I'm taking a break from hacking away at my Uyghur paper in order to cut it down to the six pages max requested by the New America Foundation for its application writing sample — a painful task if there ever was one, considering the original version runs in at 26 in full — in order to note the release of the State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2004. Many of its findings confirm the continuation of policies previously detailed in my paper; not too suprisingly, the situation is not good for Xinjiang's Uyghurs.   more »

Well, I sure don't, obviously. But if anyone does and can translate this article for me, I would be extremely grateful. Babelfish gives me the gist, but I'm looking for something a little more precise (and less stilted that what translation bots give me), since I'm looking to use it in a paper. Your help will be duly cited and greatly appreciated.

Danke!

I'm sick with a sinus headache and busy with school and Habitat, and so don't have much time or energy for blogging at the moment. I will note, however, that not only is The Gates not saffron, it has also pretty much been done before.

So in addition to keeping up with readings in class and around the web, attempting to manage my campus Habitat chapter's activities, personally planning and leading a trip of 20 people down to Florida for spring break as a part of those duties, and oh yeah, trying to figure out what I'm doing with my life when BU boots me out of here with a wave and a dorky hat to remember it all by (I've got an interview with the JET program within the month and am going to be dashing off applications to the CSIS and State in short order), at some point this semester I'm going to need to write some papers.

I expect the big one is going to be a term paper for my current course with Professor Haqqani, Islamic Political Movements, and I think I have the glimmerings of a topic after reading and hearing more and more about it recently — namely, the experience of Muslims in Europe, how their integration (or lack thereof) has shaped their views of the West and their sympathies towards Islamist politics or, at the extreme, jihad.

You can check out some potential sources on the subject I've accumulated so far just through daily browsings here. I have a tendency to read a lot more than I actually write on, at least till I've gathered up a large enough body that I can sit down and synthesize it in one big go (which makes me a pretty bad blogger, I guess), but if nothing else that might give you an idea of some of my sources at the start going into this.

Europe is obviously a pretty big place, and not an area I've studied in any particular detail prior to this, so I'm not sure yet how I'm going to restrain myself from sprawling all over the place, but since the focus of this class is generally geared towards the progression of ideas and the sort of philosophical underpinnings, I will probably be approaching it from that general angle.

Of course I've got to top myself from last semester, so I full well expect the thing to be huge, meaning the time to start is now. If anybody has any particular suggestions for more reading on the subject, feel free to drop them here; for starters I'm going to try and plow through (or at least skim) Petter Nesser's Jihad in Europe dissertation for the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, and then dig through the Frontline supplementary resources for their recent program on the subject, which I thought offered an interesting introduction to the issue but which I'd like to pursue deeper.

Ideally, I'll be able to make more use of primary source material then in my Uyghur paper, since many of these groups have websites than anyone can browse through. We'll see how it goes.

Also, at some point I have to write a biography on an influential thinker in American foreign policy — I'm thinking Samuel Huntington, just because I'd enjoy verbally smacking him around for a couple thousand words' length — and something on "an issue relating to homeland security or intelligence"... yeah, I'm hoping for more clarification on that soon.

I also really want to write something tying together several threads that've been twisting around in my head on the notion of full spectrum warfare as a reshaping of traditional American warfighting doctrines, but I am afraid I won't have the time to devote myself to that particular endeavor for quite a while. We'll see.