DIVIDED SOCIETY/DIVIDED SELF
The New York Academy of Sciences, NY
Dec 4 2007
Speakers: Richard Bulliet, Columbia University’s Middle East Institute;
Seamus Dunn, The University of Ulster, Coleraine, Co.
Derry, Northern Ireland; John Harbeson, City College and The Graduate
Center at CUNY; Susan G. Lazar is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at
Georgetown University School of Medicine; Avishai Margalit, Institute
for Advanced Study in Princeton; Dan Rather How do ancient historical
conflicts remain potent elements in the collective unconscious of a
society, and later lead to sectarian or ethnic violence? The Armenian
genocide in the early part of the twentieth century had its roots in
centuries-old religious conflicts whose political consequences set the
stage for one of the most brutal oppressions in human history. More
recently, conflicts between Christians and Muslims in Somalia and
Ethiopia have led to murderous civil wars. The Palestinian/Israeli
conflict feeds on ethnic, religious and political divides. In the case
of Serbia and Bosnia, neighbors who had once lived in harmony have
been injected with the virus of warlike mythologies, which equates
otherness to evil. In Rwanda, the ideology of mass murder took the form
of ancient tribal identifications, with roots in human morphology. Man
has been confronted with the specter of civil war from the beginnings
of recorded history, when Sparta and Athens fought for hegemony in the
Peloponnesian Peninsula. This early conflict, recorded by Thucydides,
was a struggle of ideology (between democratic Athens and the warrior
society of Sparta) as well as geography and economics. How does
the intra-psychic world of the individual, characterized by its own
civil wars between pleasure and repression, between socialization and
individuality, between conscience (or superego) and drive (libido),
set the stage for these most brutal of human conflicts? More soldiers
were killed in America’s Civil War than in both World Wars combined.
If a conflicted individual is his own worst enemy, to what extent
does the power of civil conflict derive from the degree to which it
feeds on both individual and societal unrest?
Richard Bulliet is Professor of History at Columbia University’s
Middle East Institute. He specializes in Middle Eastern history,
the social and institutional history of Islamic countries, and the
history of technology. His publications include The Patricians
of Nishapur: A Study in Medieval Islamic Social History, The
Camel and the Wheel, Islam: The View from the Edge, The Case for
Islamo-Christian Civilization, and the forthcoming Cotton and Climate
in Early Islamic Iran. He co-edited The Encyclopedia of the Modern
Middle East, co-authored The Earth and its Peoples: A Global History,
and conceived and edited The Columbia History of the Twentieth Century.
Seamus Dunn is Professor Emeritus at The University of Ulster,
Coleraine, Co. Derry, Northern Ireland. Before retirement from
the university he was Professor of Conflict Studies and Director
of the Centre for the Study of Conflict, a research centre within
the university. It was established initially to carry out research
studies in relation to the long-lasting conflict in Northern Ireland,
but was also-inevitably-much involved with other conflicts around
the world. He was also a member of the committee that founded an
international research centre within the University of Ulster, called
INCORE, under the auspices of the United Nations University.
John Harbeson is Professor of Political Science at City College
and The Graduate Center at City University of New York. He teaches
and writes in the areas of comparative politics and international
relations, with a particular focus on sub-Saharan Africa. He has been
a Jennings Randolph Senior Fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace,
and a Visiting Fellow at Princeton’s Center of International Studies.
Professor Harbeson completed two tours of duty with the U.S. Agency
for International Development while on leave from the teaching, most
recently as Regional Democracy and Governance Advisor for Eastern
and Southern Africa from 1993-1995.
Susan G. Lazar is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Georgetown
University School of Medicine, George Washington University School
of Medicine, and The Uniformed Services University of the Health
Sciences, as well as Supervising and Training Analyst at the Washington
Psychoanalytic Institute. She is the co-author of A Concise Guide
to Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, and has published extensively on
the cost-effectiveness of psychotherapy, stemming from her work
as a consultant to the Clinton White House Task Force for National
Health Care Reform. She is the Executive Director of the Fund for
the Erevna International Peace Center, which supports the Erevna
International Peace Center, an ecumenical international peace center
being constructed on land donated by the Government of the Republic
of Cyprus.
Avishai Margalit is George Kennan Professor at the Institute for
Advanced Study in Princeton and recipient of the 2007 EMET Prize. He
is a founder of "Peace Now," the Israeli peace movement calling for
recognition of the rights of Palestinians to self-determination in
their own state, alongside Israel. Dr. Margalit received the 2001
Spinoza Lens Prize, awarded by the International Spinoza Foundation
for "a significant contribution to the normative debate on society."
He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and
the author of Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies
(with Ian Buruma), which addresses currents in radical anti-Western
thought in the Islamic world.
Dan Rather (moderator) has covered virtually every major event in the
world in the past 50 years. His resume reads like a history book,
from his early local reporting in Texas on Hurricane Carla to his
work covering the assassination of President John F. Kennedy; the
civil rights movement; the White House and national politics; wars
in Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf, Yugoslavia and Iraq. From
his first days as the Associated Press reporter in Huntsville, Texas,
in 1950, Rather has more than earned his reputation as the "hardest
working man in broadcast journalism." Mr. Rather was anchor of the
CBS Evening News from 1981 to 2005 and reported for the news magazine
60 Minutes. He is now anchor and managing editor of Dan Rather Reports.
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