Welcome to the 2008 ALLIES JRP blog! The Alliance Linking Leaders in Education and the Services (ALLIES) is an undergraduate-led initiative dedicated to building a bridge for shared understanding between future civilian and military leaders through joint education, training, and relationship building. ALLIES is a program of the Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University.
The ALLIES Joint Research Project is an annual summer program in which ALLIES students come together from our respective institutions to conduct a substantive, challenging, and relevant research project abroad. This June, ALLIES is building on last year's project, which examined counterterrorism strategies in Jordan, by returning to Jordan to explore the impacts of the Iraq War on Jordanian society.
In Jordan, we will work in four groups to explore in more detail specific issues within our broader research focus: refugees and Jordanian society, Jordanian-Iraqi relations, Jordanian-US security cooperation, and the impact of the Iraq war on Jordan’s political reform process. We will meet with actors from multiple sectors of Jordanian society, in an attempt to fully understand the many dimensions of our research topics. We will conduct formal and informal interviews, organizational site visits, and dialogue sessions. After the trip, we will write four policy memos, produce a multimedia representation of our trip, and present our findings through various venues at and outside of Tufts.
We will be updating this blog often once we arrive in Jordan, so check back for updates on our research process, personal reflections on our experiences, and photos depicting a small portion of what we will see. We are grateful for the guidance and support of the Institute for Global Leadership, as well as the support of all our respective institutions. We look forward to sharing our intellectual growth, both through this blog and through the final products of our project.
