ZenPundit Roundtable on Globalization and War

Mark Safranski, the ZenPundit, is hosting a three-day symposium on globalization and war at his site. Participants in the roundtable include a number of blogospheric, journalistic, and academic luminaries. Here’s a list of the contributors and their biographies:

Austin Bay

Austin Bay is a writer and newspaper columnist. He has a Phd. in English and Comparative Literature. Dr. Bay is a colonel in the United States Army Reserve.

Bruce Kesler

Bruce Kesler is a businessman and writer. He is a former Marine and served in Viet Nam. Mr. Kesler has been active in American politics for forty years. An early member of Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace, Mr. Kesler has also worked for The Foreign Policy Research Institute and today he writes occasionally for The Augusta Free Press, The Democracy Project and The American Enterprise Online .

Doug Macdonald

Dr. Doug Macdonald is Associate Professor of Political Science at Colgate University and author of Adventures in Chaos: American Intervention for Reform in the Third World and is an expert on American Defense and Terrorism policies, particularly as they relate to Asia. Professor Macdonald has held a number of distinguished positions including Director of the International Relations Program at Colgate University and Senior Research Fellow at The Nobel Institute in Oslo, Norway.

Simon

Simon is the blogger of the well-known blog originating in Hong Kong, Simon’s World. Simon is an Australian national and works for a multinational bank in finance.

Sam Crane

Sam Crane has published a variety of academic works on the topics of Chinese politics and East Asian international relations. His foreign affairs commentary has appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the National Interest. In 1998, Crane’s writing started to shift away from academic topics and toward narratives about his son. In the past several years, such pieces have run in Commonweal Magazine, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Salon.com. Crane received his B.A. in political science from Purchase College, State University of New York, and earned his Ph.D. in political science, with a minor in East Asian languages and literature, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is chair of the Asian Studies department at Williams, and is active in civic affairs.

Chester

Chester, AKA Josh Manchester, is the blogger of the blog The Adventures of Chester. From 2000 to 2004, Manchester was on active duty in the US Marine Corps, deploying to Egypt, Kuwait, and Iraq. A combat engineer officer, he participated in battalion, group, and occasionally Marine Expeditionary Force-level planning for the invasion of Iraq. He also served for a short period as an intelligence officer, finding, sorting, and analyzing various intelligence products. Manchester has a wide familiarity with Marine Corps history and doctrine: division, regimental, and battalion-level operations, combat engineering, command and control, and logistics. He is a graduate of The Basic School and Marine Corps Engineer School, and received a BA with honors from Duke University in Comparative Area Studies, focusing on Japan and Latin America, with minors in Japanese and History. Manchester lived in Japan for a year as an exchange student in high school, and returned there for a semester in college.

R. J. Rummel

RUDOLPH J. RUMMEL, b, 1932, BA and MA from the University of Hawaii (1959, 1961); Ph.D. in Political Science (Northwestern University, 1963); Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Kappa Phi, Omicron Delta Kappa. Taught at Indiana University (1963), Yale (1964-66), University of Hawaii (1966-1995); now Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Hawaii. Received numerous grants from NSF, ARPA, and the United States Peace Research Institute. Frequently nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Received the Susan Strange Award of the International Studies Association for having intellectually most challenged the field in 1999. And received the Lifetime Achievement Award 2003 from the Conflict Processes Section, American Political Science Association. Dr. Rummel has written prolifically. His Democratic Peace theory is a major contribution to political science and foreign policy theory. He blogs at Democratic Peace.

Paul D. Kretkowski

Paul D. Kretkowski consults and writes on a range of topics including soft power, U.S. foreign policy, Middle Eastern politics and information warfare. He blogs at Beacon.

The symposium is underway with segments by Bruce Kesler, Doug MacDonald, and Simon already available.

This is a great opportunity and you can participate by putting your two cents in the comments section.

UPDATE: Submitted to the Beltway Traffic Jam.