Lesson 3.1 Overview

You now possess a basic understanding of higher order and critical thinking skills, as well as some knowledge about the nature of geography, and the definitions of geospatial intelligence. This lesson capitalizes on that base of knowledge, and gives you the opportunity to demonstrate and improve your professional and academic writing skills.

To exercise our recently acquired critical thinking skills and geographic knowledge, we are going to carefully read the works of several eminent scholars: Samuel Huntington, Stephen Walt, and Edward Said. Huntington's "The Clash of Civilizations?" was a provocative article that articulated a new geopolitical discourse for the post-Cold War era. Published in Foreign Affairs in 1993, it created an immediate stir and resulted in a book length treatment of the idea by the same name. Steven Walt is a professor of international relations at Harvard. He challenged Huntington’s clash theory in his article “Building up New Bogymen” published in Foreign Policy in 1997. Edward Said was a Palestinian-American scholar of the Middle East famous for his writings on orientalism. Said countered Huntington's discourse in his article "The Clash of Ignorance" published in The Nation in 2001. Works of both Huntington and Said are still frequently referenced and cited. For example, see recent articles on Huntington and Said.

You will have the pleasure of writing your first critical analysis paper as your deliverable for this lesson. For many of you, this will be a challenge as you have not written a graduate level paper employing critical thinking skills. However, the ability to clearly and concisely articulate your critically derived thoughts is another essential skill for the geospatial intelligence professional in any agency or organization.

Lesson Objectives

At the end of this lesson, you will be able to:

• analyze multiple sources challenging and supporting a particular thesis (Huntingdon's Clash of Civilizations thesis);

• defend your own analysis using your higher order and critical thinking skills; 

• write a graduate level academic paper.