final reflection

Wow. I can't believe that this is my last world politics blog, that there are no more wp classes, and that this semester is nearly over... it just doesn't feel like it's been a whole semester! I'm glad that I did uc because I've met so many cool people and made amazing friends - what would I do without you? While I didn't get to know everyone as well as I would have liked to - despite our differences at times - we do have another semester here and I hope that we can better understand each other as time goes on.

Though others apparently disagree, I liked the simulation and thought that it was an effective, accurate portrayal of reality. A lot of times in discussions, we become detached from how things truly are because despite our (very) diverse backgrounds, we all have something in common: we are all freshmen at American University; we all chose to come to this school and are all pursuing higher education. Even with our resident dissident voices, many times we are able to rationalize, see from each others' point of view and come to an agreement, even if it is not always a consensus. This underlying unity makes it difficult for us to remember the red tape that exists in reality, the reason that real international decisions take so much time to plan and still do not always actually work.
By representing many very different players in global development, our unifying chord was broken. True, we all still represented groups of human beings who wish to encourage development, however, this thread is not nearly as strong as that which we, in uc wp, actually share. Though I certainly would have liked to talk about issues besides anti-corruption and privatization, it was inevitable that we get stuck on only a few issues that many groups (or at least my group) considered much less significant than things like trade liberalization. I agree that given more time we could have furthered our discussion, but we knew that we had a time limit and did not budget our time well; this, again, is quite representative of international (and national) decision making. They take longer than planned yet do not finish what they set out to do. Such is politics.

Overall, I'm glad I took world politics. Yes, there was a focus on theory, but theory helps us to tie together more complicated concepts and relate events and perspectives. This is an introductory course and I think it did a good job of laying down a foundation so that if we choose to take (or need to for those IR majors) more SIS courses, we have a solid background in the basics of the subject. I think that we covered the material in a creative manner, with many different activities so that we could really learn and comprehend the subjects rather than just reading a book and being lectured at (to?). I love that we had the opportunity to have intense discussions, simulations and excursions to delve into that which is world politics.