Term Paper on "U.S. Policy Towards Thai Women Sex Trafficking"

Quoted Instructions for "U.S. Policy Towards Thai Women Sex Trafficking" Assignment:

The major assignment for this course is an original research paper (roughly 20-25 pages in length) that examines some aspect of United States foreign policy with respect to a particular country and a particular situation. One of our texts for the course, John W. Creswell’s Research Design, will guide you through the stages and steps of doing standard social science research. In the remarks that follow, I want to add some comments—philosophical, conceptual, and practical—that might be helpful in approaching this assignment. I assume that you have had a standard IAS education in one of the concentrations, but maybe not had the opportunity to apply your knowledge, skills, and abilities in a project of original research. Here is that opportunity, and for those who have had the chance, here is another occasion to hone those skills and abilities. What follows is not a fully-developed essay, but rather some thoughts and talking points. I welcome your comments and ideas.

Your first and most important job will be to ask a question that no one knows the answer to, and then proceed to provide that answer. At first glance, it might appear that someone at some time has written something about everything, but that is not the case. Scholars and *****s have written about only a minuscule fraction of what could be investigated and described. This is true for a host of reasons but the most significant are two: the world is enormously complex and the world is constantly changing. This does not mean that there aren’t patterns and generalities in human behavior and the institutions that attempt to organize it, but the patterns are not automatic. In other words, we can’t say that a particular life or situation is an example of a pattern until we investigate. This is a plea for research at the micro-level and to avoid the grand claims to universal truths.

The second job is taken care of for you by the subject matter of the class; namely, anything you investigate with respect to human rights matters. It is something significant because it is about human suffering or inequality or justice or dignity or freedom. Applying one’s mind, now made sharp as a tack by your IAS education, to things that matter is the responsibility of all intellectuals, but especially publicly-trained ones. The public has paid for most of your education and now you have a responsibility to give something back in the form of research that matters to the common good, in this case, represented by common knowledge.

Avoid seeking angles that promise to make the task easier. Choose hard cases and tough assignments and work at them. The rewards will be greater both in terms of your own learning and in terms of what matters. Choose issues and situations that reveal the world as it actually is, and not as it ought to be according to some ideology, including mine. That children are exploited in many parts of the world is true, but that does not mean that a particular child in Bangladesh who works in a factory is having her human rights violated. That must be demonstrated through argument and evidence.

Knowledge is social, that is, knowledge is knowledge when a group of people says it is. No matter how confidently I know that I saw Bigfoot on my camping trip, it isn’t knowledge until I can convince others. And to convince others I must use the tools that have been approved of by my society or subgroup within that society, in this case, the academic community. Those tools are of two kinds: evidence and argument. Evidence is what other scholars will accept as the facts of the case. They will only “allow into evidence,” to use the legal way of expressing this, facts which have passed some tests: relevance, corroboration, representativeness of the whole. Irrelevant stories, isolated comments or anecdotes, heart-wrenching emotions, or isolated bits of information do not constitute evidence. Think of prisoners exonerated by DNA or the search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Evidence must fit into an argument, which does not mean debate, but rather a crafted series of statements connected by an acceptable logic. By logic we don’t just mean formal logic but rather an acceptable form of human reasoning. Take for example the precautionary principle which states that, given our current state of lack of knowledge, we ought not to do something. We cannot prove that continuing to heat up the earth’s atmosphere will have catastrophic effects, but we probably should act as if it is the case, in order to be safe. The precautionary principle is not a part of formal logic, but it is probably a prudent form of human reasoning.

The ultimate goal and highest compliment for a piece of research is that it is convincing. No argument will be perfect because of that complexity issue, again, not to mention the fact that time will not allow all possible research or the gathering of all possible facts. In the back of your mind, all research should be accompanied by the thought “Based on what I’ve discovered so far . . . .” But at the same time, one must play fair and push the discovery as far as possible. That is how we make progress in what we know about the world. We are trying to convince each other that what we have discovered is important and true, knowing perfectly well that the latter two qualities can never be absolute.

Every piece of research, indeed, any claim about the world, is grounded in theory and you should actively work at identifying and interrogating your theories. I use the plural because we always use more than one in approaching a topic or issue and sometimes they are coherently linked, and sometimes not. At a bare minimum, we should all be familiar with what theories we use to explain the following: reality, the world, social behavior, political behavior, human psychology. A theory of reality forces us to ask about what is and what isn’t:

• Is happiness possible? Should we count on it? Is it the ultimate reality? Do rights exist? If so, where do they reside? What is morality? Does evil exist?

• What causes the world and its institutions—states, markets, cultures—to act the way they do? What’s driving the big shifts in globalization and world power? Why don’t countries respect the human rights of their own citizens and why don’t they intervene in acts of genocide?

• Why do people form into groups and why to these groups act the way they do? Why does one ethnic group or religion hate and fear another? Why, in general, do we find differences in how men and women act toward each other? Can human rights change these relationships? How, exactly?

• How is power distributed? Who has most and why? Can power be opposed, harnessed, co-opted, abandoned? What are the ways that people organize themselves into relations of power? Do organizations like Amnesty International really make a difference?

• Why would one person torture another? What is it in human psychology that makes this possible (and the evidence is that we’re all capable of it)? What is the difference between dignity and humiliation? How do you get someone to do the right thing? Is it even possible?

Whether you know it or not, you have theories that answer these questions, either because you’ve constructed them over the course of your life, consciously and unconsciously, or because you’ve been exposed to, and been convinced by, arguments advanced in your formal education. These theories can be more or less sophisticated, more or less helpful, and more or less correct; theories are not just speculation or guesses, but an interrelated set of concepts that claim to explain some phenomenon. Some do better than others. Any piece of research assumes theories. For your paper, I want you to identify the relevant theories that ground your argument. Sometimes you’ll just have to assume these theories and sometimes you’ll have to explain and defend them. The Dunne and Wheeler book is mostly about theories.

The earlier you choose your topic the better off you’ll be because you’ll have more time to read and think about it and more time to pay attention to other instances and related issues. Do not be too fussy about choosing a perfect topic—virtually any country will reveal a host of potential human rights problems or solutions (your paper can be about a human rights success). Remember that your paper is about U.S. human rights policy, so you must include an element of policy in the paper, namely, what is the U.S. doing to help or hinder the problem. For example, that child working in the factory; how is U.S. policy affecting her? Is it making her life better or worse? How and why?

Yes, the United States is guilty of human rights violations within its borders (the potential violation of habeas corpus at Guantanamo Bay is a recent example, but also endemic racism and domestic violence), but we will be looking outward to the relation between the United States and other countries, therefore, you cannot choose the U.S. as your focus for this project.

The next step after choosing a country is to choose a problematic case. This should be one that has a concrete and specific case as the focus, a case that tests the theories and arguments employed. The case can come from a newspaper article, a human rights report, or a legal case. For example, Mohammed Mahmoud Osman died two days after being released from a Cairo police station with extensive bruises over his body. Is it a human rights violation? Or just a civil matter? How should U.S. policy react to this, if at all? Should the President, the Congress, the American public get involved? Can they? What would the repercussions be? What’s realistic? Why? Where does the Osman case fit into the larger picture? Who is responsible?

The crucial thing here is not just to document suffering or purported violations, but to examine a complex case that can be analyzed from more than one point of view. In human rights work it is tempting to identify with victims and just write from one’s moral outrage over violations of the innocent. But in this class we are focusing on policy, and policy is a complex phenomenon that is not the simple application of morality to power. Choose a case that will not have an easy answer

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