And So It Begins

Hi there everybody

Well, school is now getting back into gear. Classes are getting to the point where they actually occasionally want us to hand stuff in and all that. But such is life.

So not much has been going on here other than classes. I met with a couple professors last week and convinced one to accept me as a thesis advisee (the other also agreed, but said that he did not feel qualified to advise the topic since he has not background in peace theory, only development economics). I do not have a definite question yet, though there is a larger issue that has been settled on, which is the "Role of Agriculture (or insert more specific/ another word relating to stuff in rural area) in Post-Conflict Peacebuilding". Dr Uvin's first response when I proposed it was "that is an absolutely fabulous PhD dissertation. Unfortunately you are writing a MALD" The reason this is the case being that there is no literature addressing this topic and it seems to be an up-and-coming field of study. There is currently a project being run out of UN University on this topic, which is going to lead to a book being published entitled "Agriculture for Peace". But it is not much use to me.

So I need to narrow the question and make it a little more manageable for a MALD (Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy) thesis.

On a much more fun note, I had dinner with Molly's aunt and uncle last night. They have a new 11 week old puppy named Reuben (I think he is named after the sandwich, but Molly disagrees, and we failed to ask last night), part black lab and part "other". Unfortunately I left my camera at Molly's about a month ago, so there are no pictures at the moment. But he is very very cute.

So that just about wraps it up. I officially received my first auto-generated comment the other day on the previous post. So if you look at it, don't click on the link. It is blog spam.

So cheers all and I will be in touch.