Letter from the Editor

Dear Reader,

In the 16th century, an engraver and cartographer named Abraham Ortelius was posed a question by a merchant. While maps had existed for some time, they were considered large, bulky, and possesed varying quality. In cooperation with the famed cartographer Gerard Mercator, Ortelius’ response to such a question was the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, or “Theatre of the World”. This “Theatre of the World” would be a portable book complete with maps and descriptions of regions, would be translated into several languages, and would be published in 42 editions between 1570 and 1612. The first Atlas had been born. 

The idea of an atlas is not too far from what the Pardee Atlas: Journal of Global Affairs seeks to do. Like Ortelius and Mercator, the Pardee Atlas is to become a portable, depository of viewpoints, critiques, informative articles, and developed hypotheses. The atlases of old were not set in stone by the cartographers and engravers who made them, they changed and adjusted as new discoveries were observed. This journal is to be a forum for concepts to be debated and the old ways questioned; an academic embodiment of creative destruction. 

Over the coming academic year, this website will serve to further discourse in all aspects of international affairs by showcasing original thinking from the best and the brightest, here at Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies. The works of graduate students will present unique and innovative solutions to issues that are overshadowed or overlooked by academia, policy makers, and intelligentsia. The Pardee Atlas: Journal of Global Affairs does not endorse the viewpoints of the authors we present, but we do endorse the right for all students to express their ideas freely and to push the status quo towards change and the improvement of humankind. 

“Advancing Human Progress” is the motto of the Pardee School; the Pardee Atlas will lend you the space to do it. 

I look forward to reading your works this coming year.

Sincerely,

Eduard J. Miska

Editor-in-Chief