The Attache

A Message From The Editors

The 2009-2010 edition of The Attache Journal of International Affairs is proud to continue the line of scholarly excellence that one has come to expect from the The Attache. This year our journal features pieces that reflect a range of disciplines, methodolo- gies, and viewpoints that reflects the talent and interests of the University of Toronto student body. Our selection process was tough this year. The pieces selected and the pieces represented here made it after rigorous and sometimes passionate debate. The pieces selected not only represent the Attache’s high standard of academic excellence, but our desire to challenge conventional thought and wisdom.

The Asian economic miracle is something that has studied often by economists and political scientists alike in hopes of gleaning an understanding of what causes rapid economic growth and how that can be applied elsewhere across the globe. In his piece, Asian Industrial Policy Success and the Developmental State: A Critical Analysis, Josh Xiong challenges the “assumption that active government-led industrial policy really did act as the causal agent for rapid economic growth in East Asia.” By looking analyzing the literature on South Korean, Xiong is able to create doubt about the efficacy of the Developmental state and provides a basis for further inquiry into what really jump-started the Asian economic miracle.

Much like Xiong challenged the conventional thinking on the Developmental State, Sarro seeks to shake the underpin- nings of the so-called “Washington Consensus”; a consensus that has driven the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank to deliver aid in order to reach the goals of a limited state, free trade and free market institutions. In What urban planners can teach development economists about development economics, Sarro boldly proclaims that the Washington Consensus has failed and in an interesting cross-disciplinary study, goes onto to argue that it failed for the same reasons modernist urban planning failed: both contained contempt for what they were meant to fix. In the end, Sarro calls for development policy that is based on the unique needs and conditions of each state.

Continuing Sarro’s challenge to global lending institutions, Siera Vercilo localizes the analysis of foreign aid and she seeks to challenge how Canadian foreign aid is delivered. Vercilo method of inquiry is unique, building a bottom-up approach through examinations of individual aid programs in Tanzania and Kenya. Vercilo’s piece argues in the end that “while Canada contributes to foreign aid with the incentive to reduce global poverty, it’s wasteful mismanagement of aid, lack of coordination and participation in tied-aid makes it ineffective and in need of restructuring. Foreign Aid programs are touted as helping those most vulnerable in countries that have often been decimated by war, economic decline and corruption. Hana Dhanji provides an inquiry into sometimes the most vulnerable groups in developing countries: children. Specifically, in Resilience Theory as a Tool for the Promotion of Successful Cognitive Development Among the High-Risk Population of Children in Developing Countries, lays out a framework for international donors in order to support the cognitive development of Children in developing countries. She provides a counter-thesis to those that argue for health intervention strategies saying that “… he efficacy of health intervention strategies should be secondary to the investment of resources into the alleviation of the root causes associated with the childhood impairment of cognitive development, and not a replacement for its serious consideration.”

While Foreign aid represents one major outflow from developed economies to developing ones, outsourcing represents a much larger and privatized outflow of economic activity from the Global North to the Global South. Akhil Wadhwani seeks to come to terms with outsourcing in his piece, Outsourcing to India and Mexico: A Look Behind the Glass. By delving into critical analysis of the effects of outsourcing to India and Mexico, Wadhwani seeks to understand the effects of outsourcing on developing countries. Wadhwani provides a balanced look at both the benefits and drawbacks of outsourcing and in the process challenges conventional wisdom at both ends of the ideological spectrum. In the end, he leaves the reader with a powerful thought “concluding that economic globalization is the worst form of economic policy except all others that have been tried.”

While Wadhwani examined the economic effects of globalization, Laurel Alison Reid shifts the analysis to the political realm. In particular, Reid seeks to build understanding of the growing wave of “Islamophobia” on the European continent through a comparative analysis of the immigrant experience in both Germany and France. Reid’s analysis challenges how inclusive conceptions of nationhood in both Germany and France. Using case studies from Germany and France, Reid constructs for the readers to different conceptions of nationhood and challenges how inclusive they are for growing immigrant populations.

Finally, this journal turns to one of the hottest debates in international affairs today, courtesty of Sima Atri’s The Legality and Effectiveness of a Preemptive Intervention in the Case of Genocide in Rwanda. The merits of humanitarian intervention have been challenged since the invasion of Iraq of 2003, but regardless Atri argues forcefully that, in the case of Rwanda, it was justified. Atri argues “that a multilateral pre-emptive military operation with the mandate to use ‘all means necessary’ would have been both justified and the most effective international response” to the situation in Rwanada in 1993.

These pieces are meant to spark a debate and challenge our willingness to accept the conventional thinking on a wide range of issues. They reflect not only the ability of undergraduates at the University of Toronto for scholarly inquiry but the willingness to research and dig deeper than others into trying to understand how our world works. It is our hope that the reader will come away with new insights into global issues, but also with a deep appreciation of the quality and motivation of the undergraduate student body at the University of Toronto.

Sincerely, The Editors-in-Chief Netila Demneri & Shiva Logarajah