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"The Shi'a Revival: From Iran and Iraq to Lebanon and Beyond"
with Professor Vali Nasr
Monday, February 5, 2007
7:00PM
Location: Great Hall (UCSD)
Map of Great Hall
Parking Instructions
 Biography: Vali Nasr is Professor and Associate Chair of Research at the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and Fellow at the Dubai Initiative at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
He is a specialist on political and social developments in the Muslim world and is the author of The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam will Shape the Future (W.W. Norton, 2006); Democracy in Iran: History and the Quest for Liberty (Oxford University Press, 2006); The Islamic Leviathan: Islam and the Making of State Power (Oxford University Press, 2001); Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism (Oxford University Press, 1996); The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: The Jama`at-i Islami of Pakistan (University of California Press, 1994); an editor of Oxford Dictionary of Islam (Oxford University Press, 2003); and co-editor of Expectation of the Millennium: Shi`ism in History (SUNY Press, 1989); as well as numerous articles in academic journals and encyclopedias. His works have been translated into Arabic, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Indonesian, Italian, Turkish, Persian, Chinese, Hebrew and Urdu.
Abstract: To most Western eyes, all Islamic movements look alike, and the central conflict in the Middle East is one between religion and secularism. Shockingly little has been written about the bitter divide between Shia and Sunni. Yet without understanding their ancient conflict-and its modern embodiment in the power struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia for political and spiritual leadership of the Muslim world-it is impossible to comprehend events across the so-called Shia Crescent, from East Africa through Iraq and Pakistan to India.
The provocative rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini, the Saudi pressure on the United States not to unseat Saddam Hussein in 1991, the critical role of the Ayatollah Sistani and the religious establishment in Najaf (Iraq), the volatility of Pakistan today, and the consequences of the shift toward Shia power through American intervention-all this and more is explained in the light of the Shia/Sunni divide.
Sponsored by the Institute for International, Comparative, and Area Studies (IICAS), Eleanor Roosevelt College (ERC) and the International Affairs Group at the University of California, San Diego.
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"Institutional Democracy Need Not Limit the Abuse of Human Rights"
with Professor Robert Walker
Washington University in Saint Louis
Thursday, February 8th 2007
Location: Social Science Bldg 101
3:00PM-4:30PM
Robert W. Walker (Ph. D. University of Rochester, 2005) is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Applied Statistics at Washington University in Saint Louis. In international relations, he develops general choice models of international financial policy instruments and state repression; in applied statistics, he primarily studies measurement models and Markov processes for representing discrete time series. Other research examines variation in bond ratings among U. S. states and the political economy of supranational governance in European football.
Abstract: "We reconsider the relationship between democracy and human rights abuses employing a dynamic model for the study of ordered time series. We advance the view that democracy, conditional on past practice, may or may not influence respect for human rights. Casually, existing theories relating human rights and democracy all predict that Iraq will emerge from regime change with an improved human rights record; we qualify this view. In a test covering the period 1976-2003, we find that the effect of political democracy depends on the past history of respect for human rights. At low levels of prior repression, democracy limits human rights abuses; when past repression was widespread, democracy has no effect on respect for personal integrity rights. Contrary to conventional wisdom, democracy alone is robustly insufficient to eliminate the abuse of human rights where the immediate past was highly repressive. In an example, this qualification of conventional wisdom allows Iraq to remain repressive even after the imposed regime change; previous theories do not."
For information on events or to schedule an appointment with Dr. Walker, please contact the Events Coordinator for IICAS at (858) 822-5297. Sponsored by the Department of Political Science and the Institute for International, Comparative, and Area Studies (IICAS) at UCSD.
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"Latin American Political Contrasts" with Torcuato Di Tella
Thursday, February 8, 2007 from 3:30 pm to 5:00 p.m.
Deutz Room, Copley International Conference Center,
The Institute of the Americas Complex, UCSD campus
Torcuato Di Tella is Emeritus Professor at the University of Buenos Aires and is one of the leading social scientists in Latin America. Most of his work has dealt with politics and social structure in Argentina and Argentine Social History, but he has also worked on similar subjects in Chile, Brazil, Mexico, Paraguay, Haiti, and the Latin American region in general. He has published 10 books in Spanish, half of which have been translated into English: Latin American Politics: A Theoretical Approach; Sustainable Democracy; National Popular Politics in Early Independent Mexico, 1820-1847; Political Culture, Social Movements, and Democratic Transitions in South America in the Twentieth Century; and History of Political Parties in Twentieth-Century Latin America. He has also published dozens of articles in Latin American, American, and European journals. Di Tella was also the secretary of culture of Argentina in 2003-2004, and a trustee of universities and research institutes, and a member of editorial boards of scholarly journals. For more information, please contact Ruth Pardon. Sponsored by CILAS and IICAS.
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"Structure and Agency in the Transformation of India's Foreign Policy"
Professor Sumit Ganguly
Indiana University
Monday, February 12, 2007
3:30 PM - 5:00 PM
SSB 104
Sumit Ganguly holds the Rabindranath Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilizations and is a Professor of Political Science at Indiana University in Bloomington. He has previously been on the faculty of James Madison College of Michigan State University, Hunter College of the City University of New York and the University of Texas at Austin. He has also been a Fellow and a Guest Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC and a Visiting Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. His research and writing, focused primarily on South Asia, has been supported by grants from the Asia Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the W. Alton Jones Foundation and the United States Institute of Peace. He serves on the editorial boards of Asian Affairs, Asian Survey, Current History, the Journal of Strategic Studies and Security Studies. He is the founding editor of both the India Review and Asian Security, two refereed journals published by Taylor and Francis, London. Professor Ganguly is the author, editor or co-editor of a dozen books on South Asia. His most recent books are Fearful Symmetry: India and Pakistan Under the Shadow of Nuclear Weapons (co-authored with Devin Hagerty) jointly published by Oxford University Press (New Delhi) and the University of Washington Press (Seattle) and More Than Words: U.S.-India Strategic Cooperation Into the Twenty-First Century (co-edited with Brian Shoup and Andrew Scobell) published by Routledge, London. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, New York and the International Institute of Strategic Studies, London. He is currently at work on a single authored book, India Since 1980, under contract with Cambridge University Press, New York and an edited work (with Larry Diamond and Marc Plattner), The State of India's Democracy, to be published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2007.
Abstract: "India's foreign policy has undergone a fundamental transformation in the aftermath of the Cold War. What factors explain this metamorphosis? Neither structural shifts in global power nor individual choices any fully account for the radical reorientation that took place. A more complete explanation must aggregate evidence from both international and domestic levels."
For information on events or to schedule an appointment with Dr. Ganguly, please contact Events Coordinator for IICAS at (858) 822-5297.
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Histories of the Aftermath:
"The European 'Postwar' in Comparative Perspective"
Friday, February 16- Saturday, February 17th 2007
Location: Deutz Conference Room, Institute of the Americas
For more info including the conference program, please visit the website.
To register for a specific session, please email iicas-events@ucsd.edu.
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Upcoming Events
"Nuclear, Radiological, Chemical, and Biological Weapons"
Larry D. Johnson, United Nations Office of Legal Counsel
February 27, 2007, 12:10 PM
Location: California Western School of Law
International Law Series
Sponsored by California Western School of Law and the Institute for International, Comparative, and Area Studies (IICAS) at UCSD
"Power and Agency: How Past Diplomacy Determines the Choice of Sides"
Robert Trager
University of California Los Angeles
Thursday, March 1st 2007 3:00-4:30PM
Location: Social Science Bldg 107 (UCSD)
Project on International Affairs lecture series
Sponsored by the Institute for International, Comparative, and Area Studies (IICAS)
and the Political Science Department at the University of California, San Diego. |
