Thawed-World Policy

Since the end of the Cold War, global security has hinged less on issues of arms control and military strategies than on the social, environmental, and economic problems dividing people. That is the reasoning behind the Global Security Fellows Institute founded by Dartmouth Dickey Endowment senior fellow Jack Shepherd at Cambridge University in 1993. The institute brings in foreign scholars and policy-makers to study security issues and create policies for implementation in their home countries. Shepherd, former director of War/Peace Studies at Dartmouth, also brings in Dartmouth students and graduates to serve as research assistants.

So far, 32 fellows—ranging from trade representatives to bio-diversity specialists—have applied interdisciplinary approaches to regional problems. The current group is probing economic dislocations in southern Africa to help foster policies for sustainable development. Dartmouth has supplied five interns, who attend the institute's seminars and as sist fellows. Rebecca Eldredge '94 is editing a report on pollution in eastern Europe. Jordy Urstadt '95 is writing about the ethics of using food aid to manipulate the policies of aidreceiving countries. Like the fellows they help, interns negotiate the difficult road from theory to practice.