COMBINATION TOPIC WORDINGS

[Steve Mancuso <steveman@umich.edu>]

I congratulate the topic committee on resolving several of the
controversies ahead of time (such as agents, and whether or not to list
countries).  While I agree with some of these choices (agent) and
disagree with others (I favored listing), most importantly the committee
has minimized the chances of strategic voting working.

I also support limiting the issues to those discussed in the topic
paper, and also the disinclination to use the general term "foreign
policy" (although I do sympathize with comments people have made
recently - Harris, Heidt, Haefle - about concerns that the topic might
be too narrow).

I have one major suggestion.

I hope the committee will consider COMBINING two or more of the policy
areas in the resolutions.    What I mean is that they should use more
than one of the areas at a time.  For example:

Resolved:  The USFG should substantially change its human rights and/or
security policies toward one or more ASEAN member states.

or Resolved:  The USFG should substantially change its trade and/or
democracy promotion policies toward one or more ASEAN member states.

Further creative mixing and matching are obviously possible.

Here are my arguments for this approach:

(1)  Better achieve community cosensus.  There is a rather deep split
among those who favor human rights-type topics and those who favor
security-type topics.  Why not have both in one?  That way everyone can
work on an affirmative from their preferred area.  Topics which are
limited to one area or another could be divisive and polarizing. Are
those people who want to debate human rights (or security) affirmatives
saying they want to force EVERYONE to run human rights (or security)
affirmatives, I doubt it.  Including both areas in a topic would give
everyone their first choice, without restricting the preferences of
others.

(2)  Avoid further "strategic voting."  Assuming that there exists a
commited, hard core group of supporters for the human rights policy area
(roughly the supporters of the original civil rights problem area), and
somewhat broader support for a non-human rights focus (but divided
between security, trade etc.), block voting for human rights could lead
to a minority view picking the topic.  

(3)  Offer greater substantive diversity.  Some ASEAN nations present
primarily human rights problems, some primarily security problems, some
primarily trade problems etc.  By limiting the topic choices to one of
the policy areas we may be eliminating some of the countries from
significant discussion.  If we include human rights AND security, we
would help ensure that more of the nations are discussed fully.

(4)  Somewhat address concerns about topic breadth.  As I mentioned
above, several people have commented that there is not an enormous "fit"
between this part of the world and US policy actions.  At first glance
there do not appear to be an overwhelming number of articles advocating
US action in ANY of these policy areas.  Choosing more than one policy
area for each topic clearly helps address this concern.

Those are my thoughts.  I favor that the committee write an entire slate
of topics which combine policy areas.

Steve Mancuso

---

• Prev by Date: Here are the topics!!!
• Next by Date: Re: SEA Topic
• Prev by thread: Re: Here are the topics!!!
• Next by thread: North Texas
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread
  • Author

---

Archive created by Jonathan Stanton (jonathan@cs.jhu.edu)
Return to main CEDA-L Archive Page