Steven Wax
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.