Monday 1 February, 7:00 pm – 105 Lawrence Hall (The Robert Ho Center) “Villas Miseria: Urban Dysfunction and Distorted Development in Buenos Aires, Argentina”
Jorge Francisco Liernur directs the Center of Studies on Contemporary Architecture at the Torcuato Di Tella University in Buenos Aires, and is a Senior Researcher at the Argentine National Council for Research on Science and Technology. At the University of Buenos Aires he was director of the Instituto de Arte Americano e Investigaciones Estéticas, and founder and director of the Juan O’Gorman Latin-American Architecture Chair. He acted as visiting scholar and critic at several universities in America and Europe, and his many studies on South American urbanism include The Threshold of the Metropolis. Cosponsored by the Geography Department and ALST.
Professor Richard Ned Lebow
Monday 8 February, 7:00 pm – 105 Little Hall (Golden Auditorium) “Why We Fight”
Richard Ned Lebow is the James O. Freedman Presidential Professor of Government at Dartmouth College and Centennial Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His most recent books are A Cultural Theory of International Relations (Cambridge, 2008) and The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests and Orders. The former won the Jervis-Schroeder Award for the best book in international relations and the British International Studies Award for the best book of the year. The latter garnered the Alexander L. George Award for the best book in political psychology. His Forbidden Fruit: Counterfactuals and International Relations is forthcoming from Princeton University Press. Cosponsored by the Political Science Department.
Wed. Sept. 23, 7:30 p.m. – 105 Lawrence Hall “Rethinking Genocide Prevention”
Gregory H. Stanton is Research Professor in Genocide Studies and Prevention at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University. Dr. Stanton is the founder (1999) and president of Genocide Watch (website: www.genocidewatch.org), the founder (1981) and director of the Cambodian Genocide Project, and is the founder (1999) and Chair of the International Campaign to End Genocide. He was the President (2007 – 2009) of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS). He has served as Co-Chair of the Washington Working Group for the International Criminal Court, and has been instrumental in the current Khmer Rouge Tribunal for which he drafted the internal rules of procedure and evidence. He holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from University of Chicago and a JD from Yale Law School. Sponsored by Core, P-Con, and University Studies.
Darius Rejali
Thurs. Oct. 22, 7:00 p.m. – Love Auditorium, Olin Hall “The Secret Histories of Modern Torture”
Darius Rejali is Professor and Chair of Political Science at Reed College. Beginning with a historical account detailing how Western democracies pioneered and exported techniques that have become the common base of modern torture, Rejali takes up the challenging question of the relation between torture and democracy in the present. In the wake of this history, Rejali asks what we can expect of the current US administration, and explores prospects for the future prevention of torture internationally. The 2009 Peter C. Schaehrer Memorial Lecture.
Khalil Shikaki
Wed. Nov. 4, 5:00 pm – Persson Hall Auditorium “The Prospects for Arab-Israeli Peace: A Palestinian Perspective”
Khalil Shikaki is the director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, which has conducted extensive public opinion polls in the West Bank and Gaza since the mid-1990s on a wide range of topics (the peace process, Hamas, Fatah, political Islam, etc.). He will use some of this research to illuminate how Palestinians who reside in the West Bank and Gaza view Israel, the conflict, and the prospects for peace. For further information on Professor Shikaki’s work see: http://www.pcpsr.org/about/khalilshikaki.html.
20 February /Merrill House/9:20 a.m. [faculty seminar]
115-116 Lawrence Hall The German Center/2:20 p.m. [faculty + student seminar] “After ‘After Auschwitz’: the Primitive Aftermath.”
Victoria Sanford
2 March/Ho Center, 105 Lawrence Hall 5:00 p.m. “The Land of Pale Hands: Feminicide, Social Cleansing, and Impunity in Guatemala.”
Carolyn Nordstrom
30 March/27 Persson Hall / 8:00 p.m. “Fundamental Faultlines.”
Robert Rotberg
7 April/111 Alumni Hall/5:00 p.m. “Transitional Justice and the Role of Truth Commissions in Conflict Resolution and Prevention.”
17 September/the Robert Ho Center, 105 Lawrence Hall/8:00PM “Kafka Comes To America: A Public Defender’s Fight for Justice in the War on Terror from Peshawar to Portland.”
Oregon Federal Defender, Steven T. Wax, will be speaking about the threat to civil liberties, at home and abroad, from the policies of the Bush administration in the ‘war on terror.’ Based on his experiences representing U.S. citizens arrested in connection with terrorist acts in Oregon and seven men held as enemy combatants in prison in Guantanamo Bay, Wax will explore the legal justifications offered for indefinite detention and coercive interrogation and the threat we all face from the policies the administration has pursued. His talk will weave together the legal and political debate with an account of the actual experiences of defendants incarcerated under emergency powers.
Robert Vitalis
13 October/27 Persson Hall, auditorium/5:00PM “The Hidden History of Race in American International Relations.”
In this presentation, Professor Vitalis examines the origins of the study of international relations in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. He argues that until we loosen the hold a particular idea has over our contemporary imaginations—that the subject matter of international relations is found on one side of a line between the “domestic” and the “foreign”—it will not be possible to appreciate the full significance of the fact that the scholars who wrote the first articles, papers, treatises, and textbooks in international relations all saw the “Negro problem” in the South as something to be included within the new interdisciplinary field of study. Political scientists theorizing about what they called “race development” (the title of the first journal of IR in fact) imagined two fundamentally different logics and processes at work, and thus different rules that were to be applied, across the boundary dividing Anglo-Saxons or Teutons and the inferior races found in Indian Territory, New Mexico, the Philippines, the Caribbean, Africa, and Oceania. Here was political science’s original and signal contribution to the theory and practice of hierarchy, a theory that W. E. B. Du Bois and the handful of black political scientists who followed him challenged in his continuing arguments about the global color line.
Jonathan Hyslop
22 October/the Robert Ho Center, 105 Lawrence Hall/5:00PM “The Law of War and the Invention of the Concentration Camp 1896-1904.”
1899 saw the convening of the First Hague Peace conference, the most comprehensive inter-state attempt to that time to prevent war and limit its conduct. Yet the years immediately before and after the conference saw the emergence of an appalling new institution of war against civilians – the concentration camp. In his presentation, Jonathan Hyslop addresses this paradoxical conjunction. He traces the emergence of concentration camps in the Cuban Rebellion against Spain, the Boer War, the American-Filipino War and the German repression of revolts in South-west Africa, and asks why the new humanitarian law of war was unable to restrain this development. The ways in which international publics debating the laws of war were constituted around these conflicts are explored in an investigation of the different responses of European socialists, Asian nationalists, and metropolitan political leaders to such questions. The lecture critically considers explanatory frameworks for the camp phenomenon offered by major theorists such as Arendt and Bauman. The central argument is that the dynamics of war-fighting itself need to placed at the center of an analysis of the birth of the concentration camp.
Aaron David Miller
27 October/ 105 Little Hall, Golden Auditorium / 5:00PM “The Much Too Promised Land: The U.S., the Arab-Israeli Issue, and the Middle East.”
Why has the world’s greatest superpower failed to broker, or impose, a solution in the Middle East? If a solution is possible, what would it take? And why after so many years of struggle and failure, with the entire region even more unsettled than ever, should Americans even care? Is Israel/Palestine really the “much too promised land”? In attempting to answer these questions, Aaron Miller shatters many preconceived notions, tackling the complicated issues of culture, religion, domestic politics, and national security that have defined—and often derailed—a half century of diplomacy
Ian Roxborough
10 November/the Robert Ho Center, 105 Lawrence Hall/5:00PM “Can the US win the next war? The return of the Third World.”
A debate divides the Pentagon: should the US military prepare for a future of messy, low-intensity conflicts in the Third World, of which Iraq and Afghanistan are merely the first campaigns in a long war, or should it focus its efforts on deterring war with an emerging peer competitor such as China or Russia? Ian Roxborough will describe the ways in which military planners have constructed future scenarios that make sense to them; paradoxically, the professional experiences and organizational locations of members of a military, Roxborough argues, help to define the strategic situations to which soldiers respond. Focusing on Army-Marine Corps manual: FM 3-24/MCWP 3-33.5, entitled Counterinsurgency, he examines how debates within the U.S. defense establishment concerning future wars bring to light the military’s own sociology of knowledge.
Professor McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, and has authored fourteen books on politics in the Philippines, the drug trade, ethnicity and power in Southeast Asia, and most recently, on histories of interrogation and torture. His most recent book is A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the the War on Terror (NY: Metropolitan Books, 2006).
22 October/27 Persson Hall/7:00PM. “With and Without Law: A Panel on Detentions at Guantanamo Bay.”
As the Kroll Family Human Rights Fellow at Human Rights First, Devon Chaffee advocates for U.S. counter-terrorism and national security policies that respect human rights. Prior to her work at Human Rights First, she interned with the Documentation Center of Cambodia in Phnom Penh, the Committee on Conscience at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Georgetown’s Center for Applied Legal Studies Asylum Clinic, and Amnesty International USA. Devon Chaffee received her J.D. magna cum laude from Georgetown University Law Center, where she was a Public Interest Law Scholar, and her B.A. from Hampshire College.
Jennifer Daskal was named senior counterterrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch in June 2007. From October 2005 until June, she was the advocacy director for the U.S. program. Jennifer Daskal currently focuses on U.S. counterterrorism policy in the wake of 9/11. She provided analysis and commentary for congressional staff and others on the range of legislative initiatives, including efforts to restore habeas corpus, put an end to the CIA program of incommunicado detention, and stop renditions to torture. In the spring 2007, she served as an official observer at the military commission hearings in Guantanamo Bay. Her published commentary on these commission proceedings has appeared in the International Herald Tribune, Salon.com, and The Huffington Post. In July 2007, she traveled to Tunisia to track the fate of two Guantanamo detainees recently returned there, and published a commentary and short report on her findings. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, holds an MA in Economics from Cambridge University – where she was a Marshall Scholar – and is a Brown University graduate.
Peter Kornbluh
5 November/27 Persson Hall/7:00PM “Operation Condor: Pinochet’s Secret “Rendition” Program and its Contemporary Relevance.”
Peter Kornbluh is Senior Analyst and Director of the Cuba and Chile Documentation Projects at the National Security Archive. From 1990-1999, he taught at Columbia University from 1990-1999, he taught at Columbia University as an adjunct assistant professor of international and public affairs. Peter Kornbluh is the author of numerous books, most notably The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability, which was published in September 2003 on the 30th anniversary of the Chilean military coup. The Pinochet File was selected as a “best book” of the year by the Los Angeles Times and has been translated into Spanish. In addition, Peter Kornbluh’s articles have been published in Foreign Policy, the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. He is currently a weekly columnist for the Chilean newspaper, Diario Siete.
Andrew Norris is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the editor of Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (Duke University Press, 2005) and The Claim to Community: Essays on Stanley Cavell and Political Philosophy (Stanford University Press, 2006). His recent publications include “Sovereignty, Exception, and Norm” in the Journal of Law and Society 34, no. 1 (March 2007), “Cynicism, Skepticism, and the Politics of Truth,” in Theory & Event 9, no. 4, and “Ernesto Laclau and the Logic of ‘the Political,’” in Philosophy & Social Criticism 32, no. 1 (January 2006).
