Tuesday, January 8, 2013

SAIS as a springboard to publication

How do SAIS students, eager to leave their mark on the world, burnish their credentials outside the classroom?

Many use their studies as a bridge to the policy-making world. Consider Amar Causevic, who has just published a policy paper while still a student at SAIS.

Amar studied at SAIS Bologna in 2011-12 before moving to DC for the second and final year towards his MA.

Amar Causevic
Before enrolling in SAIS, Amar, who was born in Addis Ababa and is a citizen of Bosnia & Herzegovina, earned a master's in international relations at Boston University. He had also worked as a researcher in his home country.

Below, Amar tells us how he used two courses he took while in Bologna as springboards for work at a think tank in Germany, which in turn has led to the publication of a paper on China's rising demand for oil.

Amar worked for the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt after his studies in Bologna, and in December the Institute published his paper, "A Thirsty Dragon: Rising Chinese crude oil demand and prospects for multilateral energy security cooperation".

In the 45-page paper, Amar concludes that "multilateral cooperation is the only feasible strategy for preventing dangerous confrontation" between China on the one hand and the United States, Japan, the European Union and India on the other.

To read Amar's paper, click here.

Here is Amar's own explanation of how he ended up publishing the paper:

Like many of my classmates, I have been inspired by my time at SAIS. The school gives students an opportunity to tackle crucial issues relating to international development, the global economy and geopolitics.

My publication stemmed from two classes I took at SAIS Bologna -- Politics and Economics of International Energy, and International Security Cooperation. Thanks to Prof. Manfred Hafner, I became familiar with the economics and politics of global energy trends, especially China's rising demand for petroleum.

In Prof. Harald Müller’s class, I wrote a paper concentrating on multilateral energy cooperation as an alternative to the mainstream pessimistic outlook that foresees armed conflict over petroleum supplies. Under Dr. Müller’s supervision, I wrote a first draft of the paper in the Spring Semester of 2012.

After the academic year ended, I worked as a non-resident visiting fellow at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt in the department of Policies for Security Governance of States. From June until October 2012, together with Dr. Müller and several of his colleagues, I revised and improved the draft before it was published in December 2012.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Wonderful post! SAIS students are indeed high quality cadre!

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