Road Map Through the Thicket

New faculty book explores international collaboration

by Tony Moore

For three days in March 2013, 36 sustainability and security scholars and practitioners from the U.S. and India gathered on campus for a workshop titled The United States-India Relationship in the 21st Century: Challenges for Strategic Leaders; Opportunities for Cross-Sector Collaboration to Promote Sustainable Development.

Hosted by Dickinson and the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute (SSI), the event brought together thought leaders from the world’s two largest democracies. On the agenda was examining how individuals, organizations and nation-states can work together to address strategic and sustainability-related challenges in a global environment of increasingly baroque international relationships and economic, environmental and political uncertainty.

Clearly, the goals were lofty, the issues at hand complex.

“Mapping out who the stakeholders are across borders becomes extremely challenging,” says David Sarcone, associate professor of international business & management and one of the event’s organizers. “And then on top of that to have the focus on problems that are so difficult to get your arms around—it was challenging and really provoked some thinking.”

What should make it easier for interested parties to get their arms around the issues is the book spawned by the workshop, The U.S.-India Relationship: Cross-Sector Collaboration To Promote Sustainable Development.

A collection of reflections on the workshop, transcribed sessions from the workshop and papers and presentations written and created specifically for the workshop, the book is a 500-page road map through the diplomatic and practical thicket of international cross-sector collaboration.

Michael Fratantuono, associate professor of international studies, business and management, another event organizer, will be referencing the book in the senior seminar in international studies, which addresses such big-picture issues as changing perceptions about security in the face of environmental pressures and a new crop of asymmetric threats.

“We now have the possibility of failed states serving as breeding grounds for terrorism and therefore new types of threats,” says Fratantuono, who co-edited the book with Sarcone and John Colwell Jr., former deputy director of academic engagement at the SSI. “Well, how are we going to address them? That gets us right into the collaborative effort of the military, USAID (United States Agency for International Development) and so forth. The awareness is that, with this workshop, we stumbled into an arena where this is all relevant, and so we'll continue to poke at it.” 

The book is available at the SSI Web site, where you can download a PDF version for free or order the paperback.

Learn more

• For more information about the workshop: "Strategic Sustainability"
• Department of International Business & Management
• Department of International Studies
• To download or purchase a paperback copy of the book: SSI Publications

Published October 27, 2014