Dear Reader:
We’ve been thrilled — though hardly surprised — to see just how broad and deep Yale’s pool of student scholarship in inter- national studies runs. Each issue, we receive more excellent content than we can hope to publish, and we were particularly gratified to see the enthusiastic response on campus to the inaugural Dean Gooderham Acheson Prize for Outstanding Essays in International Studies.
Still, it’s long been a goal of this publication’s editorial staff to offer the Review’s platform to an even broader community. This issue marks the fulfillment of that effort, and another step in an ongoing project to better serve both the Yale community and the international studies community at large. In this issue, you’ll find top-notch content from Harvard, Stanford, West Point, Dartmouth, and as far afield as Paris’ Institut d’études politiques, more commonly known as Sciences Po. The scholarship included covers topics as diverse as the role of Islam in Chechen separatism; a critique of the notion of the failed state; and a study of Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. Yale is represented in this collection by an essay on the work of the late Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm.
Also included in this issue are several Comments from our editorial staff and an interview with long-time State Department mandarin and Arab-Israeli peace expert Aaron David Miller, currently of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. If these more opinionated pieces catch your eye or spark your interest, please write to us; we’d be happy to publish your response and continue the dialogue.
Because we see our publication as being first and foremost in the service of the Yale community, not all of our future issues will be open to submissions from other campuses. If we have our druthers, we plan to continue the publication schedule we’ve had in place for this latest cycle: an open issue each fall, a Yale exclusive issue each winter, and the annual Acheson Prize issue each spring. As part of the Review’s wider effort to support the conversation on international studies at Yale, we hope you’ll also keep an eye out for a number of YRIS events coming up this year with practitioners in international affairs.
Finally, we’d like to offer thanks: to all of the student-scholars who submitted content to this issue for their interest and enthusiasm; to the Yale International Relations Association for its sup- port of our publication; and to our fabulous designers for another striking and elegant print publication. We immensely enjoyed putting this issue together, and we hope you’ll enjoy reading it.
Sincerely,
The Editors