Overview
The Country Report
Word Limit: 1,500 (40% of module mark) You will write a report on ONE country in Southeast Asia, designed to brief an incoming Western ambassador about that country’s political and economic development and current situation. This assessment is designed to test your knowledge of a particular country but also to develop your abilities to present a very concise, detailed report suitable for a non-academic audience.
The country I have chosen and want you to do is the Philippines. As with all assessments in SPIR, the Country Report will be marked using SPIR’s standard marking criteria. But here are some specific tips on how to complete this assignment successfully:
- You must choose a country for which there is sufficient academic literature; for this reason, Laos may be quite difficult. You may not choose Brunei, as this is the subject of the sample report provided on QMPlus, which will help you to understand what a Country Report should be like [ATTACHED IS EXAMPLE OF A COUNTRY REPORT OF BRUNEI].
- You should divide the report into sections with useful sub-headings.
- The report should provide an overview of the political and economic development of your chosen country and relate this to the current political situation that the ambassador will encounter. Put yourself in the position of a senior diplomat who wants to quickly grasp the most important aspects of their new posting. Topics you might want to include could be:
- The country’s economic development: what has shaped it, and what are its main contours?
- The evolution of the country’s political regime: how has the current regime come about, through what struggles and conflicts? What forces are dominant and what is the character of the regime?
- Remember: this module offers a political economy optic on the region. Try to consider how economic and political development are related, rather than treating them as separate. Likewise, don’t approach either development or the political system in a technical manner, e.g. just describing the formal constitutional arrangements. This is a politics module: we are interested in how power, interests and conflict determine what actually happens, which might be quite different to what a constitution says on paper!
- Current political and economic situation, including threats and challenges to the incumbent government.
- Whatever structure you choose, please do not simply produce a historical narrative that is descriptiverather than analytical. This is a very common mistake on this assignment. You should include historical detail only when it is essential to support your analysis, and understanding the present situation. We are notlooking for a sort of “general background” of the sort you might find on a Wikipedia page. It should be a focused report on how power is concentrated and exercised in your chosen country. Always structure your work, and lead paragraphs, with argument and analysis, not historical narrative.
- Another common mistake, often seen in combination with the one just mentioned, is to end the coverage of the country in the late 1990s or early 2000s. This often occurs alongside a flawed “historical narrative” approach because students narrating a country’s post-colonial history quickly run out of space. It also reflects inadequate research, relying on the first couple of weeks of reading on the module, which only take us up to the late 1990s/early 2000s.
- Feel free to include charts, diagrams, tables or maps if necessary. These do not count towards your word limit. You must include a label beneath them, with a title and source, with a citation (and this label does count towards the word limit). Example: Fig. 1: Cambodian GDP Growth (Source: UNCTAD 2016: 1).
- Reports that are attractively presented will score higher marks for presentation. The text should, as always, be double-spaced, but feel free to experiment with the layout to make it more like a professional report. You will not lose marks if you present it like a normal essay, though.
- This is a report to a diplomat, not an essay. Given the intended audience, your report should be written clearly and concisely, avoiding jargon. There is no need to include a detailed introduction or conclusion in the same way that you would in an essay. Similarly, you should avoid engaging in debate or explicitly deploying a theoretical framework. Your goal is to conduct an analysis of the country. This will necessarily be implicitly “argumentative”, in the sense that it will draw connections between phenomena in order to explain outcomes. For instance, you might claim that economic patronage networks are responsible for a regime’s political longevity. That is an argumentative claim, because it could, for example, be argued instead that political culture explains regime longevity. But since this is a report, and a short one at that, you must quickly communicate your analysis of the situation to the reader, and not get bogged down in theoretical debates.
- Useful sources, including sections for each country, are provided in Appendix A of this handbook and on QMplus. You should consult roughly seven or eight scholarly sources during your research. Always start with these sources – NOT with an Internet search! You may also reference non-scholarly sources, but these should be in addition to, and used to supplement, high-quality academic literature, which must form the core of your research.
- Citations and a full bibliography must be provided as standard, according to SPIR’s Coursework Formatting and Referencing guide. You must include a citation whenever you draw on an idea, use data, or quote from a published source – this assignment is no different in this respect to any other. You will lose marks for representation of sources if you fail to cite adequately, or your references are not properly formatted.