3quarksdaily

Egypt's New Constitution

Amnesty International issues a press release warning of dangers to freedoms of worship and women:

A draft constitution approved by Egypt’s Constituent Assembly falls well short of protecting human rights and, in particular, ignores the rights of women, restricts freedom of expression in the name of protecting religion, and allows for the military trial of civilians, Amnesty International said. 

“This document, and the manner in which it has been adopted, will come as an enormous disappointment to many of the Egyptians who took to the streets to oust Hosni Mubarak and demand their rights,” said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International. 

Freedom of religion is limited to Islam, Christianity and Judaism, potentially excluding the right to worship to other religious minorities such as Baha’is and Shi’a Muslims. 

The constitution fails to provide for the supremacy of international law over national law, raising concerns about Egypt’s commitment to human rights treaties to which it is a state party. 

Furthermore, the document fails to fully guarantee economic, social and cultural rights, such as protection against forced evictions - it also tolerates child labour. 

You can read the draft (as of now) yourself here. 

Also the NYT reports on protests around the draft.

The Salman Rushdie Case

Zoë Heller reviews Salman Rushdie's Joseph Anton: A Memoir, in the NYRB:

When Anis Rushdie read his son’s novel Midnight’s Children for the first time in 1980, he became convinced that Ahmed Sinai, the drunken father in the book, was a satirical portrait of himself. A family row ensued. Rushdie fils did not deny that Sinai was based on his father—“In my young, pissed-off way,” he would later tellThe Paris Review, “I responded that I’d left all the nasty stuff out”—but he objected to his father’s wounded reaction and thought it revealed a crude understanding of how novels worked. “My father had studied literature at Cambridge so I expected him to have a sophisticated response to the book, but the person who did was my mother…. She understood it at once as fiction.”

The position that Rushdie took during this literary-domestic spat uncannily prefigured the position he would take nine years later, when confronted by the wrath of another, more punishing patriarch. On February 15, 1989, a day after the Ayatollah Khomeini had issued a fatwa condemning him to death for his authorship of The Satanic Verses, Rushdie appeared on British television and announced that he wished his book had been “more critical” of Islam. As he reports in Joseph Anton—a memoir he has chosen to write in a de Gaulle–like third person—his principal emotion at the time was one of bafflement:

When he was first accused of being offensive, he was genuinely perplexed. He thought he had made an artistic engagement with the phenomenon of revelation; an engagement from the point of view of an unbeliever, certainly, but a proper one nonetheless. How could that be thought offensive? The thin-skinned years of rage- defined identity politics that followed taught him, and everyone else, the answer to that question.

Given how often Rushdie has been accused of writing The Satanic Verses with the express purpose of making trouble, it is understandable that he should wish to highlight the unexpected—the unprecedented—nature of the events that followed the novel’s publication. Even so, his retrospective account of himself as a bookish innocent, bewildered by the world’s coarse intrusion into the literary sphere, seems a little over-egged. By this point in his career, Rushdie, who had already been sued by Indira Gandhi for libelous statements in Midnight’s Children and had already seen his third novel banned in Pakistan, was better qualified than most to appreciate literature’s capacity for eliciting hostile, nonliterary responses.

A Pair of MIT Scientists Try to Transform Nuclear Power

Richard Martin in Forbes:

Leslie Dewan and Mark Massie are Ph.D. students in nuclear engineering at MIT.  For most of their peers, the options upon graduating are pretty simple: teach, or work for one of the national labs.  Dewan and Massie, though, decided on an unconventional path: like a couple of Stanford grads, they’ve formed a start-up.  Incorporated in 2011, it’s called Transatomic Power, and its mission is to transform the nuclear power industry.

Transatomic’s product is called a “Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor.” If you’ve read my book, SuperFuel, you’ll recognize it as an update on an old reactor technology that was pioneered at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in the 1950s and 60s.  SuperFuel focused on another type of molten salt reactor, a Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, or LFTR.  Dewan and Massie’s design is fuel-agnostic in the sense that it can run on either uranium or thorium; as the name implies, its signal feature is that it can consume spent fuel from conventional light-water reactors.  Transatomic joins a growing list of start-ups, including Flibe Energy, that are trying to revolutionize nuclear power by bringing back alternative fuels, including thorium, and alternative reactor designs.

More here.  [Thanks to James Edward Kolb.]

Why U.S., Israel should welcome Palestinian move at U.N.

Rabbi Michael Lerner at CNN:

Israel's security can only be assured when its neighbors believe that it is no longer oppressing the Palestinian people but instead living in peace and harmony with them.

The de facto strategy of past and present Israeli governments of seeking security through domination and by pushing Palestinians out of their homes, or allowing right-wing religious fanatics to create settlements throughout the West Bank to ensure that no Palestinian state could have contiguous parts, has not and cannot work to provide safety for Israel.

Israel's fate and its well-being are intrinsically linked to the well-being of the Palestinian people. It's time for the powerful to show generosity to the relatively powerless.

So those in the U.S. and Israel who want Israel to be secure should welcome the Palestinian Authority's decision to seek observer status as a nonmember state in the United Nations. The authority has agreed to return to negotiations with Israel without conditions once that status has been granted. The goal is creation of a state living in peace with Israel in borders roughly approximating those of the before than 1967 war, with minor border changes mutually agreeable through negotiations.

So who opposes this? Hamas, Israel and the U.S.

More here.

A sprinting cheetah at 1200 frames per second slow motion

Cheetahs on the Edge--Director's Cut from Gregory Wilson on Vimeo.

Twilight People: Subways Are for Sleeping

Joe Kloc in the Paris Review:

Every now and then I come across someone on the subway who defies easy categorization. I remember, for instance, a man who boarded the 3 train in Brooklyn a few years ago wearing military fatigues and a bandolier packed with little glass bottles of liquids. “Who is man enough to buy my fragrances?” he shouted. (When one rider replied that he wasn’t sure, the man responded, “Are you man enough to kill a hooker in Moscow with a crowbar?”) More recently, there was a man on the uptown 6 wearing a pair of oversized New Year’s glasses—the ones where the 0’s serve as eyeholes—who played atonal jazz on his saxophone and asked for no monetary compensation in return. I could keep going, but no doubt anyone who has lived in a city for any length of time has their own mental list of these self-styled subterranean eccentrics, grouped together not so much by any particular characteristic other than the fact that they seem only to exist underground.

Over the years I’ve made casual study of this joyful band of accidental philosophers as they’ve decorated my dreary morning commutes with their Bedazzler guns of mischief. A few months ago I had the good fortune of getting to know one of them on the R train. I was reading Joseph Mitchell’s Up in the Old Hotel when a man whom I’ll call Z. (because he asked me not to use his name) approached me and said, “That’s a great fucking book.”

More here.

Friday Poem

Mushrooms

“Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot’s in the door.”

by Sylvia Plath

And the award for savage wit goes to ...

From The Independent: 

Tomorrow night, the winner of the Polari Prize for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) debut authors will be announced at London's South Bank Centre. Tomorrow also marks the fifth birthday of the monthly literary salon that gave the prize its name. The prize is the brainchild of Paul Burston, the editor of the gay section of Time Out magazine and the flamboyant MC of the salon. As a novelist himself, the author of The Gay Divorcee, Star People and other books examining and satirising contemporary gay life, Burston is acutely conscious of the difficulties facing LGBT authors in a tough commercial climate.

...If there's one sweeping generalisation to be made about queer writing (I've been a judge for two years running), it is that it's often savagely funny. Judge a mainstream literary prize and you'll be overwhelmed by dark themes and sombre writing. This year's Polari shortlistees are North Morgan, a bitterly funny satirist in his London club novel Exit Through the Wound (Limehouse Books); the music producer Terry Ronald's Becoming Nancy (Transworld), a deliciously camp rites of passage novel; and Vicky Ryder's rollicking Ey Up and Away (Wandering Star Press), a series of almost poem-like vignettes about growing up in Nuneaton. But perhaps even more surprising is the discovery of two strong poetic voices in John McCullough (Frost Fairs, published by Salt) and Max Wallis (Modern Love, published by Flap). The elfin Wallis has an unusual day job for a poet: when I caught up with him, he had just got back from a modelling assignment in Paris. He's also unusual in his choice of inspiration: the Victorian poet George Meredith who also penned a poem sequence called Modern Love. (Also something of a model, Meredith posed for the famous Pre-Raphaelite painting The Death of Chatterton.)

...Modern Love by Max Wallis: 

Flap £4

"... A final glance. Sigh as the door slams a wooden tongue. Do not look back as dawn carries her torch across the sky; he will stay. Tarmac claps footsteps toward day and then, within, something out loud to the world that he will never hear; 'I am sorry, you know'."

More here.

Scientists build with DNA bricks

From MSNBC:

Researchers at Harvard's Wyss Institute have coaxed single strands of DNA to fit together like Lego bricks and form scores of complex three-dimensional shapes, including a teeny-tiny space shuttle. The technique, described in this week's issue of the journal Science, adds a new dimension to molecular construction and should help open the way for nanoscale medical and electronic devices. "This is a simple, versatile and robust method," the study's senior author, Peng Yin, said in a news release. The method starts with synthetic strands of DNA that take in just 32 nucleotides, or molecular bits of genetic code. These individual "bricks" are coded in a way that they fit together like Lego pegs and holes to form larger shapes of a specific design. A cube built up from 1,000 such bricks (10 by 10 by 10) measures just 25 nanometers in width. That's thousands of times smaller than the diameter of a single human hair.

The latest research builds upon work that the Wyss researchers detailed in May, which involved piecing together DNA strands to create two-dimensional tiles (including cute smiley faces). This time around, the strands were twisted in such a way that they could be interlocked, Lego-style. As any visitor to Legoland knows, such structures can get incredibly complex in the hands of a skilled builder. Yin and his colleagues are still learning their building techniques. Fortunately, the bricks could be programmed to build themselves, with the aid of 3-D modeling software. Once the designs were set, the researchers synthesized strands with the right combinations of nucleotides — adenosine, thymine, cytosine and guanine — so that when they were mixed together in a solution, at least some of the bricks would form the desired design. To demonstrate the method, 102 different 3-D shapes were created using a 1,000-brick template.

 More here.

Steven Spielberg’s White Men of Democracy

Corey Robin over at his blog:

Two weeks ago I wrote, “When Steven Spielberg makes a movie about the Holocaust, he focuses on a German. When he makes a movie about abolition, he focuses on a white man. Say what you will, he’s consistent.”

My comment was inspired by historian Kate Masur’s excellent New York Timesop-ed, which argued that Spielberg’s film Lincoln had essentially left African Americans offstage or in the gallery. In Spielberg’s hands, blacks see themselves get rescued by a savior who belongs to the very group that has ravaged and ruined them. Just as Jews do in Schindler’s List. The difference is that in the case of emancipation, blacks—both free and slave—were actually far more central to the process of their own deliverance.

Thanks in part to documents from the National Archives that historians began to rigorously amass and organize in 1976—resulting in the multi-volume Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867—students and scholars have come to a completely different view of how emancipation happened. As three of the historians who were involved in that project wrote in the path-breaking Slaves No More:

The Destruction of Slavery [the first essay in the book] explicates the process by which slavery collapsed under the pressure of federal arms and the slaves’ determination to place their own liberty on the wartime agenda. In documenting the transformation of a war for the Union into a war against slavery, it shifts the focus from the halls of power in Washington and Richmond to the plantations, farms, and battlefields of the South and demonstrates how slaves accomplished their own liberation and shaped the destiny of a nation.

Not in the Mood

Adam Shatz reviews Benoît Peeters' Derrida: A Biography, in the LRB:

Derrida’s early work was written in the shadow of decolonisation. His first book, a translation of Husserl’s 43-page Origin of Geometry preceded by a 170-page introduction, was published in 1962, but it wasn’t until 1967 that he made his mark. That year he published three books of astonishing audacity which, taken together, amounted to a declaration of war on structuralism, then all the rage in France: Speech and Phenomena, another study of Husserl; Writing and Difference, a collection of essays originally published in journals like Tel Quel and Critique; and his masterwork,Of Grammatology. Few read the formidably dense Of Grammatology from cover to cover, but it acquired tremendous cachet; a year later, its cover made an appearance in Godard’s Le Gai Savoir. What was Of Grammatology about? When Madeleine, the heroine of Jeffrey Eugenides’s campus novel The Marriage Plot, asks a young theory-head this question, she is immediately set straight: ‘If it was “about” anything, then it was about the need to stop thinking of books as being about things.’

That’s not so far off. In all three books, Derrida’s argument was that Western thought from Plato to Rousseau to Lévi-Strauss had been hopelessly entangled in the illusion that language might provide us with access to a reality beyond language, beyond metaphor: an unmediated experience of truth and being which he called ‘presence’. Even Heidegger, a radical critic of metaphysics, had failed to escape its snares. This illusion, according to Derrida, was the corollary of a long history of ‘logocentrism’: a privileging of the spoken word as the repository of ‘presence’, at the expense of writing, which had been denigrated as a ‘dangerous supplement’, alienated from the voice, secondary, parasitic, even deceitful.

Derrida wanted not only to liberate writing from the ‘repression’ of speech, but to demonstrate that speech itself was a form of writing, a way of referring to things that aren’t there. If logocentrism was a ‘metaphysics of presence’, what he proposed was a poetics of absence – a philosophical echo of Mallarmé’s remark that what defines ‘rose’ as a word is ‘l’absence de toute rose’. 

two angry old men

Though lasting literary friendships between natural rivals are not rare — Byron and Shelley, Coleridge and Wordsworth and Edward Thomas and Robert Frost spring to mind — few have been as durable as the one that began in the Front Quad of St John’s College, Oxford, one afternoon in May 1941 when a mutual friend introduced what their biographer calls ‘the odd couple’ by pointing his fingers at Kingsley Amis while imitating the sound of a gunshot. On cue, the fair-haired freshman yelled in pain, clutched his chest and staggered back to fall on a convenient pile of laundry sacks. Philip Larkin, a deliberately conspicuous figure in drab wartime Oxford, clad in bow tie, yellow waistcoat and the city’s only pair of cerise trousers, was suitably impressed by the performance. ‘I stood silent. For the first time in my life I felt myself in the presence of a talent greater than my own,’ he later publicly recalled.

more from Nigel Jones at The Spectator here.

dung into diamonds

In fact, Burton knew a lot about excremental places. Twenty-seven years before this incident, we find, in the matter-of-fact diary of the fourteen-year-old Richard Jenkins (he later adopted the last name of his guardian and mentor Philip Burton) laconic entries: “Bucket of D.” “Went up Mountain and had a bucket of D.” “Fetched a bucket of D. There was another man up there but I was very keen today I could smell D. a mile off. This mountain is nothing but D.” “D.” is code for dung. The adolescent Richard earned money by climbing the mountains outside the industrial town of Port Talbot, scooping animal manure into his bucket, carrying it back down the mountain, and selling it to gardeners in the town. The alchemy of Burton’s career is the transformation of dung into diamonds. There is a delicious moment in the diaries when he is reading in bed “and E. was around the corner of the room I asked: What are you doing lumpy? She said like a little girl and quite seriously: ‘Playing with my jewels.’” The innocence is as much his as hers: Burton’s idea of wealth—dressing your princess in diamonds—is a fantasy of childhood poverty.

more from Fintan O’Toole at the NYRB here.

Brigham Young and the restless

Like most founders of world-changing institutions (and nearly all religious ones), Young led the kind of outsize life that lends itself to these Janus-faced interpretations. The great virtue of John G. Turner’s new biography of Brigham Young—the first major study since LDS historian Leonard Arrington’s Brigham Young: American Moses (1985)—is the author’s stolid resistance to either version of the traditional Young caricature. Turner, a professor of religious studies at George Mason University, treats him as an exceptional spiritual figure (“a leader who understood himself as following in the footsteps of the ancient biblical prophets could not readily function within the US territorial system,” Turner drily notes), but also as an avatar of the frontier spirit of colonial conquest during the mid–nineteenth century. By settling a Utah territory that originally comprised one-sixth of the western United States, Young was “the greatest colonizer in American history,” Turner writes. And in establishing his desert kingdom in the face of sustained federal resistance, “he brought many of the key political issues of mid-nineteenth-century America into sharp relief: westward expansion, popular sovereignty, religious freedom, vigilantism, and Reconstruction.”

more from Chris Lehmann at The Nation here.

The best of the year’s lives and letters

From The Guardian:

What makes us curious to read about someone’s life? Hype is not always enough. Much of the noise surrounding the launch of Salman Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton (Cape, £25) was the sound of backfiring, after his American literary agent made any lorry driver, bookseller or newspaper editor liable to $250,000 damages should a copy of the book (which champions freedom of speech) fall into the public’s hands before publication day. Once free to buy it for themselves, only some 12,000 readers responded. And yet, under the blanket coverage, a fine book was struggling to get out – overlong maybe, but also funny and painful.

Of course, it helps if the memoirist has a good enemy. Edna O’Brien’s Country Girl (Faber, £20) charts her escape from a succession of foes just as unyielding as the Ayatollah. First, the Virgin Mary – O’Brien was briefly in a convent; then her birthplace, Ireland, where she dug herself a “pestiferous, vile, slime-ridden pool of transgression”; then marriage, to a jealous rival who snarls: “You can write and I can never forgive you.” The early sections smack of the gilt-edged pages of O’Brien’s religious treasury. Words run away with her as she elopes with lover after hectic lover, and enters “the carnivore world of celebrity” on the arm of actors such as Richard Burton, whose diaries (The Richard Burton Diaries, Yale, £25, edited by Chris Williams) curiously omit their “mesmerised” encounters. But her account of bringing up two boys is extraordinarily affecting, and her understanding of the mystery of writing seems spot on: “It comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open.”

More here.

Sorry, vegans: Eating meat and cooking food is how humans got their big brains

Christopher Wanjek in the Washington Post:

Vegetarian, vegan and raw diets can be healthful, probably far more healthful than the typical American diet. But to call these diets “natural” for humans is a bit of a stretch in terms of evolution, according to two recent studies.

Eating meat and cooking food made us human, the studies suggest, enabling the brains of our prehuman ancestors to grow dramatically over a few million years.

Although this isn’t the first such assertion from archaeologists and evolutionary biologists, the new studies demonstrate that it would have been biologically implausible for humans to evolve such a large brain on a raw, vegan diet and that meat-eating was a crucial element of human evolution at least a million years before the dawn of humankind.

At the core of this research is the understanding that the modern human brain consumes 20 percent of the body’s energy at rest, twice that of other primates. Meat and cooked foods were needed to provide the necessary calorie boost to feed a growing brain.

One study, published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examined the brain size of several primates. For the most part, larger bodies have larger brains across species. Yet humans have exceptionally large, neuron-rich brains for our body size, while gorillas — three times as massive as humans — have smaller brains with one-third the neurons. Why?

More here.

Linus Akesson introduces the Chipophone

Two-State Solution on the Line

Gro Harlem Brundtland and Jimmy Carter in the New York Times:

In the current political climate, it is highly unlikely that bilateral talks between Israel and the Palestinians can restart. Action is needed that will alter the current dynamic. As Elders, we believe that the Palestinian statehood bid at the United Nations is such a moment.

On Nov. 29, U.N. member states will be asked to vote on a resolution to grant “non-member observer state status” to Palestine, a significant upgrade from its current “observer entity” status. We urge all member states to vote in favor.

In going to the General Assembly, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is not carrying out a provocative act. Nor is he undermining trust and distracting from the pursuit of peace, as his critics have said.

This is a vote for human rights and the rule of law. It is completely consistent with decades of commitment by the United States, Europe and the rest of the world to peace in the Middle East based on the creation of a viable and contiguous Palestinian state existing side by side with Israel. It is a lawful, peaceful, diplomatic act in line with past U.N. resolutions and international law.

More here. [Photo of Carter and Brundtland in East Jerusalem from here.]

Thursday Poem

Let me tell you about my marvelous god


Let me tell you about my marvelous god, how he hides in the hexagons
of the bees, how the drought that wrings its leather hands
above the world is of his making, as well as the rain in the quiet minutes
that leave only thoughts of rain.
An atom is working and working, an atom is working in deepest
night, then bursting like the farthest star; it is far
smaller than a pinprick, far smaller than a zero and it has no
will, no will toward us.
This is why the heart has paced and paced,
will pace and pace across the field where yarrow
was and now is dust. A leaf catches
in a bone. The burrow’s shut by a tumbled clod
and the roots, upturned, are hot to the touch.
How my god is a feathered and whirling thing; you will singe your arm
when you pluck him from the air,
when you pluck him from that sky
where grieving swirls, and you will burn again
throwing him back.


by Susan Stewart
from Columbarium
(University of Chicago Press, 2003)

Past 5,000 years prolific for changes to human genome

From Nature:

The human genome has been busy over the past 5,000 years. Human populations have grown exponentially, and new genetic mutations arise with each generation. Humans now have a vast abundance of rare genetic variants in the protein-encoding sections of the genome^{1, 2}. A study published today in Nature³ now helps to clarify when many of those rare variants arose. Researchers used deep sequencing to locate and date more than one million single-nucleotide variants — locations where a single letter of the DNA sequence is different from other individuals — in the genomes of 6,500 African and European Americans. Their findings confirm early work by Akey¹ suggesting that the majority of variants, including potentially harmful ones, were picked up during the past 5,000–10,000 years. Researchers also saw the genetic stamp of the diverging migratory history of the two groups.

The large sample size — 4,298 North Americans of European descent and 2,217 African Americans — has enabled the researchers to mine down into the human genome, says study co-author Josh Akey, a genomics expert at the University of Washington in Seattle. He adds that the researchers now have “a way to look at recent human history in a way that we couldn’t before.” Akey and his colleagues were able to dig out genetic variants occurring in less than 0.1% of the sample population — a resolution that is a full order of magnitude finer than that achieved in previous studies, says Alon Keinan, a statistical geneticist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who was not involved with the study. Of 1.15 million single-nucleotide variants found among more than 15,000 protein-encoding genes, 73% in arose the past 5,000 years, the researchers report. On average, 164,688 of the variants — roughly 14% — were potentially harmful, and of those, 86% arose in the past 5,000 years. “There’s so many of [variants] that exist that some of them have to contribute to disease,” says Akey

More here.

Can a Jellyfish Unlock the Secret of Immortality?

Nathaniel Rich in the New York Times:

After more than 4,000 years — almost since the dawn of recorded time, when Utnapishtim told Gilgamesh that the secret to immortality lay in a coral found on the ocean floor — man finally discovered eternal life in 1988. He found it, in fact, on the ocean floor. The discovery was made unwittingly by Christian Sommer, a German marine-biology student in his early 20s. He was spending the summer in Rapallo, a small city on the Italian Riviera, where exactly one century earlier Friedrich Nietzsche conceived “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”: “Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again. . . .”

Sommer was conducting research on hydrozoans, small invertebrates that, depending on their stage in the life cycle, resemble either a jellyfish or a soft coral. Every morning, Sommer went snorkeling in the turquoise water off the cliffs of Portofino. He scanned the ocean floor for hydrozoans, gathering them with plankton nets. Among the hundreds of organisms he collected was a tiny, relatively obscure species known to biologists as Turritopsis dohrnii. Today it is more commonly known as the immortal jellyfish.

Sommer kept his hydrozoans in petri dishes and observed their reproduction habits. After several days he noticed that his Turritopsis dohrnii was behaving in a very peculiar manner, for which he could hypothesize no earthly explanation. Plainly speaking, it refused to die.

More here.  [Thanks to Steve Chasan.]

JACK GILBERT, 1925-2012

Alice Quinn in The New Yorker:

In California recently I introduced the poet Kay Ryan by admitting to the audience that I took an awfully long time to catch up to her work while I was poetry editor at The New Yorker. Kay had been sending in poems through the late eighties and early nineties, and I always responded respectfully, asking for another chance, politely declining the poems she’d sent. Eventually, she chided me, and I asked to see all the poems from her forthcoming book that had not been published. She sent them—a packet of ten or so, including poems I’d seen and sent back to her, and we accepted several, publishing three in one issue. Sometimes it takes the first big yes to unlock someone’s work. We read all the poems differently after we’ve fallen in love and been changed by that single poem.

Since Jack Gilbert died, on November 11th, friends have written to me of their passion for his work and of the big string of his poems that ran in The New Yorker in 2004 and 2005. I was late catching up to his work, too, in spite of my exposure to it. I was at Knopf when Gordon Lish published Jack’s second book of poetry, “Monolithos,” in 1982. At the time I didn’t peer into the book deeply enough to be captivated by the poems as I later decisively would be. Perhaps I was a little jealous— Gordon had obviously landed a big fish. It wasn’t until I made my way to The New Yorker and to the poetry desk that I took the measure of Jack’s immense singularity and had the opportunity to hold his work aloft myself.

More here.

Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists

No octaves. Ever.

But living in Rome for a year in the 70s changed me forever. Giacinto Scelsi (“the Charles Ives of Italy’) was there back then (I used his Steinway piano to compose there). He would sit at his dual Ondolias in his apartment overlooking the Palatine Hill, recording primordial drones and spacey improvisations onto reel-to-reel tapes; Fredric Rzweski lived here, too — his variations on The People United worker song mixed Lizstian virtuosity with leftist political edginess, and made a big splash everywhere. Back then I used to trek up to see the gentle Goffredo Petrassi in his elegant apartment for lessons and lunch. I sat with Luciano Berio in Lukas Foss’ studio at the Villa Aurelia, as he lamented, “life is too short to have to sit through the mindless repetitions of those minimalists.”

more from Robert Beaser at The Opinionater here.

do we make reality?

Holt’s guiding premise here comes from the great 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza: “Of all the possible resolutions to the mystery of existence,” Holt writes, “perhaps the most exhilarating would be the discovery that, contrary to all appearances, the world is causa sui: the cause of itself.” For Spinoza, all mental and physical existents were temporally modified expressions of a single substance, an infinite substance that he called God or Nature. Albert Einstein embraced Spinoza’s idea that the world was divine and self-causing, as more recently have other “metaphysically inclined physicists” like Sir Roger Penrose and the late John Archibald Wheeler. Such scientists go even further, proposing that human consciousness has a critical role in the world’s self-creation. “Although we seem to be a negligible part of the cosmos,” Holt writes in summary of these ideas, “it is our consciousness that gives reality to it as a whole.”

more from Jay Tolson at The American Scholar here.

One, Two or Three States

While a one-man one-vote scenario in a single bi-national state would no doubt look good on paper, and possibly even help heal some of the territorial, psychological, and legal wounds dividing the two communities, the lack of a clear pathway for achieving this goal and the seemingly insurmountable obstacles found in its way are such that this idea is often dismissed as utopian or a simple thought experiment at best. Israel’s categorical refusal to even consider a one-state paradigm, given that this would imply an end to the Jewish demographic majority, coupled with the great uncertainty and high risk of violence that would follow an eventual disbanding of the PA or an Israeli physical re-occupation of the West Bank are also matters worth considering. The Gaza Strip, ruled by Hamas as a separate entity from the West Bank since 2007, is another question mark hovering over the one-state paradigm, and the continued division between the Palestinian factions of Hamas and Fatah further complicates not only the one-state but also the two-state formula given that in practice what has been developing on the ground is a three-state reality. Finally, many critics of the one-state framework point to the fact that nationalism and a quest for sovereignty continue to be the major driving forces underpinning the conflict and further that there is no functioning example of a bi-national state in the Middle East. On the contrary, the worrying example of Lebanon’s ethno-religious conflicts is often cited as a case in point.

more from Andrea Dessì at Reset here.

Invisible Borders: Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke

Emily St. John Mandel in The Millions:

Hamid is best-known for his second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist.Moth Smoke, recently re-released by Riverhead, was his first. The plotting is masterful, especially for a first novel; Hamid’s shifts in perspective are effective, and while we know from the courtroom scene at the beginning that a child will be killed, we don’t know which one, which makes the appearance of every child in these pages an event fraught with peril. Moth Smoke was published to considerable critical acclaim in 2000, which is to say after Pakistan tested its first nuclear weapons, and the arms race between Pakistan and India form the jittery backdrop to Daru’s long goodbye.

The book is suffused through and through by a terrible uncertainty, a sense of ground shifting beneath one’s feet. Hamid uses Daru’s descent from middle-class respectability to desperation as a lens through which to examine the corruption and the complexities of late-90′s Pakistani society. It’s not an especially flattering portrait, but a major strength of the book is Hamid’s refusal to take an easy moralistic stance. Daru is a victim of circumstance, but he’s also capable of cruelty, poor decisions, and hypocrisy. He feels victimized by the monied classes, but mistreats the boy who keeps house for him. He carries a strain of entitlement; he’s insulted by the suggestion that he sell cars for a living. Through his education and through his friendship with Ozi he’s been allowed a glimpse at an entirely different Pakistan, the Lahore of the monied elite, and his rage is fueled by the impossibility of crossing the border from his Pakistan to Ozi’s. Ozi’s Pakistan is a fortress. Money is the only way in.

Ozi is amoral, but on the other hand, as he notes in a chapter told from his perspective, he manages not to slap his housekeeper and he doesn’t sleep with his best friend’s wife, which is more than can be said for Daru. Yes, Ozi acknowledges, the rich in Pakistan use their money to create their own reality, separate from the rest of the struggling country, but what choice do they have?

More here.

Wednesday Poem

Keats

When Keats, at last beyond the curtain
of love’s distraction, lay dying in his room
on the Piazza di Spagna, the melody of the Bernini
Fountain “filling him like flowers,”
he held his breath like a coin, looked out
into the moonlight and thought he saw snow.
He did not suppose it was fever or the body’s
weakness turning the mind. He thought, “England!”
and there he was, secretly, for the rest
of his improvidently short life: up to his neck
in sleigh bells and the impossibly English cries
of street vendors, perfect
and affectionate as his soul.
For days the snow and statuary sang him so far
beyond regret that if now you walk rancorless
and alone there, in the piazza, the white shadow
of his last words to Severn, “Don’t be frightened,”
may enter you.

by Christopher Howell
from Light’s Ladder
University of Washington Press, 2004

Alexandre Dumas

From Harvard Magazine:

He was the son of a black slave and a renegade French aristocrat, born in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) when the island was the center of the world sugar trade. The boy’s uncle was a rich, hard-working planter who dealt sugar and slaves out of a little cove on the north coast called Monte Cristo—but his father, Antoine, neither rich nor hard-working, was the eldest son. In 1775, Antoine sailed to France to claim the family inheritance, pawning his black son into slavery to buy passage. Only after securing his title and inheritance did he send for the boy, who arrived on French soil late in 1776, listed in the ship’s records as “slave Alexandre.” At 16, he moved with his father, now a marquis, to Paris, where he was educated in classical philosophy, equestrianism, and swordsmanship. But at 24, he decided to set off on his own: joining the dragoons at the lowest rank, he was stationed in a remote garrison town where he specialized in fighting duels. The year was 1786. When the French Revolution erupted three years later, the cause of liberty, equality, and fraternity gave him his chance. As a German-Austrian army marched on Paris in 1792 to reimpose the monarchy, he made a name for himself by capturing a large enemy patrol without firing a shot. He got his first officer’s commission at the head of a band of fellow black swordsmen, revolutionaries called the Legion of Americans, or simply la Légion Noire. In the meantime, he had met his true love, an innkeeper’s daughter, while riding in to rescue her town from brigands.

If all this sounds a bit like the plot of a nineteenth-century novel, that’s because the life of Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie—who took his slave mother’s surname when he enlisted, becoming simply “Alexandre (Alex) Dumas”—inspired some of the most popular novels ever written. His son, the Dumas we all know, echoed the dizzying rise and tragic downfall of his own father in The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. Known for acts of reckless daring in and out of battle, Alex Dumas was every bit as gallant and extraordinary as D’Artagnan and his comrades rolled into one. But it was his betrayal and imprisonment in a dungeon on the coast of Naples, poisoned to the point of death by faceless enemies, that inspired his son’s most powerful story.

More here.

The History of Boredom

From Smithsonian:

“Boredom” first became a word in 1852, with the publication of Charles Dickens’ convoluted (and sometimes boring) serial, Bleak House; as an emotional state, it obviously dates back a lot further. Roman philosopher Seneca talks about boredom as a kind of nausea, while Greek historian Plutarch notes that Pyrrhus (he of the “Pyrrhic victory”) became desperately bored in his retirement. Dr. Peter Toohey, a Classics professor at the University of Calgary, traced the path of being bored in 2011 in Boredom: A Lively History. Among the stories he uncovered was one from the 2nd century AD in which one Roman official was memorialized with a public inscription for rescuing an entire town from boredom (the Latin taedia), though exactly how is lost to the ages. And the vast amount of ancient graffiti on Roman walls is a testament to the fact that teenagers in every era deface property when they have nothing else to do.

In Christian tradition, chronic boredom was “acedia”, a sin that’s sort of a proto-sloth. The “noonday demon”, as one of its early chroniclers called it, refers to a state of being simultaneously listless and restless and was often ascribed to monks and other people who led cloistered lives. By the Renaissance, it had morphed from a demon-induced sin into melancholia, a depression brought on by too aggressive study of maths and sciences; later, it was the French ennui. In the 18th century, boredom became a punitive tool, although the Quakers who built the first “penitentiary” probably didn’t see it that way. In 1790, they constructed a prison in Philadelphia in which inmates were kept in isolation at all hours of the day. The idea was that the silence would help them to seek forgiveness from God. In reality, it just drove them insane.

More here.

The Neurofeminist

Richard Marshall interviews Anne Jaap Jacobson, in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: ...In your paper ‘Dennett’s Dangerous Ideas:ediel science. Elements of a critique of Cognitivism’ you begin with the blunt statement, ‘Human beings do sometimes believe false generalisations about themselves… we have, or may have, false beliefs about our psychology.’ You give a thorough tour of the geography of this terrain. A key thinker for you, in that he helps set the terms of the discussion, is Steven Stich who claims that we may well not have beliefs and desires. Could you say something about how someone might think such a thing?

AJJ: We talk about beliefs and desires a lot, and it seems bizarre to say that that is all wrong. One sensible thing one might mean, though, is that beliefs and desires are not the natural kinds that we need for a deeper understanding of how the mind works. I do not think, as eliminativists are inclined to do, that we can simply give up such ways of talking. Our moral and prudential language is tied to our psychological ascriptions. I have tentatively distinguished between synthetic and analytic approaches, where the synthetic approach attempts to capture the phenomenology. The analytic approach looks more to the scientific explanations in a possible quite different language. I think we can expected there to be corrections in either direction.

3:AM: OK, so then you argue that there is a mistake at the very heart of recent philosophy of mind. You think this is a mistake inherited from eighteenth century thought and has been transplanted into the work of philosophers such as Dennett and Fodor. So first can you tell us about this error?

AJJ: Let me explain how my views have become enlarged, though not really changed. I thought for some time that I simply could not do philosophy of mind. I first encountered it in the taxonomies of Gilbert Ryle and Tony Kenny. Ryle was in fact my over-all BPhil supervisor at Oxford. Rather to my horror, I realised that, as it were, I was failing to grasp what it was to go on in the same way. It was completely eluding me. At that time, I was doing a lot of work on causation, and so I reckoned that I’d better stick to metaphysics and epistemology, which seemed to me more tractable. I now think that one problem was that mental terms were being assumed to have some unity that I now believe they do not. 

Infinite Proofs: The Effects of Mathematics on David Foster Wallace

Kyle McCarthy reviews David Foster Wallace's Everything and More, in the LA Review of Books:

TO THE EXTENT THAT HE WAS AT HOME anywhere, David Foster Wallace was at home in the world of math. As an undergraduate, he studied modal logic; Everything and More, his book on infinity, explained Georg Cantor’s work on set theory to a general audience, and Infinite Jest includes a two-page footnote that uses the Mean Value Theorem to determine the distribution of megatonnage among players in a nuclear fallout game.

But Wallace didn’t just talk about math. He structured his work with it. In a 1996Bookworm interview with Michael Silverblatt, Wallace explained that he modeledInfinite Jest after a Sierpinski Gasket, a type of fractal in which a triangle is infinitely subdivided into smaller triangles using the midpoint of its borders. Pressed by Silverblatt on why he chose such a formation, Wallace elaborated: “Its chaos is more on the surface; its bones are its beauty.”

Now, many people agree that Infinite Jest is a singular novel, sui generis, akin perhaps only to Moby-Dick in its originality, but the qualities that earn the book that praise — its grotesque hyperrealism, exuberant asides, and melding of academese and slang, its spikes and spurts of kindness and abjection — seem to have nothing to do with Wallace’s experimental use of fractals. Wallace’s genius lies in his guts, his encyclopedic imagination, his eyes and ears, but not, it appears, in his tricks with advanced math. And yet perhaps the fact that the casual reader remains oblivious to the Sierpinski Gasket is proof of its success. Traditional narrative structures — the Fichtean curve, Aristotle’s rising action — are designed to keep us engaged and organized, yet remain invisible; a well placed climax pops and hooks, even if we don’t notice its strategic placement. And as an organizing principle, the fractal has an intuitive logic: the best novels already have a fractionalized quality — each chapter, and indeed every paragraph and sentence, reproduce in miniature its central conflict and arc. Wallace’s comment to Silverblatt made me wonder if fractals, or some other mathematical pattern, might generate order from everyday experience without the ordinary contrivances of plot.

Rorty and the Democratic Power of the Novel

Christopher J. Voparil in Eurozine:

The context of Rorty's embrace of the novel within the development of his own thought is instructive for understanding his view of the distinctive power of this genre over others, including philosophy. As he fleshed out the political consequences of his sweeping philosophical critique in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, in the 1990s social and political concerns came to the forefront of his work in an unprecedented way. A central preoccupation of Rorty's was "how we treat people whom we think not worth understanding" – that is, those people whom "are not viewed as possible conversational partners". The thesis I will argue is that Rorty's turn to the novel is part of an effort to bring excluded voices into what he called in the final section of Mirror, the "conversation of mankind".

The primary thrust of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature advocates a fundamental shift away from a conception of knowledge as accuracy of representation and towards an understanding of knowledge as conversation and social practice. The idea that conversation is "the ultimate context with which knowledge is to be understood" leads Rorty to a preoccupation with "conversation with strangers", understood as those who fall outside our "sense of community based on the imagined possibility of conversation". If, as Rorty claimed, "the community is the source of epistemic authority", and, building on Wilfrid Sellars, "we can only come under epistemic rules when we have entered the community where the game governed by these rules is played," then we attribute knowledge to beings "on the basis of their potential membership in this community". To illustrate this point, Rorty gives the example of how we are more likely to get sentimental about "babies and the more attractive sorts of animal" as having feelings than, say, "flounders and spiders". Likewise, we are more likely to care about koalas than pigs, he tells us, even though pigs rate higher on the intelligence scale, because "pigs don't writhe in quite the right humanoid way, and the pig's face is the wrong shape for the facial expressions which go with ordinary conversation".

Derrida: A Biography

Terry Eagleton reviews Benoît Peeters new book, in The Guardian:

In May 1992, the dons of Cambridge University filed into their parliament to vote on whether to award an honorary degree to the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, founder of so-called deconstruction. Despite a deftly managed smear campaign by the opposition, Derrida's supporters carried the day. It would be interesting to know how many of those who tried to block him in the name of rigorous scholarship had read a single book of his, or even a couple of articles.

The truth is that they did not need to. The word was abroad that this purveyor of fashionable French gobbledegook was a charlatan and a nihilist, a man who believed that anything could mean anything and that there was nothing in the world but writing. He was a corrupter of youth who had to be stopped in his tracks. As a teenager, Derrida had fantasised with some of his friends about blowing up their school with some explosives they had acquired. There were those in Cambridge who thought he was planning to do the same to western civilisation. He did, however, have an unlikely sympathiser. When the Duke of Edinburgh, chancellor of Cambridge University, presented Derrida with his degree in the year in which Charles and Diana separated, he murmured to him that deconstruction had begun to affect his own family too.

Deconstruction holds that nothing is ever entirely itself. There is a certain otherness lurking within every assured identity. It seizes on the out-of-place element in a system, and uses it to show how the system is never quite as stable as it imagines. There is something within any structure that is part of it but also escapes its logic. It comes as no surprise that the author of these ideas was a Sephardic Jew from colonial Algeria, half in and half out of French society. If his language was French, he could also speak the patois of working-class Arabs. He would later return to his home country as a conscript in the French army, a classic instance of divided identity.

Stalker is zen while Nostalghia is not

Dyer himself says that the book is not a synopsis but an amplification of the film. Amplification towards what? Towards the metaphysical, of course. The book is philosophical in that it asks essential questions: what is film, what is literature, what am I, the writer? Nevertheless, Dyer’s approach is peculiar. He is not writing philosophy, he is not analyzing, and he is not even telling us the story of the film. “Literary anthropology” comes to mind, which does indeed exist. I know some self-critical and repentant philosophers (not all of them Germans) who have consciously turned towards that genre. Dyer himself mentions “Tarkovsky’s filmic archeology of the discarded” (p. 117) and I believe that this is exactly what Dyer is doing himself. The ruminating exploration of places draws us into Stalker, which is a film about a place (the Zone). Dyer retells this place with all its décor, colors, flickering lights, noises and smells. We might have seen the stone in the water, but Dyer lifts it up and tells us what is underneath. Finally, his anthropology of things brings us closer to the metaphysical meaning of the film (he does not identify the 1961 Peugeot 404 convertible, though).

more from Thorsten Botz-Bornstein at The Berlin Review of Books here.

thank god for uncle joe

The most common criticism of Epstein I know is made more or less along these lines. He is, some would argue, a great prose stylist but not a very deep thinker, a septuagenarian poseur who has admittedly mastered euphony but whose prose leaves one feeling a bit cold. I have never found this to be the case. Like his mentor A.J. Liebling, Epstein dispenses real wisdom with what looks like insouciance but is really just old-fashioned agility. The most marked characteristic of his prose is a maddening subtlety that allows him to be breezy without sounding flippant, to appear learned without being pedantic, and, most strikingly, to be moral but never moralistic. His personality escapes the page with such force that, having read at least two horizontal feet of his books, one is almost tempted to think of him as a witty, fair-minded, loquacious uncle.

more from Matthew Walther at The Millions here.

mole

By that time, they were already beginning to think about Oaxaca, Mexico. Oaxaca, which is in the narrow part of southern Mexico that bends east toward Central America, is sometimes known as “the land of the seven moles”—a mole being a thick sauce made from as many as thirty ingredients, in a process so laborious that it puts most complicated Continental dishes into the category of Pop-Tart preparation by comparison. Having spent some time in Oaxaca many years ago, I knew that it also turns out an astonishing variety of the small treats Mexicans call antojitos—many of which consist of something in or on masa, the dough made from alkaline-treated corn kernels. Oaxaca is also known as a place where artisanal mescal thrives and tequila is spoken of as an inferior commercial tipple that might as well have been produced in the Coca-Cola bottling plant. In recent years, Oaxaca’s food scene, largely based on the traditional ingredients and methods of its indigenous people, has been celebrated by some icons of the American food world. Once Abigail and Brian decided on Oaxaca, I was quick to say that I would soon be visiting. “I’ll just give you a couple of months to find your way around,” I said to Abigail. “If you find your way around to a spot that serves a superior mole negro, all the better.”

more from Calvin Trillin at The New Yorker here.

Tuesday Poem

Become Becoming

.

Wait for evening.
Then you’ll be alone.

.

Wait for the playground to empty.
Then call out those companions from childhood:

.

The one who closed his eyes
and pretended to be invisible.
The one to whom you told every secret.
The one who made a world of any hiding place.

.

And don’t forget the one who listened in silence
while you wondered out loud:

.

Is the universe an empty mirror?  A flowering tree?
Is the universe the sleep of a woman?

.

Wait for the sky’s last blue
(the color of your homesickness).
Then you’ll know the answer.

.

Wait for the air’s first old (that color of Amen).
Then you’ll spy the wind’ barefoot steps.

.

Then you’ll recall that story beginning
with a child who strays in the woods.

.

The search for him goes on in the growing
shadow of the clock.

.

And the face behind the clock’s face
is not his father’s face.

.

And the hands behind the clock’s hands
are not his mother’s hands.

.

All of Time began when you first answered
to the names your mother and father gave you.

.

Soon, those names will travel with the leaves.
Then, you can trade places with the wind.

.

Then you’ll remember your life
as a book of candles,
each page read by the light of its own burning.

.
.

by Li-Young Lee
from Behind My Eyes 

 

 

The FP Top 100 Global Thinkers

From Foreign Policy:

AUNG SAN SUU KYI, THEIN SEIN: For showing that change can happen anywhere, even in one of the world's most repressive states.

In 2012, the hopes for the Arab Spring began fading into cynicism as the world watched Syria descend into civil war, while the region's nascent democracies struggled with their newfound freedom. But, meanwhile, one of the most remarkable and unexpected political reversals of our time has unfolded on the other side of the globe: Burma, long among the world's most repressive dictatorships, began to reform under the leadership of two very unlikely allies. For nearly 20 years, dissident Aung San Suu Kyi was sealed under house arrest by Burma's paranoid military junta, which had drawn an iron curtain over the country since 1962. Now she's a duly elected member of the country's parliament -- and it's partly thanks to reformist President Thein Sein, a former general often described as an awkward, bookish bureaucrat. To the astonishment of many, Thein Sein began loosening restrictions on free speech and opening the economy after coming to power in 2011. This year, as the United States restored diplomatic ties with Burma (which the junta renamed Myanmar in 1989) and eased travel and economic sanctions, his government curbed censorship of the media and freed hundreds of political prisoners.

Aung San Suu Kyi, the soft-spoken, iconic political activist whom devotees call simply "the Lady," may not seem like an obvious partner for Thein Sein, but she has become one by doing what few legends of her stature can: embracing the messy pragmatism of politics. Although Burma's struggles are far from over -- she has warned that international investment has been too rapid, and ethnic violence is escalating -- the willingness of both the Lady and the general to embrace short-term compromise and foster long-term reconciliation in what was only recently one of the world's most isolated countries is something to celebrate. Fittingly, Aung San Suu Kyi finally was able to accept her 1991 Nobel Peace Prize in June. She used the occasion to remind the world of those like her, who struggle in the most forlorn places: "To be forgotten too is to die a little. It is to lose some of the links that anchor us to the rest of humanity." It is a sentiment still felt from Aleppo to Havana, Pyongyang to Tehran, but also, as Aung San Suu Kyi and Thein Sein have shown, one that doesn't need to be permanent.

More here.

Thinking Clearly About Personality Disorders

From The New York Times:

This weekend the Board of Trustees of the American Psychiatric Association will vote on whether to adopt a new diagnostic system for some of the most serious, and striking, syndromes in medicine: personality disorders. Personality disorders occupy a troublesome niche in psychiatry. The 10 recognized syndromes are fairly well represented on the self-help shelves of bookstores and include such well-known types as narcissistic personality disorder, avoidant personality disorder, as well as dependent and histrionic personalities. But when full-blown, the disorders are difficult to characterize and treat, and doctors seldom do careful evaluations, missing or downplaying behavior patterns that underlie problems like depression and anxiety in millions of people. The new proposal — part of the psychiatric association’s effort of many years to update its influential diagnostic manual — is intended to clarify these diagnoses and better integrate them into clinical practice, to extend and improve treatment. But the effort has run into so much opposition that it will probably be relegated to the back of the manual, if it’s allowed in at all. Dr. David J. Kupfer, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh and chairman of the task force updating the manual, would not speculate on which way the vote might go: “All I can say is that personality disorders were one of the first things we tackled, but that doesn’t make it the easiest.” The entire exercise has forced psychiatrists to confront one of the field’s most elementary, yet still unresolved, questions: What, exactly, is a personality problem?

Habits of Thought

It wasn’t supposed to be this difficult. Personality problems aren’t exactly new or hidden. They play out in Greek mythology, from Narcissus to the sadistic Ares. They percolate through biblical stories of madmen, compulsives and charismatics. They are writ large across the 20th century, with its rogues’ gallery of vainglorious, murderous dictators. Yet it turns out that producing precise, lasting definitions of extreme behavior patterns is exhausting work. It took more than a decade of observing patients before the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin could draw a clear line between psychotic disorders, like schizophrenia, and mood problems, like depression or bipolar disorder.

More here.

The Quarterly DAG-3QD Peace and Justice Symposium

Dear Reader,

We are very pleased to collaborate with the Amsterdam-based Dialogue Advisory Group (DAG) to bring to you quarterly online symposia on topics of international peace and justice. The is the second in this series of symposia; the first was published about three months ago and can be seen here.

DAG is an organization which discreetly assists government, inter-government and other actors to confidentially manage national and international mediation efforts. Among their publicly known activities is DAG’s involvement in verifying the ETA ceasefire in Basque Country and the decommissioning of the weapons of INLA, a dissident Republican armed group in Northern Ireland.

DAG is directed by Ram Manikkalingam who also teaches politics at the University of Amsterdam. He advised the previous President of Sri Lanka during the peace process with the Tamil Tigers and prior to that advised the Rockefeller Foundation’s program in international peace and security.

In the DAG-3QD Peace and Justice Symposia internationally recognized figures will debate challenges in conflict resolution and human rights. One (or more) author(s) will present a thesis in the form of a short essay and then the others will present critiques of that point of view. Finally, the initial author(s) will also have an opportunity to present a rebuttal to the critiques.

The topic this time is the role of gender in situations of war and conflict.

The distinguished participants in this symposium are:

• Rita Manchanda: Research Director of South Asia Forum for Human Rights (SAFHR) and has written extensively on security and human rights issues in the region. In particular she has intellectually shaped the discourse on feminizing security. Among her many publications is the volume Women War and Peace in South Asia: beyond Victimhood to Agency which has been a pioneering study on feminist theorizing and praxis on conflict and peace building.
• Antonia Potter Prentice: Prior to her current work on gender, peace and security as Senior Associate to the European Peacebuilding Liaison Office, Senior Advisor to the Dialogue Advisory Group and consultant for organizations including the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, the Global Network of Women Peacemakers and Terre des Hommes, she was Country Director for Oxfam GB in Indonesia, its largest programme in the SE Asia region. She initiated the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue’s work on women, gender and peacemaking and has worked for a number of NGOs, mostly in Asia, having lived in Afghanistan, America (New York), Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Switzerland (Geneva), Timor Leste, and currently Belgium (Brussels). Antonia is a Board Member of the Democratic Progress Institute and is married with three small children. She is starting out on Twitter at Antonia_pp.
• Elisabeth Rehn: Minister Rehn has a long political career in Finland, as Member of Parliament, Minister of Defense, Minister of Equality, Presidential candidate, and also as a Member of European Parliament.  Since 1995 she has been with the United Nations, as Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Former Yugoslavia, as Special Representative of the Secretary General in Bosnia & Herzegovina, and later as independent expert on Peace and Security. She is the co-author of the 1325 report for Unifem "Women War Peace" 2002, Programme of Assistance to the Palestinian People (PAPP) report for UNDP on the situation in Palestine 2004, and the UNHCHR report on DRC 2010. Rehn is also the Chair of the Board of Directors at the Trust Fund for Victims at the International Criminal Court, the Hague.
• Chuck Sudetic: Writer and former journalist and analyst for the United Naitons war crimes tribunal in The Hague. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Economist, The Atlantic Monthly, and other publications. He authored Blood and Vengeance, a critically acclaimed book that captured the experiences of two Bosnian families, one Muslim Slav, one Serb, during the tumultuous century that ended with the Srebrenica massacre of 1995. He co-authored La Caccia, the memoirs of the war crimes prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte.
• Sarah Cliffe: Special Adviser and Assistant Secretary-General for Civilian Capacities at the United Nations. Before joining the United Nations, she worked at the World Bank, covering post-conflict reconstruction, community driven development and civil service reform. She was chief of mission for the Bank’s program in Timor-Leste from 1999 to 2002; led the Bank’s Fragile and Conflict-Affected Countries Group from 2002-2007 and was Director of Operations for East Asia and the Pacific from 2007 – 2009. She was Special Representative and Director for the World Development Report on Conflict, Security and Development. She holds degrees in History and Economic Development from Cambridge and Columbia Universities.

I would like to thank the participants as well as the indefatigable Amanda Beugeling of the Dialogue Advisory Group for working closely with me in organizing these symposia. The logo for the symposia has also been designed by Amanda Beugeling.

We look forward to your comments and feedback.

Yours,

S. Abbas Raza

 

NOTE: DAG and 3QD wish to acknowledge the generous contribution of the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO, the Dutch Organisation for Scientific Research) toward these symposia, as well as the support of our readers.

 

THE SYMPOSIUM

[Click the links below to read the essays.]

1. Who’s that girl? Women, war, and the challenges of identity by Rita Manchanda and Antonia Potter Prentice
2. The Necessity of Integrating Women into Peace Processes by Elisabeth Rehn
3. Stop Bandying about Anecdotes and Loose Commentary by Chuck Sudetic
4. Women as Actors Rather than Victims of War by Sarah Cliffe
5. Let Us Start by Listening Seriously by Rita Manchanda and Antonia Potter Prentice

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Please leave comments about any of the essays in the symposium on this post. Thank you.

Who’s that girl? Women, war, and the challenges of identity

by Rita Manchanda and Antonia Potter Prentice

It’s been another knockabout month on the frontlines of that old unwon war of attrition about equality between the sexes.  On the upside we had Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard thrilling the hearts of those who abhor sexism, misogyny and hypocrisy with her magnificent, finger-pointing skewering of the Leader of the Opposition on the floor of Australia’s parliament. On the downside, first we had Pakistani schoolgirl and human rights activist Malala Yusufzai shot in the head by the Taliban; then second, back in peaceful Canada, the well-respected Human Security Report Project was telling us that they found out this year that sexual violence against women in war isn’t quite the big deal we’ve been making it out to be (although to be fair they also reminded us that domestic violence in war settings—and indeed beyond—is a serious and neglected problem; a conflict perhaps to be recognized as such all on its own). 

But without getting into the whys and wherefores of the data the Human Security Report got and how they used and presented it, the three events make you realize that the mere fact of being labelled a man or woman (or a boy or a girl) remains a very incendiary business indeed, even in peacetime. The fact is, labels matter, arguably more in wartime than in peace. After all, labels are what a lot of conflicts are about. Are you Muslim or Christian? Alawite or Sunni? Hutu or Tutsi? ‘Have’ or ‘have not’? ‘With us’ or ‘against us'?  But is it less risky to ask ‘and are you are a woman or a man?’ Does that descriptive make any difference to the labels that went before? Not only do women have many different labels, and where they can, a tendency to use them in many different ways, but as we shall see, they have a venerable history of using common labels, and those that denote shared values, to make constructive contributions to resolving their communities’ worst ills such as armed conflict, to the benefit of all.

The thing is, that women, like men, are not just women. The other labels they can lay claim to might be ethnic (I’m Tuareg), religious (I’m Jewish), political (I’m pro-government) or related to things they do like bearing children (I’m a mother), bearing arms (I’m a guerilla), or bearing witness (I’m a human rights worker) — frankly bearing a whole lot of things besides, though that is not the particular axe we want to grind in this piece. So what difference does it make which of those labels a woman uses, or others use of her? Does it matter which she chooses to prioritize and when? Is she even free to do that?

Violence starts putting red lines and black and white boxes around 'who we are' in ways we might not always choose, as do national projects and our choice of politics. Life hangs on the balance of such labels—ask Rohingya Muslims fleeing Myanmar, Buddhist tribals attacked in Bangladesh, or people with Kurdish or Armenian roots, or professing Alawite or Sunni faith from Syria fleeing into bordering lands.  And if to that I am label is added, ‘woman’ —that female body can become the ground on which some fronts of that war is fought: the purveyor of community identity and its reproducer can be sexually tortured and stigmatised, displaced, impoverished or widowed. Or, while still a child, shot in the head on the way to school.

Consider this: can Jamila forget who she is as another mass grave is unearthed where her ‘disappeared’ brother may be buried because he by virtue of being a Kashmiri Muslim was a suspect or worse expendable? Can Indu forget who she is when militants massacred her family because of who they were, forcing her to leave home and neighbours, to seek in town the ghettoized security of her community?   Yes, Jamila is a woman but she is also a Kashmiri and a Muslim, entwined in complex ways with the ethnic and religious struggle, which defines her daily life; just as Indu, a Kashmiri Pandit woman lives in with quotidian explicit reminders with her community identity.  There’s probably not a moment in the day when she is not conscious of who she is, in a way women and men living in peace in Delhi or Brussels are probably not.   

Women have won a merited reputation for bridging the divides of sectarianism and political orthodoxy to come together and organize for peace – essentially using the common values of some of the shared labels (e.g. woman, mother, wife, schoolgirl) to find middle spaces between the harder line positions that come with some of the other labels (e.g. communist, monarchist, revolutionary, reactionary, warrior).  Inspiring examples of using the female label as an organizing principle which transcends the recognized fault lines of conflict continue to crop up: the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition winning seats at the talks which led to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 and inserting language on integrated approaches to social services and education and on addressing the needs of victims which would never otherwise have been there; Sudan’s Gender Experts Team (GEST) enabling women across community divides to bring recognized new perspectives into the peace process leading to the 2006 Darfur Peace; Somali women organizing a ‘sixth’ clan in 2002, transcending clan divides by forming a clan of women who came from each and every one; and there are many more.   As Marie Mullholland, a self-proclaimed Irish nationalist republican who works with Protestant Unionist women said of her peace building work “it’s because I can imagine a future when those names won’t mean the same thing.”

Significantly, though, there aren’t examples of men organizing in the same way (or certainly none we know of; it’s an interesting side note that the international community has demanded stringent empirical research to prove the value of women’s contribution to peace making, while it has never demanded the same about men’s contributions).   The reason for this is perhaps obvious: men can stick to their other labels as through them they can access power, resources and agency.  Women’s organizing is typical of how marginalized people organize: their lack of status forces them to seek common ground and shared positions – even with plenty of disagreement, and some unresolved issues along the way.  If only more peace tables looked like a women’s coalition for peace! They don’t of course, because the key ingredients of power and resources – and let’s not forget the weapons - aren’t there.

What’s interesting though, is that whether you think that women get socialized in a gender stereotypical way to ‘nurture’ and ‘care’ or not, the times they’ve got close to peace processes have shown they tend to push for issues like inclusion, equality, justice and social reform.  They also tend to ally with and support other marginalized groups. In Afghanistan in the 2003 Constitutional Jirga 20 percent of the voting delegates were women, albeit many were proxies of warlords; but women affiliated to the Afghan Women’s Network forged alliances with other marginal groups, the Uzbeks, supporting the demand for minority rights – and getting recognition of the Uzbek language and gender sensitive language in the new Constitution.   In Nepal, in the slew of agreements that comprised the peace road map – Comprehensive Peace Agreement (2006) the Interim Constitution (2007) and the Constituent Assembly (2008-2012), the motifs that pop out are inclusiveness, proportionality and participation, derived from an alliance of discriminated and institutionally excluded groups - women, indigenous peoples, and oppressed castes.  But once the conflict resolution momentum abated and polarized politics returned, political party identities reasserted themselves and gender became a particular (and predictable) casualty: for example, no one troubled to lobby for any of the almost 4,000 (they were just under 20 percent of the full Maoist fighting force) women combatants to get demobilization, disarmament and reintegration packages designed according to their needs, as was being done for their brothers in arms.

The frustrating thing for many is that the ‘forgetting’ of gender (label or fact) is as much something women do as men.  Women can also prove to be quite the autocratic, ruthless and cruel leaders that their male counterparts can be, as feminist advocate Nicholas Kristof reminded us in the pages of the New York Times in his September 30^th opinion piece “Women Hurting Women”.  But before we get into the business of deciding that given the chance, women will behave just as men do or have done, let’s remember, that we have not yet reached the holy grail of ‘critical mass’, so we don’t actually know.  If women were at critical mass, - defined by the Committee which monitors states parties compliance with the ‘bill of rights for women’, the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, as at least 35% across all institutions of power including the media, everywhere in the world - then we would be at a point where we can judge if men and women in general handle power differently or the same.  But we’re not there yet, by a long way.  Right now, it’s still a man’s world, and the women that are making it to the top are still doing it in that context, some by reaching a helping hand down the ladder to women below, and others kicking the ladder away in echo of what perhaps was done to them before.  That’s not telling you how the critical mass of women would behave in power, it’s telling you how those individual women behave when the bulk of power is still held by the other sex.  Good luck to you, Julia Gillard.

But, with all that said, there are still other complexities for women to navigate than just the challenge of on going sex discrimination.  There are women who are fully conscious of their female identity, and who may also be fully aware of the marginalization, which has ensued from it.  But they may still choose in the interests of a community to which they belong, to identify more strongly with that group then with their ‘gender group’.  To expect women to stand apart from their community’s ethnic movements is to misread the historical experience of the many ways in which women are embedded as members of a particular ethnic community in the struggles of those groups, and nowhere more so than in conflicts which turn on ethnicity and identity issues.   It’s proven hard so far to find spaces in those conflicts where it matters less that you are a Rohingya woman, for example, than that militarization, a culture of impunity and exclusionary politics are laying waste to society and jeopardizing the future of its children. 

In the Philippines, where this very month an important framework agreement has been signed between the government and the largest Muslim rebel group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, many (though not all) women have expressed a desire to describe themselves and act first as members of the “Bangasamoro” group, which describes their ethnicity, than as women.  This is partly because of the painting of the ‘gender agenda’ as a Western imported agenda – a contention that listening to the conversation of women’s groups in pretty much any conflict-affected country in the world will quickly dispel; but they also because are looking for ways to pursue very gendered priority issues  – like pervasive domestic violence – in ways which can be integrated with the struggle to maintain their distinctive culture and the community identity which goes with it.  It’s important to remember that it’s up to those women, or the feminist Qu’ranic scholars, and all the others juggling these complicated labels, to figure out when they want to be who, and the broader purposes they want those labels to serve.

So yes, you can get a bullet in your back for speaking the wrong language in the wrong place; for praying a certain way a certain number of times a day; for casting your ‘secret’ ballot against the diktat of the hidden eye that watches; for being a girl who speaks her mind and heads off to school.  Labels are dangerous, in different and often worse ways for women than for men; playing with them may be very much like playing with fire.  But, echoing the slogan of another defining campaign on women’s rights, let’s not forget, it’s a woman’s right to choose.

 

Rita Manchanda: Research Director of South Asia Forum for Human Rights (SAFHR) and has written extensively on security and human rights issues in the region. In particular she has intellectually shaped the discourse on feminizing security. Among her many publications is the volume Women War and Peace in South Asia: beyond Victimhood to Agency which has been a pioneering study on feminist theorizing and praxis on conflict and peace building.

Antonia Potter Prentice: Prior to her current work on gender, peace and security as Senior Associate to the European Peacebuilding Liaison Office, Senior Advisor to the Dialogue Advisory Group and consultant for organizations including the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, the Global Network of Women Peacemakers and Terre des Hommes, she was Country Director for Oxfam GB in Indonesia, its largest programme in the SE Asia region. She initiated the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue’s work on women, gender and peacemaking and has worked for a number of NGOs, mostly in Asia, having lived in Afghanistan, America (New York), Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Switzerland (Geneva), Timor Leste, and currently Belgium (Brussels). Antonia is a Board Member of the Democratic Progress Institute and is married with three small children. She is starting out on Twitter at Antonia_pp.

 

To leave a comment, please see the introduction to the DAG-3QD Peace and Justice Symposia, of which this essay is a part, here.

The Necessity of Integrating Women into Peace Processes

by Elisabeth Rehn

Much good news is reaching us about “women making the case”, but it is also true that the opposite sometimes dominates.  In which category should we put the Canadian Human Rights Report, telling us that sexual violence against women in war was not the big deal we are making it to be?

In their essay, Antonia Potter Prentice and Rita Manchandan raise the question, what then is a big deal?  For me, after talking face to face with thousands of raped women and men in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Northern Uganda, Liberia, Sierra Leone, East Timor, Bosnia & Herzegovina—we have a tendency of counting this kind of problem by percentages, number of instances of sexual violence, child soldiers, refugees, IDP’s—every case is a big deal.  Unfortunately, the violence continues after the war, from a tactic of war to a habit of post-conflict life. Dr. Denis Mukwege, the founder of the Panzi Hospital in Bukavu (DRC) has told me how the war changed sexual violence to a much more brutal and destructive form. He has during the history of Panzi treated close to 40,000 women, children and men who have been victims of sexual violence.  Listening to him makes it clear that this is a big deal.

Sexual violence is indeed (despite its terrible influence on the society) not the only issue when making peace and building up society after a conflict. Women want inclusion, equality, and social reform, and very strongly, justice.  When experienced conflict mediators are asked: What is more important, peace or justice? the answer predominantly given is peace as many lives are thereby saved. But the victims of sexual violence do find justice important. Sometimes it is the only way of building their future without fear, and for overcoming stigmatization. For them ending impunity and pursuing justice is of paramount importance.

The UN resolution 1325/2000 has a main message: enhancement of women in decision making, in the peace processes, and at the negotiation tables. In some way the related resolutions which have followed took the focus from this message stressing the women’s role as victim.  Helping victims is important, but we cannot forget that the only way to support them is to get women involved in the decisions, as actors in politics, in economics, and with rights to own property.  The victims themselves want this.  It is impressive meeting women in DRC, raped, infected with HIV, kicked out by their husbands from their homes after being ”unfaithful”,  who refuse to be called victims, they are “survivors”.  They are ready to fight for the better future of their country.  One way forward that they believe in is to get education for their daughters.

The strong women of West Africa have worked hard and successfully in building peace.  The example of Liberian women is well known, followed now by the strong activities of Femmes Africa Solidarité and others for democratic and non-violent elections in the region. They engaged in the elections in Liberia, but the real breakthrough was made in the Senegal election at the Women’s Situation Room.  Women in Senegal were informed at gatherings about the importance of voting, and not to allow violence at polling stations.  All parties were represented at the Situation Room and presidential candidates visited them. They organized a link to the Ministry of Interior, to Police stations, and the women as observers had mobile phones to report immediately about unrest or women hindered to vote.  The outcome is known.  President Wade immediately declared his loss, calming down his supporters.  The new President visited the Situation Room on the next day after his election, promising to keep the parity rule.

Women are regarded as one block with similar minds and opinions.  Of course it is not true, like men women represent ethnic groups, religions, political opinions, young and old, the whole variety of life.  Bearing this in mind women have still been able to engage in collective actions, like the Liberian action for peace, or the  Women’s Situation Room in Senegal.  As the President of FAS, Bineta Diop explains:  you have to discuss with the women's groups what is dividing them, and to find the issues they can agree upon.  Then build up the action on these issues to get everybody on board.

The Women’s Situation Room in Senegal is an example of women’s common action for democratic participation.  It has been widely recognized, including by the African Union.  The concept was brought to the elections in Sierra Leone and observers from Kenya and other African states facing elections in the near future were present in Dakar to learn. The many earlier violent elections like in Ivory Coast must not be repeated. If the unified actions of women can ease the tensions, it is already a long step forward.

Negotiating for peace is not an independent special event.  It is an ongoing and sometimes very long process of ending conflict by building the momentum to sit down at the table for talks.  Even then much of the work is done far from the tables. Experts, advisors, are listening to different interests of the people and the persons in power.  If there is a genuine interest to embrace the whole population in a future peace, the skills and knowledge of women must be taken into account.  It cannot be denied that women have a strong responsibility in the implementation of peace agreements.  When we talk about the head mediator, we use  the word “he”, not she.  We are informed he has advisors who know about the needs of women.  It is not enough.  The mediator must himself be fully sensitized about the importance of integrating women in the process. If he does not genuinely care then the courtesy meetings listening to women representatives are only a play for the galleries. The same rule goes for the few women mediators.

 

Elisabeth Rehn: Minister Rehn has a long political career in Finland, as Member of Parliament, Minister of Defense, Minister of Equality, Presidential candidate, and also as a Member of European Parliament.  Since 1995 she has been with the United Nations, as Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Former Yugoslavia, as Special Representative of the Secretary General in Bosnia & Herzegovina, and later as independent expert on Peace and Security. She is the co-author of the 1325 report for Unifem "Women War Peace" 2002, Programme of Assistance to the Palestinian People (PAPP) report for UNDP on the situation in Palestine 2004, and the UNHCHR report on DRC 2010. Rehn is also the Chair of the Board of Directors at the Trust Fund for Victims at the International Criminal Court, the Hague.

 

To leave a comment, please see the introduction to the DAG-3QD Peace and Justice Symposia, of which this essay is a part, here.

Stop Bandying about Anecdotes and Loose Commentary

by Chuck Sudetic

Preface:

1) I am a feminist. I see myself as fortunate to have come of age in this age when significant, growing, but still-inadequate numbers of women have taken their rightful place in business and government and the professions and all other walks of life in many parts of the developed world and in some corners of underdeveloped countries.

2) Women are the species. Men have controlled too much too long. They continue to maintain a stranglehold on too many women in too many parts of the world, from the high rises of Manhattan and The Bronx to the highlands of Lesotho and the hills of Swaziland.

Discussion:

I feel disappointed at the essay under discussion. Perhaps I’m missing something in these words. Perhaps I demand too much from words and essays. But I consider this piece a lost opportunity, a bandying about of undeveloped anecdotes and loose commentary undisciplined by a honed argument and without enough definition even to foster engaging discussion of something concrete and urgently important.

This is unfortunate, because when it comes to the question of women and war, I see war everywhere. I see as much violence, and perhaps more, in places where “peace” reigns.

The really important work in overcoming barriers confining women is on behalf of the hundreds of millions of women for whom the barriers in question are maintained and defended with violence, and in too many instances deadly force. This, to me, translates into urgency. So I seek discussions grounded in the practical, in the question “What is to be done?”  rather than on the ethereal or the academic.

There is much to be said about labels and their effects, positive (protection) and negative (exclusion), which this essay suggests but, for me, fails to explore. The practical cannot, I fear, be grasped well at this level. Because the real problem, as I see it, is in the deeper structure that produces the labels, the mysterious workings deep beneath the anthropology, the sociology, the psychology, the linguistics…. And in these disciplines, it is revealed not through the theoretical discussions, but through the minutiae of the case studies.

What, for instance, beyond drafting legislation and enforcing the law, must change in the culture – the deep-seated habits of mind – that lead men and, let’s be fair, women to choose to shoot or detonate bombs to prevent young girls from going to school because he or she believes some god requires women to be subservient unto men?

What must change to stop a mother in some inner city neighborhood from telling her son that he must kill his sister, as his father commands, for the “honor” of the family, because this is demanded by some patriarch back in his village?

What must be done to have mothers-in-law stop torturing young wives and slave girls?

What must be done to stop young husbands from throwing acid into the faces of unwanted spouses or from dousing them with gasoline and setting them alight?

What must be done to have “born-again” Christian men in the United States to consider rape a criminal act and not the fault of the victim, who is now to be castigated and shunned? And what must be done with the families of rape victims in Africa who send them into the bush to live, and die, alone?

Let’s discuss the nature of this war zone. And let’s explore solutions.

The term that resonated most with me in the essay at hand was “war of attrition.” But I feel that the term is not well fitted to the reality at hand, to the “struggle” that will – for it must if civilization is to become more equitable and more efficient – need to be waged for decades and generations to alter, positively, patterns that are so ingrained beneath the anthropology, the sociology, the psychology, the linguistics…etc. Here, obviously, there will be a need for persistence, perseverance, courage, and sacrifice, and more spite of the kind demonstrated by that little girl from Pakistan who lies recovering from her wound in a hospital in England. More people like her will die in this struggle.

This process, even if it did not require a blood payment, is complicated, daunting, terrifying…

How, for instance, can women and men outside of Swaziland help women inside Swaziland better defend themselves and their daughters from men who would infect them with HIV in a way that, I at least, consider premeditated murder deserving of criminal prosecution and punishment? These are men who promise vulnerable women protection and succor, but actually exploit them for sexual pleasure and abandon them when convenient, and too often leave them to deal with the killer virus in conditions of destitution that produce death in droves by pneumonia and tuberculosis and in turn leave their children orphans, to become prey, too often, to sexual predators?

How, for instance, can women and men from outside help young girls, virgins, who have, or are vulnerable to rape, by men infected with HIV who believe this will cure them?

What about saving the daughters of Roma whose fathers fall into debt to loan sharks and then sell their daughters into prostitution in Budapest and Amsterdam and Brussels to repay it?

How can mothers be taught not to spoil their sons, making them utterly dependent upon women servants, and beat their daughters into submission?

How about the Eastern Congo? This is my favorite case study example, because it shows the daunting complexities of trying to do good. In Eastern Congo, among some peoples, abduction of young girls and forced sex and payment of a dowry goat are the traditional practice of taking a wife. And here this age-old practice, combined with the impunity that has surrounded armies always and everywhere, has enabled soldiers and their officers to assume that they can engage in mass rape – the greatest spate of rape reported in the history of man.

Congo’s parliament—under pressure from wise, well-meaning, persevering, and courageous women activists—has defined in law all sex with women under the age of 18 to be rape, and has introduced tribunals to try men arrested for such crimes and punish men found guilty and award damages to the injured. This is a very, very good thing. But how to deal with the side effects, the injustices in the application of this law that ruin women and men?

In the less-than-a-dollar-a-day world of Eastern Congo, a father speaks for a minor daughter. A minor daughter who has been raped is to be shunned. So consider this scenario, which is based upon an actual case: Young soldier and a sixteen year young woman fall in love. They have consensual sex, which is rape under the law. She becomes pregnant. They decide to marry. The young man approaches the father of the pregnant young woman and offers to pay the dowry goat.

The father presses criminal charges. Not because he is interested in honor or justice. But because he is interested in the opportunity to be awarded  $10,000 in damages, from the state since the young man is a soldier. (Never mind that no award of any such damages has ever been paid. The courts have made such awards on paper.) So for the father, no goat is enough. The case goes to trial. The girl pleads with the court not to put her husband in jail. She tells the court that she will be sent away to care for her still unborn child on her own with no income. She tells the court she loves her husband. The judge even pleads with the father to relent. The father refuses to drop the charges. He wants to be awarded the $10,000 that will never be and says it is a matter of “honor.” And the court is bound by the statute. Outcome: The young man is convicted and sent off to jail. The young woman goes off to some hostel to give birth to her son, before she is forced out on her own to toil as a prostitute. The child will make his or her way. And the father will have a piece of paper saying the state owes him $10,000.

There is too little time to waste on bandying about undefined terms and flitting discussions. In this is an age of opportunity, an age when rule of law might just be spreading. It is foolishness to assume it will last without being nurtured and consolidated. For this we need women—and especially women in power—and we need them to lead and wage the struggle down to the ground level.

 

Chuck Sudetic: Writer and former journalist and analyst for the United Naitons war crimes tribunal in The Hague. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Economist, The Atlantic Monthly, and other publications. He authored Blood and Vengeance, a critically acclaimed book that captured the experiences of two Bosnian families, one Muslim Slav, one Serb, during the tumultuous century that ended with the Srebrenica massacre of 1995. He co-authored La Caccia, the memoirs of the war crimes prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte.

 

To leave a comment, please see the introduction to the DAG-3QD Peace and Justice Symposia, of which this essay is a part, here.

Women as Actors Rather than Victims of War

by Sarah Cliffe

This essay raises a series of fascinating questions about identity and women's participation in peace-making.  The focus is—rightly, I believe—on women as actors rather than victims of war.

This is not to say that we should ignore the particular impact of conflict and violence on women: in the last two decades, for example, women and children have made up close to 80 percent of refugees and those internally displaced.  Women generally bear the greatest burden of coping with the effects of conflict, whether in trying to feed and care for families that have lost all their income and assets, rebuilding homes that have been destroyed, or dealing with being chased from their neighborhoods and starting a new life elsewhere.  And whatever the final statistical wisdom proves to be on the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and intimidation, there is no doubt that rape and sexual humiliation of women have been used to to inflict suffering and create a climate of fear, from the conflicts in west and central africa, to authoritarian regimes in Chile and Argentina, to the Balkans, to the violence fuelled by drug monies in central America.

Activists—male and female—have done much to publicize these effects and to help women to organize to claim recognition and reparations for the harm suffered.  The essay highlights however an element which is equally and perhaps even more important in considering the links between women's identity and violence—women's role as actors in peace-making and in rebuilding societies that have been torn apart by violence.  It outlines clearly the "fact of life" that women do not have unique identities—they may be involved in efforts to resolve conflict as much through their political, ethnic or religious identity as through their sense of solidarity as women.  

This raises an interesting question of the trade-offs between promoting participation of women in peace-making processes as a separate "women's representation", versus promoting their participation as part of the other groupings (whether governmental, political and resistance organisations, social movements, or community representation) in which they take part, and from which part of their identity is drawn.  In the end I believe—as do the authors of the essay—that this is a choice for the women in the societies concerned: they will have a stronger sense of whether they have shared interests as women which would benefit from being separately represented, or whether they feel energies should be devoted to making sure that their political, social and community groups are adequately representative of, and accountable to, the perspectives of the women that they should represent.  Another way of thinking about this is through the lens of "inclusive enough" agreements, suggested by the 2011 World Development Report on Conflict, Security and Development.  What does "inclusive enough" mean in terms of women's representation in the political settlements that aim to end violence.  On the one hand having no women engaged is clearly a red flag, as it would be for other major identity groups in the societies concerned.  But HOW women are represented is probably best left to be thrashed out by the societies concerned. 

A second issue implicitly raised by the essay is the divergence between Western pressure - real or perceived - for the inclusion of women and women's issues in peace processes, versus local perspectives.  This can sometimes be overblown, and manipulated as an attack on local women's activists.  But it is a real concern. Most studies of programs to change women's political, economic and social status show that this is a long struggle, and that it needs to be undertaken within local realities.  The national solidarity program in Afghanistan, for example, was shown to have a statistically significant improvement on perceptions (amongst both men and women) of women's ability to lead.  But the change was relatively small, persuading less than 10 percent of the concerned communities of this change in mindset over three years.  This often contrasts with donor perceptions of change, and with a technocratic approach that argues that well-written top down "gender action plans" can solve gender equity problems in a short space of time.  There is a need to ensure that support and funding to women's movements (which can provide crucial space for thinking and action) is delivered sensitively, and is not perceived as imposing external models.

All of the above essentially agrees with what I understand to be the perspectives of the authors. Where I would take issue is on two points - one an omission, and one a simplification.  

The omission is simple but perhaps important.  The angle of the essay is primarily on women's agency in political talks, with the examples of Northern Ireland, the Philippines and so on.  But there is another element of peace-building where women's agency is crucial, and this is in the reform of state institutions to have them serve all citizens.  Often less visible than political negotiations, there may actually be a crucial peace-building gain to having women involved in decision-making on reform in public finances, or in the security forces.  Indeed, the World Development Report points to examples—Nicaragua's security and justice reforms versus those of neighboring countries, for instance—where the involvement of women plausibly appears to have been one of the most significant factors in the success of reforms.  This point, on women's involvement in the "hard" sectors rather than only in more socially-oriented discussions, is often under-attended in the debate on gender and violence.

The simplification is the argument that women are better at cross-sectarian organizing, with the examples of Northern Ireland, Somalia and Sudan.  Perhaps this is so—certainly women have played this role courageously in some cases, and in the face of rough criticism from their own communities.  But so have men. So two points on this.  First, it may make sense in each society to identify where the strengths lie in cross-sectarian communication: are these in women's groups, in trade unions, in business associations, in political parties, or in organizations dealing with social issues, for example?  Second, while this can be an important strength for women and an activity women's groups may want to consider, let's not push the idea that "reaching across divides" is women's unique purview.   Because we want all actors, men included, to feel responsible for this.  And importantly, because while cross-sectarian organizing and awareness-raising can be incredibly valuable, it has some risk of boxing women in to a "soft" area of conflict resolution.  We do indeed need women who can play this role, but we also want empowered women who feel that they can contribute in many ways to peace-building—starting political parties, reforming their security forces and governments, starting businesses that provide a sense of hope for communities, as just a few examples.

 

Sarah Cliffe: Special Adviser and Assistant Secretary-General for Civilian Capacities at the United Nations. Before joining the United Nations, she worked at the World Bank, covering post-conflict reconstruction, community driven development and civil service reform. She was chief of mission for the Bank’s program in Timor-Leste from 1999 to 2002; led the Bank’s Fragile and Conflict-Affected Countries Group from 2002-2007 and was Director of Operations for East Asia and the Pacific from 2007 – 2009. She was Special Representative and Director for the World Development Report on Conflict, Security and Development. She holds degrees in History and Economic Development from Cambridge and Columbia Universities.

 

To leave a comment, please see the introduction to the DAG-3QD Peace and Justice Symposia, of which this essay is a part, here.

Let Us Start by Listening Seriously

by Rita Manchanda and Antonia Potter Prentice

It’s hard to write a rebuttal when one gets the strong sense that even those, like Chuck Sudetic, who claims to be so disappointed by the ideas we shared (or the way we shared them?), actually subscribe very much to the main points we were making.

Elisabeth Rehn has dedicated her professional life to this work, and a key lesson her response to our piece, and her work in general, teaches conflict mediators, and peace process support actors is to listen, listen, and then listen some more to a broad representation of people on the ground, including of course women. Listening, and acting on what is heard, and reporting back on those actions are highly validating for the person being heard, especially when their experience is normally one of disempowerment and marginalization.    

Unwittingly but helpfully answering Chuck’s vociferous call for ‘more practicality’ she describes the effective and pragmatic mechanism of the Senegal Women’s Situation Room.  She trenchantly reminds statisticians, policy analysts and the writers of glib op eds that each individual experience of conflict related sexual violence is a shock to the world’s conscience, and a wound to its victim’s very soul that can never be forgotten.  So whether there are in reality handfuls, hundreds or thousands of such cases, each individual one stands as a horror on its own.  She reminds us that for victims of these kinds of crimes of conflict, peace and justice aren’t a ‘choice’ or a ‘tension’; they are quite simply the same thing.  Impunity means for them that the conflict is not over.  There’s no rebutting that from our side, and we’re pretty sure that Sarah Cliffe and Chuck Sudetic feel the same way.

What she does not perhaps spell out is an insight that comes out more in Sarah Cliffe’s piece and is an important finding of the 2011 World Bank Development Report on Conflict, Security and Development to which she referred: that investing in citizen security, justice, and jobs is essential to reducing violence in societies, especially post-conflict ones, a finding which relates quite as much to women as to men.  The effects of sexual violence in conflict, especially when not dealt with, lead to extreme social distortions and specific, negative socio-economic consequences for the survivor and her or his family.  It’s not hard to agree that sexual violence is bad for people, bad for communities, bad for societies; but recognizing that preventing it by empowering women across the board, alongside changing attitudes, seems to be a tougher sell.  We would maintain that socio-economic empowerment as is as important for women as political empowerment: with resources, comes status and choices; with status and choices come voice and power. 

Chuck Sudetic is right: violence is everywhere, the cultures that make this ok have got to change, and clumsy international attempts to support local efforts to do this have got to get more nuanced.  Chuck wants us to fix this now; Sarah reminds us that cultural change, attitudinal change take years to take root.  We agree with him: we wish it had been fixed yesterday; but Sarah’s right, mind-set changes are incremental, and if each society is to find its way from the ‘inside out’, as it were, it must set its own pace for change – taking into account women’s views alongside men’s about the pace that fits. 

Sarah also asserts that we have oversimplified our case on women’s coalition building across divides.  She argues that men done this, but - frustratingly - does not give us examples which compare to those we cited for women, as this is a gap in our knowledge we are keen to address.  We would love to see how such peacebuilding coalitions might (or have already?) connect and work with women’s ones.  She is clearly worried about the marginalizing effect of ‘single identity’ organising implied by women’s organizing for peace, and thinks that we were ignoring the vital need for such groups to collaborate, cooperate with and even co-opt men.  We agree that political parties, trades unions and the like are all vital organs in society which can be used in re-building societies post conflict, and should all have a prominent place for women; but we think she underplays the fact that women, as an enormously marginalized group in public life across the globe, identify themselves that they need ‘private’ or ‘safe’ spaces to gear themselves up, build tactics and strategies before, or alongside the work they do with or to men to build peace.  We need shared, inclusive spaces to work things out, for sure; but if we’re not coming into that room as equals in terms of our access to power and resources, we might need some time to prep ourselves, if that’s ok with you.

This brings us to Sarah’s emphasis on the appealingly pragmatic concept of the ‘inclusive enough’ peace process, which sounds a warning bell for us.  Who defines what’s inclusive enough?  We maintain that the marginalisation of women has a special quality precisely because women represent such a vast ‘minority’ group – more than three and a half billion people spread across every society in the world.  It would be impractical indeed for an inclusive approach to dogmatically require a mathematical proportion of representation of each defined grouping involved in any given conflict, but the sheer numbers tell us just how disproportionate the exclusion of women continues to be and why Chuck is right to call for an urgent response to that.

Finally, we’d like to address Chuck’s point that to talk of labels is to put at a theoretical level an issue of lived urgency, which must be dealt with in the immediate reality.    Writing in 16^th November 2012 International Herald Tribune, Chrystia Freeland examines the attribution of Obama’s recent presidential win to the ‘rainbow coalition’ of minorities, which included, significantly, a large proportion of women.  She discusses research on creative performance and identity integration carried out by the Singapore Management University and the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan which shows, say its authors “that ethnic minorities and women in male dominated professions are most creative when they have found a way to believe that their ‘multiple and conflicting social identities are compatible… those who see their identities as compatible they are better at combining ideas from the two identities to come up with something new… People who have high identity integration, it is not that they are more easy-going. It is that they find peace between the two different worlds’. 

This useful and practical piece of research shows how valuable women’s skills in multiple identity handling is; and hence it demonstrates how Chuck has misunderstood a fundamental point which Sarah and Elisabeth grasp: when we talk about women’s labels and identities we are talking about the different ways in which they are agents and actors - movers and shakers in their own lives – as well as the roles which cultures and histories have boxed them into. We weren’t reducing them to theory; we were insisting on their agency.  He’s right, cultures need to change which currently treat the violence and the discrimination if not as OK, then certainly as non urgent and ignorable.  But what he actually does is to pose a series of questions, referring himself in a loose and anecdotal way to a series of briefly sketched cases, which still don’t give us the solution that he clearly has in mind, apart from the fact that this violence must in the end be met with violence.  What was the answer he was offering to the nightmare story of the twisting of good intentions from the Congo?

What we suggested, and continue to suggest, is that we start by listening seriously, urgently indeed, to the voices of women affected by this violence at all levels and in all ways, wherever they may be; let them tell us all what they think, want and need. And let’s act on that, men and women, together.

 

Rita Manchanda: Research Director of South Asia Forum for Human Rights (SAFHR) and has written extensively on security and human rights issues in the region. In particular she has intellectually shaped the discourse on feminizing security. Among her many publications is the volume Women War and Peace in South Asia: beyond Victimhood to Agency which has been a pioneering study on feminist theorizing and praxis on conflict and peace building.

Antonia Potter Prentice: Prior to her current work on gender, peace and security as Senior Associate to the European Peacebuilding Liaison Office, Senior Advisor to the Dialogue Advisory Group and consultant for organizations including the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, the Global Network of Women Peacemakers and Terre des Hommes, she was Country Director for Oxfam GB in Indonesia, its largest programme in the SE Asia region. She initiated the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue’s work on women, gender and peacemaking and has worked for a number of NGOs, mostly in Asia, having lived in Afghanistan, America (New York), Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Switzerland (Geneva), Timor Leste, and currently Belgium (Brussels). Antonia is a Board Member of the Democratic Progress Institute and is married with three small children. She is starting out on Twitter at Antonia_pp.

 

To leave a comment, please see the introduction to the DAG-3QD Peace and Justice Symposia, of which this essay is a part, here.

American Civil Religion in the Age of Obama: An Interview with Philip S. Gorski

Over at the Immanent Frame:

JB: This leads to an interesting question: who’s going to take up the mantle of theology? In your essay in The Post-Secular in Question, you ask, “What’s the role of sociology?” Your answer is that it could be a moral science that recovers the idea of “the good.” What would that moral sociology look like? Is there a relationship that you see between the creation of a civil religion and the creation of a sociology that’s more concerned with the good?

PG: That would certainly be a hope of mine, and it’s something that I’ve been thinking about a great deal lately, whether there’s a limited kind of moral realism that we could defend, and that we might actually be able to contribute to through social science or at least through academic reflection of some kind or another? My suspicion is that there is; I just don’t know what the scope of it is. It would have to be premised on some understanding of human flourishing—that human beings are put together biologically, neurologically, in a certain way—that they have certain kinds of capacities or propensities—that their flourishing and well-being in general involves the development and cultivation of these propensities and capacities. Of course I’m simply channeling a lot of research that’s being done in neighboring fields. There’s recent work in positive psychology, for example, which is starting to get a great deal of attention by people like Jonathan Haidt and Marty Seligman. There’s a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics tradition that people like Martha Nussbaum and Richard Kraut have revived and defended in recent years. Even some folks like Amartya Sen have tried to make a basis for a different way of thinking about economics and development policy. So the question is, “How do you develop a theory of the human good which doesn’t become a kind of hardened dogma, a sort of a one-size-fits-all understanding of what a life well-lived is going to mean?” 

Rockets & Ethics

Mike LaBossiere in The Philosopher's Magazine (image from Wikimedia commons):

In a repeat of events in 2008 (and earlier) Hamas stepped up its rocket attacks from Gaza against Israel. Israel, not surprisingly, responded with attacks of its own. In addition to the political and humanitarian concerns, this matter raises numerous ethical issues.

One issue of concern is that Hamas generally locates its launch sites close to or in civilian areas. As such, Israel runs the risk of killing civilians when it attempts to destroy the launchers. This raises the general issue of launching attacks from within a civilian population.

On the face of it, this tactic seems to be immoral. To use the obvious analogy, if I am involved in a gun fight and I grab a child to use as a human shield, I am acting wrongly. After all, I am intentionally endangering an innocent to protect myself. If the child is hurt or killed, I clearly bear some of the moral blame. While my opponent should not endanger the child, I would rather limit her options if I kept attacking her while hiding behind the child.  Naturally, if I was shooting at her innocent children while using a child as a shield, I would certainly be acting very wrongly indeed.

One possible counter is that the analogy is flawed. In the child example, the child is coerced into serving as a shield. If the civilians support Hamas and freely allow themselves to be used as human shields, then Hamas would not be acting wrongly. To use an analogy, if I am in a gun fight and people volunteer to take bullets for me by acting as human shields, I would seem to be acting in a way that would be morally acceptable. As such, as long as the civilians are not coerced or kept in ignorance (that is, employed as shields by force or fraud), then it would seem that Hamas could be acting in a morally acceptable way.

There is, of course, a rather obvious concern. To go back to the gunfight analogy, suppose my fellows volunteer to serve as human shields while I shoot randomly at my opponent’s friends and family. If my opponent returns fire and hits one of my shields while trying to stop me, it would seem that my opponent would not be acting wrongly.

africa for norway

gerhard richter in the studio