About a month ago, I was elected as Scribe for my fraternity, ΑΕΠ at George Washington. As such, I took over responsibilities for communicating our events, not only to brothers but also to the university administration, our overarching national organization, and the public at large. Before I was elected, Scribe was seen as a sort of fake job, being limited to filling out mandatory forms and taking the occasional few notes. The real power of the position, as my peers treated it, was in having a voice on the executive board, allowing one to promote their vision of what the fraternity should look like. However, speaking with our assigned consultant from nationals and reading up on training materials he provided, it became increasingly clear that this interpretation was causing quite a few problems for our chapter. Given that my role at the time was Brother at Large, which I had gotten elevated to the Executive Board by reading our constitution, I realized that we could benefit from better workspace and communications infrastructure. Despite having a lot of very competent leaders, I found that they would often exchange hundreds of texts in our executive groupchat debating situations that they didn’t have enough information to make decisions on. Events were planned through long chains of texts, both in groupchats and between officers and event chairs, meaning our meetings often centered around people opening up iMessage and reading things aloud as opposed to operating off an agenda. Furthermore, members of the chapter would often complain that events weren’t being communicated well enough. So, I ran for the role and won. Now it’s time to do the work.
This semester, I took a class called Israeli-Palestinian Peacebuilding (IAFF 3352), which took a dual narrative approach to studying their history. This meant analyzing various historical developments from the perspectives of both Israelis and Palestinians, identifying ‘chosen traumas’ that drive the intractable nature of the conflict. The capstone of the class was intended as two papers analyzing a ‘final status issue’, meaning a key matter that needs to be resolved before peace can be brought about. Options included water sharing policy, territorial disputes, and more. For my analysis, I chose to discuss the split between Hamas and Fatah, synthesizing a comprehensive story of the roots of their schism and addressing its implications for the peace process. (Un)fortunately, the professor was a bit slow with grading, and cancelled the second paper, which was supposed to be more oriented towards analysis using peace studies literature. As some consolation, I have decided to take elements of the paper I did write, expand upon them a bit, and turn it into a blog post.
Earlier this month, I was assigned to participate in a group project for a class I’m taking called “Evolution of Warfare”.
It’s taught by a Captain in the marine corps. The goal of the project: to develop a plan to deploy marines in littoral waters
in order to counter aggression from the fictional “People’s Republic of Azuria”. The goal of our incursion was to deny operational freedom to Azurian forces while asserting freedom of navigation for civilian vessels in surrounding waters. We chose Scylla and Charybdis as the operation’s designation, a homage to the great leviathans blocking Odysseus’ path in the Odyssey.