Jeremi Suri

Archive for the ‘Geopolitics’ Category

We have been here before. Think of other late August and early September days in recent years past — 1990, 2001, 2008. In each of these years the international system entered a period of flux as the summer ended. In 1990 the end of the Cold War left a major power vacuum in the Persian Gulf. In 2001, a contested election and a distracted American electorate left the most powerful nation on earth paralyzed against its plotting enemies. In 2008 profound discontent with the “Global War on Terror” hamstrung the Western powers against constructive action as Russia invaded its Georgian neighbor. These periods of later summer flux, like those notorious August days of 1914, enabled determined small actors in the international system to re-direct and often undermine the strongest states. Late summer strategic flux is very dangerous.

We have definitely entered one of these moments again. The challenges for the most powerful actors are plentiful and the promising solutions from their leaders are paltry, to say the least. The United States has withdrawn its combat forces from Iraq, it continues to fight in Afghanistan and sanction Iran. What is the American program for a more peaceful and stable Middle East? How is the Obama administration pursuing a constructive vision in its daily reactions to recent events, including the terrible floods in Pakistan?

The same questions arise in East Asia. The United States has managed cautious, amicable relations with China, and it has isolated North Korea. What is next? What is the Obama administration’s program for assuring continued access to Chinese capital, economic growth in Japan, and, most important, security on the Korean peninsula?

Strategic flux is the confused and passive position that pragmatic policy-makers adopt when they feel overwhelmed. It represents an abdication of leadership, a clinging to cautious tactics and myopic time horizons. Leaders must do more than react tentatively to the crises of the day, they must do more than promise to keep the ship of state above water. As Max Weber recognized more than a century ago, leaders must articulate aspirations that create a new reality, that mobilize energies and capabilities, that create change amidst flux.

Obama better get to work. For all his intelligence, good judgment, and rhetorical talent, he has fallen down on the job. America’s greatest asset as a powerful nation is its ability to re-define the international system in constructive ways. At a time when old models for economy, governance, and war are in decline, the United States must articulate alternatives. Many will disagree with an American vision, but debate on American terms will silence the much more dangerous, destructive, and degenerate voices that wash across the landscape as the United States sits silently, a ubiquitous Goliath defined by the Lilliputians all around it.

Jonathan Swift would be the first to tell Obama that he must find the vision to engage and motivate observers, rather than allow them to tie him down. Late August is a time to leave the beach renewed for creative, integrated, visionary strategic leadership. The only other possibility is a long winter of suffering. We need an Indian summer of strategic courage, and we need it now.

This blog was originally posted at http://globalbrief.ca

Classes on the go: Distance education becoming more popular

By TODD FINKELMEYER
The Capital Times tfinkelmeyer@madison.com
Posted: Tuesday, August 10, 2010 5:00 am

Unlike many who take courses during UW-Madison’s summer session, Peter Owen hasn’t spent any hot evenings catching up on his studies while sipping a cold beer on the Memorial Union Terrace.

Owen is a 24-year-old first lieutenant stationed in Iraq with the 724th Engineer Battalion of the Wisconsin Army National Guard. So instead of sitting near the shore of Lake Mendota while finishing coursework, he’s knocked off some required readings and listened to recorded lectures on an MP3 player while seated in the back of a military transport aircraft waiting to take off on another mission.

“I have really enjoyed the opportunity to keep working toward my degree while deployed,” Owen, who is taking a foreign policy history course from UW-Madison professor Jeremi Suri, says in an e-mail interview. Owen was a graduate student at Valparaiso University pursuing a masters in International Commerce and Policy prior to being deployed.

Welcome to the modern world of “distance education,” a field that incorporates various styles of teaching and a range of technologies to deliver education to students who aren’t sitting in a traditional classroom. While evolving technology continues to drastically change how people communicate, get their news and make purchases, it’s generally having a less dramatic impact on how higher education is delivered — at least at a place like UW-Madison, where just 2.5 percent of all credit hours are taken through distance education courses.

“One of the motivations for this course is my sense that teaching is often not as innovative as it can be,” says Suri, who is teaching this online course for the second straight summer. “We fall into patterns and ruts, and that’s probably true of any profession. I’m not saying we should throw out the traditional ways of teaching, but I’m interested in shaking things up and experimenting in different modes of delivery.”

It’s no secret, however, that many professors on campus still thumb their noses at online-based courses and view them as something only lowly regarded, for-profit institutions put out for public consumption.

“Many of these online universities are offering an inferior product,” says Suri. “I’ve looked at some of them, and they’re crap. So why are some of these places thriving? It’s because they’re delivering a product people want. So I think it’s time that real institutions with quality products get into delivering more distance education.”

Everything in Suri’s eight-week, three-credit summer course — “American Foreign Policy: A History of U.S. Grand Strategy From 1901 to the Present” — is online. The class website includes a syllabus, which spells out course details and links to the online journal and newspaper articles that are required reading. The site also hosts short video lead-ins to preview each of the three, hour-long, audio-recorded Suri lectures students listen to each week. Those in the class – which include 100 typical undergraduate and 30 graduate-level students, most of whom have ties to the military – can download the lectures onto an MP3 player or other recording device to listen to at any time, anywhere. Or they can sit at their computer and listen to the hour-long talk, which includes additional information via PowerPoint slides. There are online discussion sessions and online office hours, with one main written assignment, a midterm and a final exam.

“The combination of a rigorous military schedule and improvements in modern technology made the distance class ideal for me,” Kimberly Jones, a 25-year-old Army captain who took the course to learn more about U.S. foreign policy, says in an e-mail interview. “I was able to use my phone to download all the lectures, so when I found that I had time and opportunity I listened to the lectures and took notes. Due to my commitments to work, church and continuous house guests (we live in Hawaii), the distance learning allowed me to listen to lectures, conduct readings and post discussions with flexibility and thoroughness.”

Jon Pevehouse, a political science professor, is teaching a similar set of students this summer in an online-only course titled, “Problems in American Foreign Policy (Poli Sci 359).” He agrees that the flexibility distance education courses offer students is the biggest positive, but notes there are some drawbacks.

“It does cut off some flexibility on my end,” he says. “Last (month), with the WikiLeaks incident (where the website leaked tens of thousands of classified military documents), I would have loved to have spent the next day’s lecture digging into that. But a lot of these things have to be recorded two and three weeks in advance, so it does cut off some pedagogical flexibility.”

Jesse Pruett, a 39-year-old Army reservist living in Alexandria, Va., who is taking Suri’s course, also feels some loss: “Although there was some give and take in the online discussion forum, I did miss the exchanges, debates and interactions that seem to be a big part of traditional brick-and-mortar classroom settings.”

In the end, however, most agreed these were relatively minor drawbacks for the opportunity to take a course from a highly regarded professor at a name-brand university.

“A key benefit is the flexibility and the lack of an attendance requirement,” says Pruett, who has a newborn at home and is pursuing a master’s in international relations. “Obviously, living in the D.C. area, I would not have been able to take the course in a traditional format. I also traveled during the course, coincidentally to Fort McCoy, Wis., for a couple of weeks of military training and to California for civilian purposes. It was difficult, but the online format meant it was still possible to maintain the workload, something that would have been impossible with a conventional route.”

Basic idea is nothing new

Although the basic idea of distance education is nothing new — UW-Madison professors in the agriculture department were sending informational pamphlets to farmers across the state in the late 19th century — upgrades in computer and online technology in recent years have led to an explosion in this form of teaching and learning.

According to a report from the Sloan Consortium titled “Learning on Demand: Online Education in the United States, 2009,” some 4.6 million students were taking at least one online course during the 2008 fall semester — a whopping 17 percent jump over the previous year. That hike far exceeds the 1.2 percent growth during that time in the overall higher education student population, with more than one-in-four college students now taking at least one online course.

And there is no indication this trend will slow anytime soon.

In June, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels established WGU Indiana, a partnership between the state and Western Governors University aimed at expanding access to higher education for those in the Hoosier state. Under the partnership, this online university will technically remain a private school, but Indiana residents will be able to use state scholarships to pay for tuition there. Just last week, a committee of education and business leaders in Texas recommended that students there complete at least 10 percent of their coursework toward a degree outside the classroom through options such as online courses.

At UW-Madison, 152 “distance education” courses — which the university classifies as those “taught primarily by means of interactive video, recorded electronic media or the internet” – were offered in 1999-00. By 2008-09, the most recent year for which figures are available, that number more than doubled to 365.

Despite that jump, just 2.5 percent of all student credit hours at UW-Madison in 2008-09 were through distance education courses according to the school’s Data Digest.

“We’re having ongoing discussions about how do we find this sweet spot, so to speak, between making sure students get the whole Wisconsin experience as a resident student on campus — that includes research opportunities and service learning and all the high-impact, traditional practices — with the latest technologies,” says Aaron Brower, UW-Madison’s vice provost for teaching and learning. “It’s a very deliberate discussion about how can we best use technology in our teaching.”

Conference in Madison

Madison was the center of the distance education universe last week as 1,000 people from across the country took part in the 26th annual Conference on Distance Teaching & Learning, a three-day event at the Monona Terrace Convention Center.

Jane Terpstra, the conference’s director and an outreach specialist with UW-Madison’s division of continuing studies, says there are numerous valid reasons for a college to consider adding more distance education options. A sometimes overlooked advantage, notes Terpstra, is that it gives students an important leg up in experiencing different ways of learning and communicating.

“Computer learning and communication is so important these days,” says Terpstra, who also teaches courses in UW-Madison’s two distance education certificate programs. “It’s important to become comfortable with new technologies and to learn how to communicate even if you aren’t face-to-face with someone.”

Another reason for adding online offerings is if there is a backlog of students attempting to get into courses that are a prerequisite to numerous higher-level classes. Most online courses can be taken at any time of the day, so they don’t interfere with other classes that meet on specific days at specific times. Offering these high-demand courses online can then help alleviate bottlenecks that keep students from graduating in a timely fashion.

Adding distance education courses can also make sense for schools trying to reach students from a large geographic region. Perhaps these students don’t have time to drive all the way to campus, but are willing to log on at home to take a class.

“Accessibility, to me, is the biggest issue for looking at offering more online courses,” says Suri. “We can not assume anymore that all the people who need to learn in our society want, or can afford, to show up on campus. Especially in the summer. This way, if you have to leave campus and work in Milwaukee or help out on the family farm, you can still get some credits taken care of and graduate earlier.”

And the faster students get through school, the more slots that open up for new students. This could help alleviate some of the political pressure there always is to allow more students into UW-Madison.

“One problem we’re trying to crack is it would be nice to have more students, but we don’t have enough dorms and classrooms,” says Kathy Christoph, the director of academic technology in UW-Madison’s Division of Information Technology. “So I’d love for people to think hard about, ‘How can technology help with that problem?’ Then measure whether we’re successful by seeing if we are able to teach more students successfully without having to build more dorms and classrooms. But there is definitely an art to designing online courses where the students really have a good learning experience, so that won’t be easy.”

Wedemeyer led the way

Charles Wedemeyer, a former professor of education at UW-Madison, is considered one of the fathers of modern distance education, says Bill Tishler, a media specialist with the university’s Division of Continuing Studies.

In the late 1930s, Wedemeyer expanded his reach to those off campus by using the university’s radio station to broadcast English lectures. After serving in the Navy in World War II, he worked as director of UW-Madison’s correspondence study department from 1954-64, where he devoted his energy to nontraditional education research. These studies are recognized as the foundation for distance education practices, and Wedemeyer became an independent study and continuing education consultant to a dozen foreign countries — including Great Britain, where he was a chief consultant to the Open University, the world’s first successful distance teaching institution which opened in 1971.

Tishler says UW-Madison started offering statewide distance learning programs on television in 1959, and that continued through the early 1990s, before the Internet came along and started to quickly change the game.

“This university has really been a pioneer in distance education,” says Tishler, a proponent of expanding distance education options on campus, and who produces the classes taught by Suri and Pevehouse. “But I’m not sure we’ve ever really embraced our own pioneering work. As a research institution, I guess we’re doing well. But as a teaching university, we don’t always practice what we preach.”

Unlike UW-Madison, the University of Wisconsin System as a whole is making a concerted effort to expand its distance education offerings, and today features a website which serves as a gateway to the roughly 1,200 courses across the system that require no campus visits to complete.

UW-Madison, which became one of the first universities to offer a Certificate of Professional Development in Distance Education back in 1993, today features a range of graduate and professional development programs in engineering, business, education, pharmacy and nursing, to name only a few, that are distance education based.

For now, however, there is little pressure to significantly expand distance education offerings for undergraduates at a state flagship institution. UW-Madison, like its peers, already is at capacity and turns away thousands of applicants each year because most young students straight out of high school still want that on-campus “college experience.” They look forward to moving away from mom and dad, to the face-to-face interactions with professors and other young people, and to attending college football games.

Conversely, universities which don’t continually reassess their distance learning options could quickly find themselves behind the curve.

“I really think these online-only classes are going to mushroom,” says Suri. “Not only because more and more of us (at UW-Madison) are trying it, but because students are demanding it.”

Geological surveys conducted recently in Afghanistan show that the impoverished country has enormous potential mineral wealth. Investigators sent to the region by the U.S. Defense Department estimate that as much as $1 trillion worth of copper, cobalt, gold, and lithium exist under the ground. The New York Times reported that one Pentagon document predicted Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a crucial material for computer batteries. Older Soviet geological surveys, apparently hidden from the Taliban by Afghan officials in the past, confirm these findings.

Afghanistan’s new mineral wealth is a potential blessing or a potential curse. The uses of this desperately needed capital will be determined by the structures of governance that are constructed for the country in the next months and years. This is a topic that numerous scholars have investigated in depth, and there are a series of insights that are very valuable moving forward.

First, scholars of the so-called “resource course” have shown that vast quantities of concentrated raw material wealth are, quite often, debilitating for governing structures. Powerful individuals and families hoard the raw materials for their personal uses and they underinvest in institutions and processes that would spread the wealth to others. The owners of the wealth become “renters” and they stand in the way of economic and political development that would democratize society and diffuse their concentrated wealth for broad social purposes. This is the story of almost all the oil-rich countries (especially Saudi Arabia), dominated by autocratic billionaire families, amidst poverty and underdevelopment.

Second, scholars have shown a parallel dynamic between raw material “renters” and foreign aid “renters.” Those who receive large quantities of foreign aid also have a tendency to hoard and under-invest in their society at large. Access to foreign aid becomes a source of personal capital and sustained political authority. Families, like the Karzai family in Afghanistan, use aid money to debilitate reidstributive and democratic institutions.

Third, amidst this discouraging evidence scholars have found a positive alternative. Raw material wealth can, in fact, contribute to broad social and political development if it is immediately integrated into representative and redistributive governing institutions. New institutions, and new mechanisms for policing those institutions in the public interest, must be constructed simultaneously with the acquisition of raw material wealth. The institutions cannot wait. Political management and rigorous public accountability must accompany the wealth. In this sense, democracy and development do indeed go hand-in-hand. Norway, with its vast discovery of oil reserves in the 1950s and 1960s, is the model. Canada and the United States are also models, at least in part.

How can we use the new raw material wealth of Afghanistan to follow the path of Norway, and not Saudi Arabia:

1. The international community, led by NATO and the United Nations, must articulate a set of broad principles for the good governance and productive uses of Afghanistan’s new mineral wealth. These principles should be made into an international covenant, obligating all foreign actors to follow them.

2. The international covenant should be used to negotiate procedures for managing raw material extraction and distribution with local Afghan actors. Local tribal leaders, not just the Karzai family, must see an incentive for good governance. They must develop trust with international actors as investors and policemen encouraging this process.

3. The Afghan public throughout the country, particularly poor farmers, must be mobilized to claim this raw material wealth for their own development. They should know the capital exists, they should recognize its potential, and they should be mobilized to demand its uses for broad social purposes. This is the only way to convince farmers to stop growing poppy for their livelihood, and invest in better lives through legitimate industry and agriculture. A mobilized Afghan public, with voice through domestic and international institutions, is the best source of accountability for raw material wealth. Norway had a strong public voice in these decisions when the country discovered oil; Saudi Arabia did not.

These are only some initial steps. They will not solve all problems, but they will begin a productive process. The discovery of Afghan mineral wealth raises great potential. The international community and the Afghan people must now begin the hard work of turning potential to broad benefit through good governance. The new mineral wealth could have its most enduring effect in spurring the social and political investment that Afghanistan has lacked for so long.

This blog post initially appeared at http://globalbrief.ca

The last two weeks have proven that foreign aid is a potent political symbol. Ships carrying food and other supplies to Palestinians in Hamas-controlled Gaza have become more of a problem for Israel than any recent Palestinian military force. The aid ships appear benevolent, they carry human goods and international do-gooders. Israel`s efforts to survey cargo, as part of its military blockade of Gaza, appear heavy-handed. Attacks on Israeli soldiers doing this surveillance work look innocuous, or even legitimate. Israeli retaliation seems terribly out of proportion, at least at first glance.

Visiting Europe, I have watched citizens and politicians of all stripes re-tell this same story. The Israelis are the brutal Goliath, the aid workers are the idealistic humanitarians victimized by Jewish fanaticism. European newspapers and television shows convey that same simplistic message. That is what so many reasonable and intelligent people believe. It is not accurate, but that does not matter. Israel`s efforts to isolate Hamas, deter rocket attacks, and interdict military materials flowing into Gaza – all acts with some claim to legitimacy – have, in fact, isolated Israel more than ever before. To make matters worse, Israel must now oppose an international investigation of recent events for fear of biased reporting by any panel of “experts” assembled from the United Nations, the European Union, or another international body.

It is time for Israeli leaders to stop arguing about the reasons and the legitimacy of their actions. No one is listening any more. Right and wrong do not matter in such a conflict-infested context. Instead of defiance, belligerence, and isolation, Israel would be best served if it called the bluffs of its critics. Give the critics some of what they want: Show that Israel will make deals. Seize the peace agenda for Israel, not its enemies.

What does this mean in practice:

1. Israel should lift its blockade and allow open trade with Gaza. Call upon international observers from the UN and the EU to monitor against weapons shipments. Make it clear that Israel will react strongly if violence from Gaza increases.

2. Israel should recognize Hamas as the most legitimate and popular party representing the Palestinian people. Israel should also offer to talk with Hamas. Why not? Is Hamas worse than the PLO was in the years before Camp David? Give Hamas and its international advocates a reason to support peace, and hold them accountable if they do not reciprocate. That will put the onus on Hamas for a change.

3. Stop the new settlements. Israel could make a strong gesture of goodwill if it ceased all new settlement construction in occupied territories. To begin with, these settlements are counter-productive for Israeli security. They create forward positions that are difficult to defend. They also fund the most extreme, hateful, and unrepresentative elements of Israeli society. Stopping the settlements would serve Israel´s national interests, and it would show a commitment to live with its neighbors. It would also generate strong international pressure for Hamas and its international supporters to reciprocate with a significant peace gesture.

The tragic events and hyperbolic media coverage of the last few weeks have turned the world against Israel in ways that threaten the Jewish state more than any single enemy. Israel must reverse this tide of world opinion if it is going to survive. Israel needs to seize the high ground, from a position of strength that will not last much longer, and turn tragedy to opportunity. That is the true test of patriotism and statesmanship. That is the tradition of Israel, from Chaim Weizmann to Yitzhak Rabin.

It is also the tradition of the United States. As Israel`s closest friend, the United States must encourage its ally to take the diplomatic high ground and avoid irreparable descent into depths of international resentment and hostility. If Washington does not help Jerusalem to shift direction, American public support for Israel might also be in jeopardy. No one wants to defend commandoes enforcing a blockade against an occupied people. Again, this is not a question of right or wrong. This is a question of international perception, and perceptions make reality, especially in the Middle East.

This post originally appeared on http://globalbrief.ca

The tensions around the Korean peninsula have escalated yet again, following the release of evidence that Pyongyang ordered the March torpedo attack on a South Korean ship. In recent days, the two Koreas have cut off most relations with one another, and the North has unleashed a new series of threats. The United States has voiced strong support for its South Korean ally, and the United Nations Security Council will discuss a new resolution on sanctions against Pyongyang.

This is serious stuff. It appears that North Korean leader Kim Jong-il is using his recent belligerence to build internal support for a transition in power to his youngest, and largely unknown, son. For the conservative South Korean government and the United States, a direct and unprovoked attack on a sovereign state´s naval forces, operating in international waters, demands retaliation. The North Koreans and other observers must not think they can attack the ships of other states at their whim. They also must not believe that a small nuclear capability offers protection against reprisals. Otherwise, the incentives for more attacks and more nuclear proliferation, in East Asia and other parts of the world, will only increase.

The U.S. strategy toward North Korea, from the second term of the Bush presidency through the first two Obama years, has focused on containing Pyongyang through close cooperation with regional allies, awaiting the regime´s internal collapse. This still appears wise, but also insufficient. Recent aggression reinforces the long-standing fear that Kim Jong-il is willing to immolate the entire region for the sake of prolonging his regime, or at least making its self-destruction globally devastating. Kim will not follow the path of Erich Honecker and the other East German leaders who peacefully accepted the post-communist transformation of their government in 1989.

So what else should the United States and its allies do? There are no good options, but that observation does not justify strategic inertia. Here are 3 ideas the United States should consider for a new strategy against North Korea, short of war:

1. Increase forced information penetration of North Korean society. The South Koreans recently set up new loudspeakers near the border. We could also initiate aerial leaflet drops, new radio broadcasts, and other efforts to undermine Kim Jong-il´s totalitarian control of information in his society. Even if these actions show limited results, they will raise the costs of the regime´s recent aggression for its leader. If Kim wants to remain unchallenged at home, he must limit his belligerence abroad. Otherwise, we will use our technology and other means to bring our message into his society.

2. Cut off energy supplies. North Korea is dependent on energy imports, mostly from China, to fuel its military machine. Its citizens live energy-starved lives so that the military can threaten its neighbors. Its nuclear technology supports destructive weapons rather than basic societal needs. If we want to halt the continued functioning of the North Korean military, embargoeing energy imports is a fast and easy path to that outcome. The North Koreans will surely threaten a military reprisal, but we can respond with the offer for renewed energy imports after evidence of North Korean non-belligerence. This approach does risk a North Korean decision for war, but that might be an unavoidable risk under present circumstances. An energy embargo can have real effects on North Korea and force a possible change in its policies, if the U.S. is firm and builds support for this approach in China, South Korea, and Japan. If all of these states do not immediately agree, even the threat of an energy embargo might inspire a rethinking in North Korea.

3. As much as we might not like it, the time may have come for strategic military strikes against North Korea´s nuclear facilities. We cannot allow a regime that has attacked its neighbor´s navy to follow with threats of similar unprovoked nuclear attacks. We cannot allow a regime with this record of aggression to continue loose talk of launching nuclear missiles. If this continues, Japan and South Korea will surely feel more internal pressure to develop their own nuclear capabilities, setting off a greater arms race in the region and around the world. Nothing could have worse implications for U.S. non-proliferation efforts. The North Koreans and other observers (especially in Iran) must know that their nuclear efforts will become military targets if they are coupled with aggressive moves against their neighbors. This approach might induce a North Korean act of war, but that again might be a risk worth taking. Otherwise, we have set a precedent for accepting aggression and nuclear proliferation in East Asia and other regions. The future war that is likely in this scenario is worse than anything that would come from military strikes on nascent nuclear belligerents today.

As I said earlier, none of these are good options. The present course of containment, however, appears worse as it allows North Korea to attack its enemies at whim, pay few costs, and procure concessions that prolong the regime and its threatening behavior. To break out of this vicious cycle, the U.S. and its allies should consider some difficult alternatives. Effective strategy requires exactly this kind of thinking, staring into the abyss and contemplating necessary sacrifices and lesser evils.

This blog post originally appeared at www.globalbrief.ca

As I look around the world, I see a series of challenges that require an extraordinary combination of political skill and scholarly insight. Take the debt woes in Greece, Portugal, and perhaps Spain. These are countries that are living beyond their means. How can we move them, and the European Union as a whole, to recalibrate their societies to maintain social-market humanism in affordable and sustainable ways? To even begin to answer this question, one needs access to deep research on economy, sociology, and history. One also needs the political instincts of a Bismarck, a Metternich, or a Talleyrand to sell a viable new solution across an anxious European landscape.

Similar things could be said about nuclear proliferation and environmental degradation. To get a handle on both issues and understand root problems, one requires deep knowledge of physics, biology, political science, and game theory. Political negotiations surrounding arms control and climate change are tortuous, complex, and unpredictable. Here again, the successful strategist will need intellectual insight and political prudence.

In theory, modern bureaucracies are designed to bring all of these specializations and skills together. In practice, they do nothing of the sort. Every large bureauracy that I have studied (from the EU and the United States to modern corporations and world-class universities) produces fragmentation, specialization, and cross-area rivalry. In particular, the knowledge producers are rarely connected to the policy actors. The people who research understand very little about how big policy decisions are made. The people who make policy decisions understand very little about the research behind their decisions. Think, for example, of the paltry interchange between those who set education policy and those who actually educate in our societies. Or, even more startling, look at the gap between those who make war and those who actually fight war.

The time has come to reinvent bureauracy and the organization of knowledge for policy purposes. Here are three hypotheses to ponder:

1. We need to create more cross-field literacy and less specialization in our best educated young people. The most effective leaders need to know how to ask the right questions, and whom to ask.

2. We need more small institutions, not fewer big institutions. Size is often a disadvantage. It creates more complex lines of communication, more fragmentation, more separation. Cooperation requires sustained conversation. That occurs best in small communities.

3. We need to stop our search for simple answers with quick solutions. Nothing worth doing is accomplished in a short time frame. We need more patience. We need more willingness to invest in the long-term. We need to make more short-term sacrifices in the present for the future.

Our contemporary challenges are great, but so are the collective capabilities of the most advanced societies. The problem is not brains or money or strength. The problem is organization. The problem is that we are not doing enough to bring knowledge into the service of policy. Producers of knowledge and makers of policy must devise new ways to work together.

This post originally appeared on http://globalbrief.ca