Ten years into the war in Afghanistan, Payne Distinguished Lecturer Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, the former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan and the former Commander of the American-led Coalition Forces there, set out to examine the transition to Afghan sovereignty.   Eikenberry laid out  three broad sets of questions: How well are we doing in the campaign in Afghanistan, what are the significant challenges we’ll face in achieving our goals and objectives, and what are the implications for American power and influence in the 21^st century.

Watch the video below.

Richard Morse was the featured speaker at the UT Energy Symposium on November 3^rd.  His talk, entitled, “Beyond Climate Policy: Reconciling Climate Change and the ‘Coal Renaissance’”, analyzed global coal markets and their relationship to climate change.

Because coal is the single largest source of global CO2 emissions, Morse argued that any attempt to combat climate change requires a strategy to address coal.  Morse argued that existing climate policy frameworks are not accomplishing this at the scale required, and suggested new frameworks to address the coal and climate challenge that can be deployed in existing energy markets with limited government intervention and support.

Fyodor Lukyanov is editor-in-chief of the journal Russia in Global Affairs, published in Russian and English with the participation of Foreign Affairs magazine. He has an extensive background in different Russian and international media, in which he worked from 1990 to 2002 as a commentator on international affairs.

Lukyanov now widely contributes to various media in the US, Europe and China. His monthly "Geopolitics" column appears in the Russian edition of Forbes magazine. He is a member of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, an independent organization providing foreign policy expertise and also a member of the Presidential Council on Human Rights and Civic Society Institutions.

http://creees.stanford.edu/events/DallinLectures.html

How certain is the future?

Southeast Asia Forum director Donald K. Emmerson addressed the intersection between crisis, uncertainty, and democracy in a keynote presentation at the 2011 annual conference of the Australian Political Studies Association.

Emmerson examined such global events as the large-scale financial crises of recent decades, the 9/11 attacks, and the Arab Spring. He argued that the current century is marked by increasing complexity and uncertainty, which interact to challenge global, regional, and national security in novel ways. It is urgent, he said, to adapt and craft political institutions that can respond quickly and aptly to these new demands.

What are the limits of literary freedom? Writers' claims for autonomy have encountered legal restrictions to their freedom of speech.  As suggested by Foucault, censorship has shaped the very notion of authorship. This talk will confront the diverging conceptions of the author’s responsibility in France and the beliefs in the power of writing that underlie them through the debates surrounding literary trials, including the cases of Béranger, Courier, Flaubert, Baudelaire, the naturalists, and the purge trials after World War II. In reaction to these conceptions, writers developed their own code of ethics, which contributed to the emergence of an autonomous literary field and to the construction of the figure of the public  intellectual, embodied by Zola and by Sartre.

Gisèle Sapiro is Research director at the CNRS and Director of Studies at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales. She is also head of the Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique, Paris, and been a visiting professor at the University of Freiburg and at NYU, among other places. Her interests include the sociology of intellectuals, literature, publishing and translation. She is the author of La Guerre des écrivains, 1940-1953 (Fayard, 1999; forthcoming in English translation with Duke University Press), La Responsabilité de l’écrivain. Littérature, droit et morale en France (19e-20e siècles) (Seuil, 2011), and of numerous articles published in journals of sociology, history, political science, aesthetics and literature, cultural studies and French studies. She is also editor or co-editor of Pour une histoire des sciences sociales (Fayard, 2004), Pierre Bourdieu, sociologue (Fayard, 2004), Translatio. Le marché de la traduction en France à l’heure de la mondialisation (CNRS Editions, 2008), Les Contradictions de la globalisation éditoriale (Nouveau Monde, 2009), and L’Espace intellectuel en Europe (La Découverte, 2009).

Co-sponsored by:  The Europe Center, Department of French and Italian, Taube Center for Jewish Studies, Center for the Study of the Novel, Department of Sociology, DLCL Research Unit on Literature and Ethics, Hebrew Literature Workshop, and the French Culture Workshop

Event Summary

Sapiro describes how writers during the inter-war period were targeted for social and political subversion, and even accused of being responsible for the French military defeat. The belief in the power of the written word, a legacy from the French Revolution, along with the Catholic fear of the dangers of reading, contributed to the perception of the printed word as a vehicle for inciting crime. Censorship was prevalent, with many prosecutions for writing and publishing carried out during the 19th century.

Sapiro traces how this repression led to the development of two competing ideas of professional ethics around writing: the idea of art for art's sake, and the political commitment of public intellectuals. She also describes the application of objective and subjective responsibility theories, ideas about criminality, and the absence of a professional ethics in writing, to the laws of free press during this period. Sapiro outlines several specific cases of prosecution against prominent authors in France, and the variety of arguments used in the defense - sometimes unsuccessfully.

A discussion session following the talk raised such questions as: How does the identity of the author relate to concepts of citizenship? Could the trials of authors be considered a form of censorship? Were there structural similarities between the trials and the public debate? Was there any reaction in the literary realm? Was there ever any criticism about the legal mechanism as the appropriate arena for discussing this moral debate? Why wasn't the debate held within the government?

موضوع المحاضرة هو عن تقييم الحركات الثورية بمنطقة الشرق الأوسط وجذورها السياسية، الإقتصادية والإجتماعية، وذلك في ضوء شرح طبيعة الثورات كنتاج للتعارض بين النظام السياسي والقوى المنتجة بالمجتمع.

المحاضر سوف يناقش وضع كل دولة على حده وتطوره فيما يتعلق بإختلاف الهيكل الإجتماعي لكل دولة، بالإضافة إلي فحص ظاهرة الحراك الإجتماعي للعملية الثورية متضمناً في ذلك فحص نماذج القوى الإجتماعية المتواجدة قبل الثورة والتي ظهرت خلالها. وأيضاً سوف تتطرق المحاضرة إلي إنعكاسات الوضع في المنطقة علي المستوى الإقليمي.

جلبير أشقر: أستاذ العلاقات الدولية ودراسات التنمية بكلية الدراسات الشرقية والإفريقية بجامعة لندن، وصاحب العديد من المؤلفات المتعلقة بمنطقة الشرق الأوسط وشمال إفريقيا، ومنها: "صراع البرابرة: صناعة النظام العالمي الفوضوي الجديد" (2006)، "خطر القوة: الشرق الأوسط والسياسة الخارجية للولايات المتحدة الأمريكية" (مع المفكر والكاتب الكبير نعوم تشومسكي 2007)، و"العرب والمحرقة النازية: حرب المرويات العربية – الإسرائيلية".

Greek Nationalism had an early start in late 18th century because of the preponderance of the Greek language in Balkan institutions of learning. The early enlightenment was transmitted by learned prelates before the French Revolution launched its anti-clerical onslaught. Whereas 19th-century exponents of nationalism were children of the secular enlightenment, the second half of the century was dominated by the romantic and irredentist nationalism of Konstantine Paparrigopoulos that believed in the cultural, not racial, continuity of the Greeks. Turkish Nationalism was a late comer in the Balkans. The views of the Young Ottomans constituted at first ambiguous attempt before the Young Turks and Ziya Gökalp made their nationalist mark. Ataturk evicted religion from the Gökalp blueprint and kept the other two pillars, secular nationalism and modernization. Both Greek and Turkish 20th century nationalisms were influenced by the French post-1870 prototype.

Thanos Veremis is Professor Emeritus of Political History in Department of European and International Studies at the University of Athens and Founding Member of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP). He has held teaching and research positions at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (London), Harvard University’s Center for European Studies, Princeton University’s the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, St. Antony’s College (Oxford), the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and the Hellenic Observatory of the LSE. From 2004 to 2010, he served as President of Greece’s National Council for Education. His publications include Modern Greece: A History since 1821 (with J. Koliopoulos, 2010); The Balkans: Construction and Deconstruction of States (2005), Greece: The Modern Sequel (with J. Koliopoulos, 2002), Greece (with M. Dragoumis, 1998) and The Military in Greek Politics (1997).

Mediterranean Studies Forum, 2011-12 Greece & Turkey Lecture Series. 
Co-sponsored by The Europe Center

The lecture is co-sponsored by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, CDDRL Program on Arab Reform and Democracy and Stanford Humanities Center

This lecture will assess the social-economic and political roots of the ongoing revolutionary process in the MENA region in light of the explanation of revolutions as expressions of the contradiction between the development of productive forces, the mode of production and the political structure. It will address the variety of situations and processes in MENA as related to the differences in social structures and types of states. The social dynamics of the revolutionary process will be examined, pointing to the social-political nature of the forces involved – whether those forces that pre-existed the upheaval or the new forces that emerged during the upheaval. Finally, it will reflect on the perspectives of the process at the regional level.

 Gilbert Achcar is Professor of Development Studies and International Relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of the University of London, where he is based since 2007, after Beirut, Paris and Berlin. He is the author of several books on politics and international relations in general, and the Middle East and North Africa in particular, including most recently The Clash of Barbarisms: The Making of the New World Disorder (2006), Perilous Power: The Middle East and U.S. Foreign Policy (co-authored with Noam Chomsky, 2007), and The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives (2010).

Inaugural lecture for the Institute for Social Banking, Canterbury, UK Summer School.  A link to the video of this talk can be found below:

• July 3, 2011 "Money, Politics and the Future of Globalization"

India’s 160 million Muslims differ geographically by language, socio-economic status, and culture. The Muslim-Indian community shares a common trajectory of challenges in their political power and socio-economic status. Their identity, in the eyes of the average Indian, is evermore monolithic and faith-based. To some politicians, Muslim Indians are now considered a security risk. In a talk held August 10 at the Commonwealth Club of California, Rafiq Dossani discussed the causes of their challenges and possible future.