it did reflect the reality of global politics and it failed short of explaining how the world works in others. This discussion reminded me, as I think we all should be reminded at times, to recognize that just because a theory explains a truth or a perceived truth does not mean that it is the only truth. This was further emphasized in the articles we read which stressed that only through a combination of realism, idealism, and constructivism can we reach any type of successful policy.

While I really connected to what we did in class this week I feel like in general we have not been discussing in the classroom the reading we have done outside of class. I think much of the reading we have done directly relates to the activities we have been doing in class and I would like to incorporate the readings. I think there are interesting points that could be pulled out of these readings and applied to the classroom discussions we have been having. Next week I will try to better connect the outside readings to the class discussions while in class rather than only making those connections after the fact.

Erica Peterson