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Correspondence, Asia Pacific
The National Malaise

Stanley Wolpert writes of the “mixed legacy” of India’s history (Review, Winter 2011), but his account suffers from triumphalism. His attribution of India’s survival to an essentially permanent civilization is reminiscent of Mark Twain’s hyperbolic remarks on his encounter with the ancient city of Varanasi. Despite his summary of developments in India since 1991, his piece retains the quasi-mystical reverence once characteristic of a certain Western reading of India (as opposed to those who bemoaned India’s filth and poverty).

By Keshava Guha  |  April 19, 2011
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Correspondence, Asia Pacific
India's Youth Challenge

Adviser (Education), Indian Planning Commission & Author, Indian Higher Education: Envisioning the Future

Facing a declining working-age population in advanced countries and China, India’s growing youth population need not be a blessing. What Arvind Panagariya fails to consider in “The Global Professional” (Review, Winter 2011) is that India’s youth bulge and their galloping aspirations can be a recipe for disaster.

By Pawan Agarwal  |  April 19, 2011
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Correspondence, Americas
Chile's Graduation

Resilience to the global crisis, improving debt profiles and declining macroeconomic risks, capital inflows and strengthening currencies, low inflation and countercyclical monetary and fiscal policies. Does all that mean that emerging Latin American economies are finally entering into the developed world? Not yet, but some of them are getting closer.

By Eduardo Levy Yeyati  |  March 6, 2011  |  15
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Correspondence, Asia Pacific
Justice in the Philippines?

Frank Smyth’s survey of the appalling annual toll of journalists killed on the job is especially timely now, as the latest year’s tally includes one event that grotesquely inflated the total—the massacre of 32 journalists in the Philippines. Fortunately, there are signs that the perpetrators of this atrocity will not escape with impunity.

By Peter James Spielmann  |  March 6, 2011  |  1
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Correspondence
A Good Start, but not Quite

Claudio Grossman is the Dean of the American University Washington College of Law and the Chair of the United Nations Committee against Torture. 

By Claudio Grossman  |  December 23, 2010
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Correspondence, Global
Toward Reciprocity in the Accommodation of Western Law and Indigenous Justice

Douglas Lind is Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Idaho. He is an expert on indigenous justice.

By Douglas Lind  |  December 23, 2010  |  1
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Correspondence
The GOP's Sex Problem

As Kira Sanbonmatsu notes in her piece, “Life’s a Party,” (Harvard International Review, Spring 2010), women are severely underrepresented in American politics.  In the US Congress, 84 percent of the members of the House of Representatives and 83 percent of Senators are men.  The numbers are not much better at the state level, where more than three-quarters of state legislators are men.  Men occupy the governor’s mansion in 44 states. They run City Hall in 89 of the country’s 100 largest cities. 

By Jennifer Lawless  |  August 1, 2010
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Correspondence
Gender and Life Choices

Margot Wallstrom (“A Womanly Virtue,” Spring 2010) helpfully calls our attention to the horrific lives of women in much of the underdeveloped world. But her understanding of gender equality in the developed world is problematic.

By Steven E. Rhoads  |  August 1, 2010  |  1
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Correspondence
The Diversity of US Social Science

In the Winter 2010 issue of HIR, Kishore Mahbubani laments the fact that American social science has wrongly adopted methodologies modeled on the natural sciences, resulting in a baleful cultural myopia (“Beyond the Universal: The Cultural Myopia of US Social Science”). “Quantification, abstraction, and emphasis on model-building and replicability led to a fundamental failure to understand the differences in human societies,” Mahbubani writes. “The destruction of ‘area studies’ made things worse,” he adds.

By Michael Frazer  |  May 1, 2010
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Correspondence
Caveats to Authority

In his Winter 2010 article “Authoritarianism after 1989: From Regime Types to Transnational Processes,” Professor Jason Brownlee incisively points to the transnational character of authoritarianism.  Indeed, while the end of the Cold War stimulated numerous studies of the ways in which external factors (such as diffusion, the spread of information technology, international NGOs, and bilateral and multilateral conditionality) promote democracy, scholars have only recently begun to examine how post-Cold War transnational forces may facilitate non-democratic r

By Lucan Way  |  May 1, 2010
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