Category: Writing

Sorry to go on and on about the thesis, but for some reason it has been dominated my attention recently. It has now taken on the character of being much like those large maps of Europe on which officers push around little tanks with long wooden poles. The tanks are there, the terrain is there, but their positions with respect to one another keep changing. A section on the nature of environmental ‘problems’ is somewhere near the border between the introduction and the first substantive chapter. Other bits have yet to be deployed into the theatre of operations, despite being fairly well constituted in and of themselves. Others are like the fledgling brigades of the new Iraqi army: assembled, in some sense, but far from ready to operate as part of a larger operation.

The draft introduction being submitted tomorrow is best seen as a first attempt to deploy a coherent strategy, with plenty of bits to be filled out later. The central issue is working out a broad way by which to coordinate the operations of disparate units, so as to develop sensible (if not entirely comprehensive) coverage of the terrain in dispute.

[Update: 8:30pm] This evolving draft section from my thesis may also be of use to general readers of this blog: Appendix I: Glossary and Table of Acronyms For those times when you can’t keep remember what was happening when UNECE (part of ECOSOC) negotiated the CLRTAP to deal with POPs (including PCBs).

By Monday, I am meant to have a draft copy of my thesis introduction ready for discussion. The paradoxical thing about the task is that it will almost certainly be necessary to revamp the introduction a great deal, once the three core chapters have been finished. Of course, it is essential to get the direction right. Tidying up the introduction and conclusion is something that can be done during the period between when my supervisor leaves Oxford and when my thesis is due (April 1-22).

Hopefully, a generous soul or two will volunteer to read a few chapters (or even the whole thesis) to check for general comprehensibility and strength of argumentation.

PS. Lots more information, both about the thesis and other coursework, is appearing on the wiki.

Right now, I feel both as though I am on the final stretch of the M.Phil and that I am still less than halfway through the single most important item: the thesis that stalks me down Oxford’s cobbled streets. Now that I have a schedule set, the first order of business is prioritizing the reading that I should do in the remaining time. The second is to get the thing written. I will feel a lot better about the whole process once I have submitted and discussed one draft chapter: at present, I don’t particularly feel as though I know what I am doing. Once I have intuitively accepted that this project is not enormously more difficult than others that I would now brush off, it will come together quickly. Thinking about it as five or six long papers on related themes is one way to make the whole assembly seem less daunting, though it is important for them to be tightly integrated.

Aside from the thesis, all I have left are two papers for international law (both of which can probably be made highly thesis related) and four three-hour exams. Two of those are on the core seminars from last year: history and IR theory. The other two are on the optional papers from this year: the developing world and international law. There is good reason to be concerned about all of them – the two core seminars from first year aren’t exactly sharp in my mind, and the two optional papers cover a lot of material. That said, there is only so much information you can transfer from mind to paper in three hours. Likewise, while you do need to know a good amount of stuff to do well on Oxford exams, the way in which you approach and answer the questions seems to make all the difference between a tolerable grade and a really good one.

Parallel to all of this is the lingering and difficult project of finding something worthwhile to do after this. I have three basic objectives: finding a job that will (a) increase my knowledge and experience, (b) make me at least financially neutral, no longer going deeper into debt, and (c) not make people say: “So you did an M.Phil at Oxford and then you did… that.” This is the sort of project that you would be expect to be easier than finishing the degree itself, but it’s a matter of comparative advantages. With five months until I leave Oxford, the clock is ticking.

PS. New difficulties have arisen, with regards to the submission of the fish paper to the MIT International Review. If three specific things can be dealt with, it should be published within the next few months. If not, I may need to start hunting for yet another journal in which to try and get it printed.