Campus organizing

You can find the official JQA Society Event Success Guide here. The official signup sheet is here. Our official logos can be downloaded here (ZIP file), and we have sample social media images here.

The national JQA office and your university’s student activities office should be your primary resources for tips and assistance in getting your group up and running and then ensuring its continued success. However, there are also helpful materials available online that are worth checking out. For example, the WikiBook Effective Student Organization was compiled at Western Washington University in an effort to gather insights on campus organizing and potential challenges from all of the university’s groups. There are also good guides on various aspects of student organizing from groups across the political spectrum, for example, here, here, here, on running effective meetings (here) and on building a good leadership team (here). (Note that many of these groups have a more activist image, while JQA is focused on ideas and on reaching students in every part of the political spectrum, so some of the ideas might not work.)

There’s an excellent guide to organizing a speaker event here. (Make sure to understand and follow all campus policies, especially on flyering, tabling, chalking, and food safety, as you prepare for your event. Your university’s student activities office is the best contact on this.)

Intellectual development

The Society hopes to encourage the study of important foreign policy scholarship by sponsoring reading groups on college campuses. Interested faculty and students should contact the Society’s executive director, John Allen Gay, at john.gay@jqas.org.

The Society’s list of recommended readings can be found here.

The two greatest early articulations of a restraint-oriented vision for American foreign policy were found in George Washington’s famed 1796 Farewell Address, and John Quincy Adams’ 1821 Independence Day address. (That’s the full text; the core of his argument can be found here.) Contemporary scholars have laid out a diversity of visions of a more restrained foreign policy. One of the shorter, more accessible ones, “Restraining Order: For Strategic Modesty,” can be read here.

Some of the more prominent examples of different viewpoints are John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt’s “The Case for Offshore Balancing,” Eugene Gholz, Daryl G. Press, and Harvey Sapolsky’s “Come Home, America” (a critique of which can be found here), Eric A. Nordlinger’s Isolationism Reconfigured (reviews that lay out his arguments can be found here and here), and Barry R. Posen’s book Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy. (A version of the preface of this book can be read in the Boston Review; H-Diplo had an excellent symposium on the book featuring a number of noted academics.) And, on a separate but related issue, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s famous valedictory speech warning against the danger of “unwarranted influence” by the “military-industrial complex” can be found here.

To get views on contemporary foreign policy developments from perspectives that challenge the status quo, some good places to start are the Nation and TomDispatch (from the left) and the American Conservative (from the right). The National Interest, especially its Skeptics blog and the blog by JQA Society Board of Advisors member Paul Pillar, is another good site. The libertarian Cato Institute has a foreign policy podcast, Power Problems, to which you should listen.

To stay up to date on the current discussion, like JQA’s Facebook page or follow us on Twitter – we regularly post interesting contributions to the foreign policy conversation from around the web, and strive to present a mix of perspectives in the articles we select.

Professional development

A good place to start for aspiring to careers in foreign policy are the career guides hosted by Columbia University and the Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs. There is also a lot of good information at EagerlyDC; more general, high-quality work on office dynamics and so forth can be found in publications like the Harvard Business Review. The Society’s members receive a weekly email with a handpicked list of foreign policy jobs and internships. And, of course, professional development is a key part of what JQA Society chapters do, so talk with your chapter leaders and the national office for ideas.

You can sign up for the Society’s acclaimed weekly newsletter here. Subscribers receive a hand-picked list of jobs, internships, and news from around the foreign policy space.