ASSIGNMENT NO. 1 • HINTS AND OTHER HELPFUL INFORMATION
For this assignment, the first thing you need to do is find an issue or event about which to write. This should not be difficult to do. Indeed, there are a number of very good souces of news on world affairs.
One of these is the New York Times Web Site, and specifically the paper's Global Issues page. This page will keep you abreast of major stories and issues around the world. If you need to find news about particular regions or countries, you should examine the Washington Post's World Section, where you can find regional coverage of Africa, the Americas, Asia/Pacific, Europe, the former USSR, and the Middle East, as well as Photo Gallery and Special Reports. Another very useful site is OneWorld Online, which provides an alternative perspective on major issues. This site also allows you to search for information by country or theme. For more links, check my World News page. Another very good source of world news and information is the BBC News, which has a World News page, as well as individual pages for Africa, the Americas, Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia. A second major British site is the Guardian, one of Britain's most popular papers. The Guardian has a World News page, with up-to-date coverage of world events. You should be sure to check the Guardian's News Guide page, which allows you find major news sources from different regions of the world.
To find background information on major news stories, you should also review the archives for most of the papers above (most will even have special background sections). But, don't neglect the rest of the Internet. Simply typing in "background" plus the a keyword from the issue/event you have selected will give you a whole range of possible sources. For example, to find out more about the Chechnya issue, I can type "background" and "Chechyna" into the google search engine. Doing so gives my dozens (if not hundreds of results). One of the first ones to appear is entitled "The Dirty War in Chechnya" on the "HRW" website. "HRW," you will learn, is the Human Rights Watch, a major non-governmental organization. It is important—critical, in fact—that you pay close attention to the source of the information you uncover on the web. This is because many web sites will be little more than propaganda outlets, meaning that the information they provide will not always be accurate or useful. In other words, don't trust everything you read. In a similar vein, do not assume that one site will give you all the relevant "facts" about an event. Even highly "credible" sources will often only present a small subset of facts. This is almost always the case with government sources. For example, the US State Department, because of American relations with Russia and because of the "threat of terrorism," has been careful to characterize the conflict between Chechnya and Russia in very moderate terms.
To find background information on most issues, you will also likely to have to conduct a more targeted search as well. Because of the sheer number of potentially useful sources on the Internet (and because your topics can cover a huge range of issues), however, I cannot provide a good list of what these sources might be. Still, there are some general sources that most of you might find useful. These include (but, to repeat, are hardly limited to) the following (note: sources are listed in completely random order):
U.S. Department of State: International Issues Page
United Nations: Briefing Papers for Students (also check the UN site more generally)
Columbia International Affairs Online (CIAO) • NOTE: you can access the password protected info on this site by using "csula" as both the user id and password
Center for Defense Information • A good site for background information on specific topics or issues
Foreign Policy In-Focus • A good site for background information on specific topics or issues
Brookings Foreign Policy Home Page • A good site for background information on specific topics or issues
WWW: International Affairs Resources • This one of the first places to go to find links to a wide range of web-based resources on international relations. Includes a guide for doing IR-based research on the Internet
To repeat, the few sites listed above are only a tiny, tiny fraction of the potentially useful sites available on the web. So, don't rely on these for all your research needs. You should check my Resource page and Research page for additional sources.
I will update this page--and add more useful and specific information--during the weekend if I receive any questions of general interest from students in the class. If you have a question, therefore, let me know as soon as possible. Otherwise, I may not have time to respond or to post the information on this page.
