So last week was a hell of a week - not that it was all that extraordinary in terms of weeks of personal events in my life. The week I spent on White Beach on Boracay in the Philippines was more sublime. My fraternity initiation week was more demanding (and absurd). I had several weeks in Paris that were certainly more spellbinding, and I'm sure that any number of weeks during my parents' divorce were more confusing. No, what makes this past week unusual was the high number of encounters I had with critical global issues. As a master's student of international affairs in Washington, DC, I'm sure this won't be the last one of these I'll have.

On Tuesday, I attended a free screening of Al Gore's film, "An Inconvenient Truth" for American University students, which I hadn't yet seen (I know I'm late in the game on this one, but give me a break; my first time setting foot on U.S. soil in 2006 came late July). I was impressed with Gore's personal conviction, knowledge, and delivery of the material he presents in his neverending, worldwide, and highly-paid speech circuit slideshow on the looming ecological crisis facing homo sapiens on planet Earth. It's clearly evident that Gore is using the facts to advance a personal agenda. But good on 'im. It would be nice if we could see all of our politicians with the candor and unabashed passion that Gore displays for his cause, and surely our opinions of them would change severely for the worst in too many cases if that were so. Furthermore, in the end, I'm convinced Gore's right: containing global warming is a moral issue, and the implications for our personal responsibility as citizens of the planet are undeniable.

On Wednesday, I attended the inauguration of SAIS's U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins. All of the current living former ambassadors to S. Korea were in attendence as speakers on a guest panel, and I made my first appearance as an audience member on C-SPAN. What were more remarkable than this, though, were keynote speaker Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill's hard-edged assertions on North Korea. He announced that, among other things, North Korea "can have a future or it can have [nuclear] weapons. It cannot have both." In the audience, I was impressed with Secretary Hill's resolute words, particularly as they marked a stark contrast from his lighthearted nature at the outset of his speech. The Washington Post called it "the toughest response yet [to N. Korea] from the Bush administration, coming two days after Pyongyang announced plans to conduct its first nuclear test." However, I didn't appreciate the weight that Hill's words would carry until they ran through the news cycle, whereupon I quickly learned a basic DC lesson : if an event is free and open to the public, show up. Policy is made everyday at these kind of events in Washington, and you never know when you'll witness something significant (and what's more, they're usually catered). Anyhow, as a nuclear North Korea now appears to be a reality, Hill's message keeps coming back to me as I wonder how far such a hardline U.S. position can hold, or if it ever could.

Later on Wednesday evening, one of my class discussions centered on of the historical divergences in Islamic thought, the shari'a law tradition, and international conceptions of human rights. More progressive literature on the concept of an "Islamic State" suggests that the relationship drawn by more conservative and fundamentalist Muslim leaders between shari'a, the Quran, and the concept of Islamic government is tenuously substantiated at best. Bassam Tibi, among other Muslim authors, has demonstrated capably that the connection between politics and Islam is primarily rooted in historical context, not scripture. The assertion that the Quran prescribes for the creation of an Islamic system of governance is misleading. The tradition for shari'a, Tibi contends, stems from the period following Mohammed's provincial governance of Medina, but not specifically from the core revelations of the prophet while in Mecca. He writes, "In fact, shari'a is a post-Quranic construction, initiated basically to regulate, as a kind of civil law dealing with affairs of inheritance, marriage, and the like...Today, fundamentalists invent the tradition of shari'a, as an Islamic consititution of the state."

This is troubling, essentially, because radicals' promotion of an Islamic state allegedly based on shari'a allows them to marginalize international conceptions of human rights and further legitimize militant diametric opposition to non-Islamic systems of governance and law. To compound this issue, the fundamentalist position is actually continuing to gain support not only in the Middle East, where the U.S.-Iraq debacle continues to polarize Muslims against the West, but also in Southeast Asia, home to the world's most populous Muslim nation, Indonesia. I should clarify, the expansion of Islam is not the concern here, but rather the widespread propagation of a branch of any religion that seeks to divide cultures and promote violence, be it Islamic, Christian, or of any other faith. Moreover, it seems to me that the creation of a state along such lines should be disconcerting to anyone.

To summarize, I felt rather rudely awakened by this trifecta; the continuing spriral toward a planetary ecological crisis, the ever-escalating tensions over the North Korean nuclear standoff, and the proliferation of radical religious fundamentalism all pose major obstacles toward human progress and growth and taken in sum seem almost insurmountable. Yet, I'm still optimistic, probably because my goals demand that I be; if I didn't see the potential for change, I wouldn't be a student of international affairs. If major changes can be made soon in carbon emission standards and toward alternative fuel sources, perhaps we can stave off irregular climate change. If North Korea can be engaged carefully instead of provoked, then perhaps the Korean peninsula can be denuclearized (again). And if the U.S. and others can begin to retract their negative and contradictory presence in the Middle East and begin pursuing a more positive dialogue with Muslim leaders, stability can be pursued more realistically in the region, giving less ammunition for radicals who offer only disorder and betray the peaceful tenets of Islam. This all, however, depends on a change of leadership in the U.S., a subject about which I'm sure to have plenty more words come November....