Re: What inspired

Description: Travel, and the virtues of "aesthetic" research.

Question:  What inspired “The Second World”?

Transcript: This book is actually a couple of things, one is how do you create an excuse to travel for a couple of years and have that entirely paid for and the other thing was that I wanted to do a television program and I wanted to call the second world. I wanted to be a step up from the only planet and step down from like a hard national kind of documentary and kind of give the latest social, political, environmental, cultural kind of feel a middle tears sort of countries that aren’t well covered by travel shows, or that are covered by really superficially like in terms of their food or beaches and I thought that was really necessary and still is necessary. But I wrote it as a TV idea and it did not have legs because I did not have any connections in TV, so eventually I turned into book proposal and that is why this book happened.

Question: What type of research did you do?

Transcript:  It really was a creative process in the sense that there was not the kind of methodology that you get from typical international relations scholarly kind of books. My methodology is I call it in the preface of the book is aesthetic which is just a cop out to say that I did not have like a rigorous strategy. I wanted to blend ideas and kind of academic thinking about a place with and strategy with a just a feel judgments observations, interviews really just a gut perception or what is going on in the place that was my method, that was my so called approach, but one rule was never leave a place, until you are just done, until you really feel like you have a feel for an confident sense what argument is going to be, until you have that don’t leave the country. So some places like Ukraine or Turkey, in Turkey I spent at least a month, and in Egypt I spent over a month. Other countries like Bulgaria, I went for like a day, and so nothing against the Bulgarians, but that was the sort of macro but inside each country I wanted to meet every one. When people say did you just talk to government people, you just talked to academics who knows every one literally. Any one and every one, what happens is you go some where and you start talking to the few key contacts that you have and they say, oh, you need to talk to you my brother, oh, you need to talk to this official, oh, there is a professor at and you just keep on meeting people and at some point you feel like the value added. The marginal utility is gone down and you are ready to go. But you have to go and let things happen. 

Question: Who influenced your work?

Transcript: There are people along the way Kishore is more certainly one of them, he hosted me at Leetonia School for a couple of weeks that I used Singapore as a base from which to explore other key countries in the region and more broadly I would say inspirations and style where people like Robert Caplin, who was a friend and the mentor and he is obviously his writing style and approach to explaining issues is very much to the sort of gridy on the ground spent time, and immersed your self kind of approach the things, I certainly try to do that as well. They don’t write in the first person in the way he does. So there are definitely some big intellectual figures who, whose work I have sympathized with and by reading them, I gotten the confidence through my way. So I think what you find in the end this kind of the synthesis, have a lot of different types. People have read, my book in said, oh, he is just like Freetze Zacario [phonetic] or how he is just like Robert Caplin and he is just like some one else, some one else, some one else. So depending on who you read you wind up seeing certain similarities but in the end obviously it’s me and I am just sort of amalgamation all that.

Question: How do you respond to criticism?

Transcript: I gave a pretty big lecture Princeton at the Wilson school and the first question came from Robert Cohen, who is probably most influential part of scientist the life today and he said, how can you write a book that [inaudible] on this notion a multi-polarity and super powers setting up larger and larger series of influence and yet organize your book by regions and talk about regionalism and regional institutions happening on this micro level as if that also shapes world order as much as super powers do and I said it is really simple because that’s what is happening and so whether fear is like it or not and he did not really have position, he was just asking me and he did point to a paradox, but my point is that life is full of paradoxes, contradictions and so my book is our reality. I will let the theorists figure out what is consistent and what is inconsistent. I am with theorist myself, but I did not write this book for the theoretical audience, because as you say I open my self up to broader audience and so I can get criticized by some academics for those paradoxes, and tensions, but reality contains all those tensions and much more should capturing reality and I am in satisfying any one theory or the other. American foreign policy makers tend to instrumentalize [phonetic] countries and say this is what we want from them, this is what they need to do for us. They don’t begin with the question, who are they, where are they? What do they want, what can we do for them, subjects that they will do things for us. If we were to have that approach in methodology I think that we would have more effective foreign policy, so that is what I want foreign policy makers to take away from this book, because it is not written by an American and for Americans. It is written as a biography or set of biographies of countries to be understood by Americans or Chinese or Europeans and this book could be read equally well by any of them without really a bias towards it being American centric.

Recorded on: 3/3/08