Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The Supreme Court’s 2003 affirmative action decisions contained an interesting development that on the surface had little to do with minority rights in higher education. Among the friend-of-the-Court briefs that the Supreme Court reviewed was one filed by two dozen current and former high-ranking military officials. The “Becton brief” (so named after its lead amicus, Lt. Gen. Julius Becton) urged the Court to safeguard the service academies’ ability to engage in affirmative action, on the grounds that the practice enabled the creation and preservation of an integrated officer corps. The Court was not only persuaded by this argument, but also regarded it as crucial evidence supporting its reaffirmance of race-conscious admissions, and quoted from the Becton brief at length in Grutter v. Bollinger.

The Court’s reliance on – and implicit trust in – the military’s guidance is not at all surprising. Indeed, the Court has a long history of deferring to military judgment. While other litigants are often required to submit proof of whatever assertions they are making before the Court, the Justices invariably accept arguments put forth by the military without subjecting them to constitutional scrutiny. Non-military claimants typically have to persuade the Court that their evaluation of what is proper in their particular field is consistent with constitutional imperatives. By contrast, once the military informs the Court of what is proper vis-à-vis the armed forces, the Court rarely determines that this reasoned evaluation violates the Constitution. While all litigants are granted presumptions of subject-matter expertise, only the military’s subject-matter expertise is habitually shielded from rigorous constitutional evaluation.

This paper will track this tradition of Supreme Court deference to the military. It will be a systematic review of the relevant precedents, one which will detail the circumstances in which the military has typically been brought before the Court (or voluntarily appeared as amicus), the military’s “success rate” in persuading the Court, and the philosophical patterns that emerge from the various decisions.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper explores the underlying assumptions, leadership, aims and activities of the Princeton Project on National Security, a network of scholars and past and current public officials that has been working to produce an alternative (non-Bush doctrinal) national security strategy for the United States. The paper locates the major funding sources behind the Project in two major philanthropic foundations ? the German Marshall Fund of the US and the Ford Foundation ? both of which have long supported and fostered foreign and security policy research in universities, policy research institutes, and think tanks. The Project is large-scale, well funded, linked with scores of leading American scholars such as Anne-Marie Slaughter, G. John Ikenberry and Joseph Nye, as well as former state officials such as Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, Zbigniew Brzinski, James Woolsey, and James A. Baker III. Its study groups have investigated and reported upon all aspects of US national security ? including threat-assessment, democracy-promotion, and anti-Americanism. Its reports have been submitted to Condoleeza Rice.From a cursory examination of a sample of their voluminous documents and reports, it is clear that the PPNS, broadly-speaking, adheres a belief in American primacy and the necessities of American global leadership, robustly pursuing US core interests, aggressively conducting the war on terror and constructing alliances to that end, better long-term planning for nation-building and war-making, and pursuing public diplomacy strategies to convince ?anti-Americans? to be neutral or ?pro-US? where possible, without hindering the pursuit of non-negotiable US core interests. The ?golden age? of US foreign policy for the PPNS was 1945-52, the age of Truman during which the Cold War mindset was firmly established and the apparatus of American expansionism constructed. How is the Princeton Project to be evaluated? Are their ideas and ?alternative? national security strategy fundamentally different to that promulgated by President George W. Bush? If so, what are the main differences? Have the Project?s scholars become ?state intellectuals?? Are they in danger of becoming instruments of US state power? Or are they the ?only viable alternative? to a neo-conservative militarism that animates existing policy? In Gramscian terms, the PPNS appears to have become part of the US hegemonic project, albeit one that offers some criticisms and alternatives to preventive war and unilateralism. The Project appears to be a manifestation of the relative resurgence of realist liberal-internationalism, and of the elements of the US foreign policy establishment that are its main sponsors, in the wake of intense criticism ? from all quarters - of Bush?s illegal war on Iraq.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Some historians have noted that the modern, mainstream aversion to fat had become increasingly salient by the 1880s. The beginnings of America’s obsession with combating corpulence--whether for health or aesthetic purposes--certainly owed in part to the machinations of advertisers, the fashion industry, life insurance companies, pharmaceutical interests, and food manufacturers. But an account of how Americans went from aspiring to leanness rather than corpulence is incomplete without an examination into the function of nutrition advocates—physicians, chemists, and un-credentialed, but self-styled experts--in the creation of norms about food consumption and body size.

This paper traces the development and popularization of the calorie from the advent of technological innovations that measured the calorie value of foodstuffs and people’s caloric needs to the ways in which knowledge about the nexus between calories, fat, and weight gain percolated from scientific and medical authorities to the general public. I argue that the calorie facilitated a new way of disciplining the body and became the center of a corporeal regulation in which characterizations of the calorie as a fail-proof product of modern science reinforced the notion that one’s body size was determined by individual behavior rather than ascribable to other considerations beyond one’s control. Moreover, the calorie, a hitherto invisible dimension of food, resulted in a reconstitution of food as calories and body fat and contributed to dieters’ changing perceptions of their entitlement to food, especially to calorie-dense aliments.

Lulu Hunt Peters (1873-1930), a syndicated medical advice newspaper columnist and the author of the nation’s first best-selling diet book, Diet and Health, with Key to the Calories (1918), was indispensable to the dissemination of popular knowledge about the calorie. To Peters and her devotees, a knowledge of calories combined with the practice of calorie-counting seemed to offer the most precise, effective means of vanquishing corporeal bulge in a putatively modern and scientific early-twentieth century America. Dieters who previously felt powerless to change their bodies because they were uncertain of the relationship between food consumption and body size were imbued with a newfound sense of control over their corporeal selves. But recording every calorie consumed also meant that if calorie-counters failed to achieve desired weight loss, they could only fault themselves for lacking the willpower to abide by their calorie restriction programs.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In light of contemporary anti-immigrant rhetoric highlighting past immigrants as model groups assimilating quickly and earnestly into American culture, this study analyzes a case of identity politics from the past showing the shifting, unstable nature of national/racial/ethnic identities in contrast to the myth of culturally unified past.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The main aim of this paper is to discuss the extent to which it can be argued that, so far as the British Foreign Office and diplomatic service were concerned, there was anything as coherent as a ‘new diplomacy’. Did the concept only exist on a high poli