In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the U.S. insurance industry confronted billions of dollars in unanticipated losses. In addition, major global reinsurers quickly announced that they no longer would provide coverage for acts of terrorism in reinsurance contracts. Recognizing that historical loss forecasts had failed to account sufficiently for terrorism events and facing an immediate shortage of reinsurance, many U.S. primary insurance companies soon declared their intention to exclude terrorism risk from future policies. This pending market disruption led the U.S. Congress to pass the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA) of 2002 to “establish a temporary federal program that provides for a transparent system of shared public and private compensation for insured losses resulting from acts of terrorism.” Subsequently, Congress passed the Terrorism Risk Insurance Extension Act (TRIEA) of 2005, which was similar (but not identical) to the TRIEA.
From the U.S. Treasury Department’s perspective, the TRIA was intended to provide protection for business activity from the unexpected financial losses of terrorist attacks until the U.S. insurance industry could develop a self- sustaining private terrorism insurance market. However, during the debate over the TRIEA, representatives of the U.S. property liability insurance industry argued that the industry lacked sufficient capacity to assume terrorism risks without government support and that terrorism risks were still viewed as uninsurable in the market.
Given that the TRIEA was extended for a further seven years at the end of 2007, the debate over the need for a federal role in the terrorism insurance market is far from over. Although the federal government does not want to serve as the insurer of last resort for an indefinite period, it is clear that there are major obstacles to developing a private market for terrorism coverage.
Roy challenges the Western prejudice which sees Islam as incompatible with democracy and the Islamist victory as necessarily being a threat to the ideals of democracy, pluralism, and good governance that characterized the Arab Spring. Ultimately, as Roy suggests, the Islamists will have to respond to the current situation in Egypt and the fact that the Arab Spring did not have the kind of Islamic ideological component of the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Roy writes:
The Islamists are certainly neither secularists nor liberals, but they can be democrats. It is not the convictions of political actors that shape their policies but the constraints to which they are subject. The Islamists are entering an entirely new political space: this was not a revolution in which a dictatorship was replaced by a regime that resembled its predecessor. There have been elections and there will be a parliament. Political parties have been formed and, whatever the disappointments and fears of the secular left, it will be difficult simply to close down this new space, because what brought it into being in the first place – a savvy, connected young generation, a spirit of protest – is still there. Islamist movements throughout the region are constrained to operate in a democratic arena that they didn’t create and which has legitimacy in the eyes of the people.
In his book, Acts of God and Man: Ruminations on Risk and Insurance, Michael R. Powers discusses how risk impacts our lives, health, and possessions and proceeds to introduce the statistical techniques necessary for analyzing these uncertainties.
In today’s business world, professional risk managers often construct extensive lists of pure and speculative risks, including every imaginable type of uncertainty to which individuals and firms are exposed. Among pure risks, one finds traditional “insurance” perils such as fire, wind, theft , disease, and professional negligence, along with more complex hazards such as substandard construction, inadequate security, technological obsolescence, and political instability. Speculative risks include real estate, common financial securities (stocks, bonds, commodities, etc.), and interest and currency-derivative products, as well as market- specific changes in the prices of raw materials, human capital, and end-of-line goods and services.
Fortunately, a remarkable simplicity underlies these myriad risks. Despite the great number of individual sources of risk, there are only a very few exposures subject to risk. These fundamental exposures are life, health, and possessions.
One then might ask: Why should we be concerned about the quality of life? I would argue that the following two principles provide the answer:
• The Morbidity Principle. An individual/corporation/society whose quality of life is damaged will have a greater chance of imminent death.
• The Lost-Gratification Principle. An individual/corporation/society whose quality of life is damaged may not have the opportunity to enjoy recovery of health or restitution of possessions before death occurs (i.e., “a good quality of life today is worth more than a good quality of life tomorrow”).
Here is a description of the series from “Living Proof”:
Dr. Joshua Miller discusses the many types of disasters that affect people around the world and how to help individuals and communities recover. He highlights the social ecology of disaster and the consequences of different types of disasters on individuals, families, and communities. Dr. Miller proposes an alternative to traditional, individually-focused mental health approaches, called Psychosocial Capacity Building, which is multi-systemic and addresses collective cultural orientations and helps foster access to the social support and connections that exist in groups and communities.
“China’s escalating popular violence against local authorities and humble petition to the central government in the last two decades should be understood in light of [a] longstanding Confucianist conception of authority. This conception persists despite all the ideological and political revolutions of the twentieth century….”—Ho-fung Hung
The recent protests against land grab in Wukan and a polluting power plant in Haimen in South China have captured the world’s attention and lead many to ask whether something significantly different from China’s many other local protests is happening., The Wukan villagers’ orderly exercise of self-governance after the CCP authorities fled the village, as well as their political demand for local democracy, is rare if not unprecedented. So is the Haimen protesters’ occupation of the local government building.
The Wukan protest, in particular, resonates with many great uprisings in China’s history such as the Leiyang rebellion of 1844. In the early 1840s, local intellectuals in Hunan’s Leiyang County adamantly petitioned higher authorities against local tax abuses. The arrest and torture of a leading petitioner unleashed an armed revolt in which villagers seized the county seat and set up their own local government, which was short-lived and was crushed by imperial government forces. After the crackdown, the grievances against the Qing state continued to brew in the area and prepared many locals to embrace the Taiping Rebellion that shook the very foundation of Qing rule in the 1850s.
Despite their democratic demand and parallel with uprisings in Chinese history, we should also notice the Wukan protesters’ emphasis of their loyalty to the central government and their begging for mercy and aid from the highest authorities. In the Haimen protest, we likewise see protesters kneel during their action to beg for intervention from higher authorities to stop the construction of a second power plant. In this regard, these protests are not much different from most other recent local protests that are militant against local authorities but submissive toward the central government. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, China watchers rested much hope on such confrontational local protests and cast them as precursors to larger-scale movements that could radically change the status quo. But these waves of unrest came and went and the party-state remained in control.
Powers discussed how page 99 from his book reflects some of the ideas in his book Acts of God and Man. Here are some excerpts:
Reports abound that the realm of risk and insurance – with its chary underwriters, cynical claim adjustors, and calculating actuaries – is dry and forbidding. In Acts of God and Man, I challenge this notion by proposing a “science of risk” that entails:
* a fundamentalist Bayesian (i.e., subjective/judgmental) approach to modeling uncertainty and assessing probabilities;
* a formal distinction between the primarily natural “aloof” risks of insurance and the largely artificial “non-aloof” risks of other financial markets; and
* a personalized scientific method that casts off the shackles and inconsistencies of more orthodox methods too burdensome for the study of risk.
As part of our week-long focus on Acts of God and Man, we are also giving the book away for free along with five other titles from Columbia Business School Publishing to one lucky winner!
In addition to Acts of God and Man you can also win:
To enter the giveaway please submit by email your name and mailing address by 1 pm eastern time on Friday, January 27th to pl2164@columbia.edu. The winner will be drawn at random. (Unfortunately, the giveaway is only available to those living in the United States or Canada.)
“Careful descriptions of the methods and models behind climate change science bear out that assertion, proving that the only way to counter dangerous lies is to expose the truth, however inconvenient it might be.”—Publishers Weekly review of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars
In this meticulous and engaging brief on climate change research and the political backlash to legitimate scientific work, Penn State professor Mann narrates the fight against misinformation from the inside…. The persuasiveness of the “hockey stick,” as it was dubbed, made Mann an instant political target. In the 2009 hacking scandal known as “Climategate,” emails discussing the mathematical models he used to create the figure were said to prove an international conspiracy to dupe the public. That controversy, Mann writes, is only the latest attempt by deniers to discredit scientists one by one; for decades, powerful interests have spent untold millions to tarnish legitimate research and the reputation of scholars who have dedicated their lives to understanding our world….. Mann balances the statistical analysis with charming personal anecdotes from his life and work. Careful descriptions of the methods and models behind climate change science bear out that assertion, proving that the only way to counter dangerous lies is to expose the truth, however inconvenient it might be.
We are pleased to announce that the much-discussed My Life with the Taliban, by Abdul Salam Zaeef is now available in paperback.
My Life with the Taliban is the autobiography of Abdul Salam Zaeef, a former senior member of Afghanistan’s Taliban and a principal actor in its domestic and foreign affairs. Translated for the first time from the Pashto, Zaeef’s words share more than a personal history of an unusual life. They supply a counter-narrative to standard accounts of Afghanistan since 1979.
For more on the book, you can read the chapter No War to Win and below is an interview with the editors of the book Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn.
“This model, then, calls for the compilation of a new, hidden history of Islam that fills in those areas declared off limits by the anti-Islam discourse. But, first, we must radically rephrase the West’s favorite polemical question—What’s wrong with Islam?—to a less comfortable query: What’s wrong with us?”—Jonathan Lyons
I propose a new model for approaching the world of Islam—a “hidden history,” as it were, of its practices, beliefs, and culture. To begin with, we must acknowledge that the established Western discourse of Islam does not—or, at the very least, does not necessarily—reflect the reality of Islam itself, what I have referred to earlier as “Islam qua Islam.” Rather, this discourse is the product of a process that has embedded a particular discursive formation in Western thought. Here, then, are the roots of what Sutton and Vertigans have identified as the prevailing “caricature of Islam” (2005:31). Chapters 4, 5, and 6 established ample grounds for such an assertion, and many more examples beyond the scope of this inquiry might likewise be marshaled in support.
Next we must deliberately remove the central pillars of the thousand-year-old anti-Islam discourse and examine what remains behind. Or, to return to the question posed at the outset, we must ask, When we open this particular window, what is it that we see that has not been seen before? Were we to set aside these central notions—that Islam is inherently violent and spread by the sword; that Muslims are irrational, antiscience, and thus antimodern; and that they are sexually perverse and hate women—as flawed representations of the nondiscursive reality of Islam, then whole new vistas of possible relationships between East and West will begin to open up before our eyes.
“The Bush administration adopted and perpetuated the established discourse of Islam and women for the benefit of specific Western interests—in this case, the military occupation and political and economic domination of Muslim societies…. Bush and his fellow social conservatives were able to obscure their own opposition to women’s advancement at home by contrasting the freedoms of Western women with those of women suffering under Islam.”—Jonathan Lyons, Islam Through Western Eyes
In his bookIslam Through Western Eyes: From the Crusades to the War on Terrorism, Jonthan Lyons examines Western, frequently misguided views on Islam. In the chapter on Islam and women, Lyons “traces the emergence of th[e] discourse of Islam and women from within the greater anti-Islam narrative, commencing with the Enlightenment and progressing to the war on terrorism.” This discourse, Lyons argues, has been used to further various political and ideological agendas.
Lyons concludes the chapter by examining how in recent years, the West, particularly the media, has looked to the veil and women’s sexuality as a kind of barometer of progress and modernity. Here is an excerpt from the chapter:
This narrative of the veil, sexuality, and Western notions of modernity and progress reaches its height, however, whenever the subject is postrevolutionary Iran. Since the victory over the U.S.-backed shah in 1979 and the creation of the Islamic Republic, Iranian women have been required to veil in public. In the early years, dress requirements were extremely strict—no hair showing, no makeup or nail polish, no open-toe shoes, and so on—and at times brutally enforced by religious vigilantes. These practices have been relaxed significantly in recent years, and some middle-class and upper-class urban women now adopt colorful and personal expressions of the hijab that do little to disguise the figure or fully cover the hair.
Both the official line and public opinion toward this dress code have a complex and nuanced history (Abdo and Lyons 2003), but the Western media have universally seen and shown it as a reliable barometer of progress or lack thereof by secular civil society at the expense of the ruling religious establishment. In this schema, then, the more lipstick and hair visible to visiting foreign correspondents, the less secure the conservatives’ grip on power and the better the chances of popular revolt against the Islamic system.
Last week Siddharth Kara, author of Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery, was interviewed by Rahim Kanani on forbes.com. Kara who advises the U.N., the U.S. government , and other governments on anti-slavery research and policy, describes how he became involved with the anti-slavery movement as an undergraduate and working at a refugee camp in Kosovo.
In the interview, Kara explains why human slavery is so profitable, far more so than drugs and other illicit businesses. He also describes some of the advances being made in combating human trafficking and what further advocacy is necessary.
Here is an excerpt from the interview:
Rahim Kanani: What are some of the biggest challenges to ending trafficking and other forms of contemporary slavery?
Siddharth Kara: A lack of detailed understanding of how and why slave-like exploitation functions in various sectors of the global economy is a primary barrier to a more effective response. Much effort in the field of combating modern slavery has focused more on anecdote and sensationalism than on actual analysis of the problem. A paucity of resources deployed to understanding and combating slavery is another primary barrier. The US government spends 350 times more money each year to combat drug trafficking than slavery. This does not mean that we will end slavery by simply throwing money at the problem, but it gives a sense of the anemic level of resources that have been allocated towards this issue. And by the way, the US government spends more money to combat slavery than most any other government in the world, so that gives you a real sense of how big the gap is globally. Another primary challenge has to do with the inability of activists in the field to catalyze a more unified grassroots movement to combat the issue. The antislavery movement remains highly fragmented, and as a result, its ability to mobilize social opinion and lawmakers on the issue has been hampered.
To enter the giveaway please submit by email your name and mailing address by 1 pm eastern time on Friday, January 20th to pl2164@columbia.edu. The winner will be drawn at random. (Unfortunately, the giveaway is only available to those living in the United States or Canada.)
Michael E. Mann suggests that what we are facing is not so much the politicization of science but the scientization of politics. More precisely, science is being used to advance political causes. Mann also discusses how certain groups, particularly oil companies, have effectively shifted the terms of the debate regarding climate change. Climate deniers have played a role in making the media view human-caused climate change as a subject of debate when in fact the science is definitive.
What’s at stake according to Mann is that public and political discourse has been hijacked by climate deniers when what is needed is a sustained discussion on how to combat climate change.
As Jonathan Lyons explains, in page 99 he examines the West’s failure to take seriously the accomplishments in philosophy and science from the Muslim world. This, he argues, has been one of the West’s most persistent and ultimately damaging misunderstandings about the Muslim world. The other two relate to Islam and women and Islam and violence.
Jonathan Lyons writes
The Western narrative of Islam and science, like those of Islam and women and Islam and violence, is part of a 1000-year-old discourse that shapes what we say – and more importantly, what we cannot say – about Islam and the Muslims. This, in turn, has left us intellectually unprepared and politically unable to respond to some of the most significant challenges of the twenty-first century: the global rise of Islamic political power; the more narrow emergence of religious violence and terrorism; and clashes between established cultural values and multicultural rights on the part of growing Muslim immigrant populations.
In the concluding chapter toThe Severed Head: Capital Visions, Julia Kristeva speculates on some of the meanings and legacies of representations of sacrifice and the severed head:
Because the sacred, or the nostalgia for it that remains, turns out to reside not in sacrifice after all, or in some aesthetic or religious tradition, but in that specifically human, unique, and bitter experience that is the capacity for representation.
And the mother goddess, in these capital visions pushed to their ends? What becomes of the fabulous mirage, the archaic source of the depressions that call us to speech and thought, the primordial prehistoric figurine, the heads of Medusa, Gorgon, Jezebel, and, in the form of their phallic conspiracy, the woman masters, the Judiths and Salomes? What remains of the final depths of the sacred? And what do they make of it, the man and the woman, when they know where that comes from?
They remember. They pass it and pass it again. And they laugh at it. “The Woman with 100 Heads” of Max Ernst may not be the most inspired figuration of that indispensable allusion, in which the sacred gets frankly tiresome, whereas its absence resigns itself to robotics. But this horrible, naive, vulgar, surrealist cartoon, which mocks women, heads, decapitations, fascinations, horrors, and their capital of beliefs, still allows us to remember our capital visions. And maybe to die of laughter, while keeping a cool head, in the grip of our fantasies, our ancient or modern religions, ever tenacious and thoroughly ridiculous. Let us not finish it off too quickly, this sacred vision. Let us remove the head, let us keep on passing.
Starkman’s article, which was published in the Columbia Journalism Review, and is now available as a digital short for Kindle, Nook, and iPad, takes on what has become a dominant perspective on the future of news in the digital age as personified by three well known media thinkers — Jay Rosen, Clay Shirky, and Jeff Jarvis — who have dominated the “future of news” debate. Starkman makes a powerful case that the perspective that these three represent, despite their many useful insights, is in the end corrosive to public-service journalism.
Starkman writes:
According to this consensus [as elaborated by Shirky, Rosen, and Jarvis], the future points toward a network-driven system of journalism in which news organizations will play a decreasingly important role. News won’t be collected and delivered in the traditional sense. It will be assembled, shared, and to an increasing degree, even gathered, by a sophisticated readership, one that is so active that the word “readership” will no longer apply. Let’s call it a user-ship or, better, a community. This is an interconnected world in which boundaries between storyteller and audience dissolve into a conversation between equal parties, the implication being that the conversation between reporter and reader was a hierarchical relationship, as opposed to, say, a simple division of labor.
Conceived as a plan that was both logical and a reflection of the democratic values of the American republic, the grid has stood the test of time thanks to both its rigidity and its flexibility and has allowed for the city’s geographical and economic expansion. As the book and the accompanying exhibit at the Museum of the City of New Yorkreveal, the grid is a reflection of and has shaped the city’s political, economic, and cultural character for more than two hundred years.
* The commissioners of the 1811 plan noted rather scornfully that they had eschewed the “circles, ovals and stars which certainly embellish a plan” in favor of “convenience and utility.”
* New York’s grid plan was to first to eliminate named streets altogether (the names came later). The rationality behind Manhattan’s street numbering system—Cartesian analytical geometry—also underpins early modern conceptions of space more generally.
* The key to the greatness of the grid is variety. It is not made up of evenly spaced, similarly sized blocks. The blocks, which are all 200 feet wide (north to south), vary in length (east to west) from less than 250 feet to more than 900 feet. Most east-west streets are 60 feet wide. However, seventeen of them are 100 feet wide. Most, but not all north-south avenues are 100 feet wide. Madison and Lexington Avenues (each 80 feet wide) were introduced after the 1811 plan to accommodate additional traffic.
* The original surveyors were regularly obstructed, attacked, and sued for damages for cutting branches to complete their work.
* The 1811 commissioners who laid out the grid had assumed that it would take several centuries for urban growth to reach above 155th Street.
Given that the grid has been altered since it was first planned in 1811, the Architectural League of New York, in partnership with the Museum of the City of New York and Architizer, issued a Call for Ideas inviting architects and urban designers from around the world to speculate about how Manhattan’s grid might be adapted, extended, or transformed in the future. It asked them to consider issues such as how the grid might be modified to respond to climate change or new transportation infrastructures; how new digital technologies might affect the form and function of the buildings in which we live and work and the impact they might have on the city’s streets and public spaces; what the most pressing issues are facing the city today and into the future; and what solutions might emerge out of (and in turn modify) the street grid.
You can view a side show of the different proposals which include:
* A second grid 700 feet above the existing street grid. This new grid relieves street congestion, creates new sites and facilities for tourism, and redefines Manhattan as a truly three-dimensional grid.
* Extending the existing grid with “informal” configurations of blocks along the waterfront, creating both new sites for building and novel spatial experiences for pedestrians.
* The creation of a virtual grid which is overlaid on the existing physical grid, a digital platform onto which residents can upload ideas for their block, neighborhood, or the city as a whole. The ideas are then accessed by New York architects, who in turn upload design responses to the same virtual grid, which are visible to everyone using smart phones and social networks.
In the book, Betts takes a skeptical look at the use of American force in the postwar era and analyzes, sometimes critically, the use of force by recent presidents. The following are excerpts from the book’s introduction:
When the United States became more secure it became more forceful. Since the Cold War ended it has spent far more than any other country or coalition to build armed forces; it has sent forces into combat more frequently than it did in the era of much bigger threats to national security; and it has done so much more often than any other country. The United States has been, quite simply, “the most militarily active state in the world.” To many in the mainstream of American politics this is as it should be because the United States has the right and responsibility to lead the world—or push it—in the right direction. To others, more alarmed by the pattern, U.S. behavior has evolved into “permanent war.”
Some of this belligerence was imposed on the United States by Al Qaeda on September 11, 2001, but the terrorist threat cannot account for the bulk of blood and treasure expended in the use of force over the past two decades. In the first half of the post–Cold War era, until complications in Iraq and Afghanistan, American national security policy was driven not by threats but by opportunities—or rather what an overambitious consensus in the foreign policy elite mistakenly saw as opportunities. Instead of countering immediate dangers, American policy aimed to stabilize the world in order to prevent dangers from arising. There is no evidence, however, that this activism short-circuited more dangers than it generated. And at the same time, American force has been ambivalent, trying to do too much with too little. Policy elites who wanted to make the world right sometimes held back for fear that costly ventures would lack public support. Sometimes they have chosen the worst of both worlds, compromising between all-out effort and doing nothing at all, but with the result of action that is both costly and indecisive.
Last week brought the very sad news of Christopher Hitchens’s passing after a struggle with cancer. We were fortunate enough to have been able to include some of his writing inThe Best American Magazine Writingseries. In2007, his piece “The Vietnam Syndrome” was included in the collection while in2008, his article “So Many Men’s Rooms, So Little Time,” was selected.
The2011edition includes his essay “Unanswerable Prayers,” in which Hitchens discusses his illness and the reactions of friends and those perhaps not-so-friendly. In the following excerpt from the piece, Hitchens talks about how the illness has affected, or better stated, has not affected his lifelong skepticism about religion and the belief in God:
An enormous number of secular and atheist friends have told me encouraging and flattering things like: “If anyone can beat this, you can”; “Cancer has no chance against someone like you”; “We know you can vanquish this.” On bad days, and even on better ones, such exhortations can have a vaguely depressing effect. If I check out, I’ll be letting all these comrades down. A different secular problem also occurs to me: what if I pulled through and the pious faction contentedly claimed that their prayers had been answered? That would somehow be irritating….
Pursuing the prayer thread through the labyrinth of the web, I eventually found a bizarre “Place Bets” video. This invites potential punters to put money on whether I will repudiate my atheism and embrace religion by a certain date or continue to affirm unbelief and take the hellish consequences. This isn’t, perhaps, as cheap or as nasty as it may sound. One of Christianity’s most cerebral defenders, Blaise Pascal, reduced the essentials to a wager as far back as the seventeenth century. Put your faith in the almighty, he proposed, and you stand to gain everything. Decline the heavenly offer and you lose everything if the coin falls the other way. (Some philosophers also call this Pascal’s Gambit.)
Ingenious though the full reasoning of his essay may be—he was one of the founders of probability theory—Pascal assumes both a cynical god and an abjectly opportunist human being. Suppose I ditch the principles I have held for a lifetime, in the hope of gaining favor at the last minute? I hope and trust that no serious person would be at all impressed by such a hucksterish choice. Meanwhile, the god who would reward cowardice and dishonesty and punish irreconcilable doubt is among the many gods in which (whom?) I do not believe. I don’t mean to be churlish about any kind intentions, but when September 20 comes, please do not trouble deaf heaven with your bootless cries. Unless, of course, it makes you feel better.
“I think we overestimate our soft power. Americans understandably like to think of themselves as a model for the world, as a society that other societies want to be like. To some extent, this is true, but we tend to exaggerate the extent to which our soft power really shapes others’ policies.”—Richard Betts
Richard Betts believes that defense could and should be cut given the current economic situation in the United States. He calls for a “mobilization strategy,” which would offer a more modest and less expensive approach to our role in the world:
The United States should move towards more of a “mobilization strategy”—which means that we should take advantage of the reduced threat to our security that came with the end of the Cold War, and have a more modest view of the need to intervene abroad as long as direct threats to our national security are limited. We should orient our military planning and organization to what might be called a “readiness to get ready,” that is to focus on training, research and development, organizational structures and their maintenance, and all of the infrastructure for military power that can be used as a base for rapid buildup when conditions change and the world situation deteriorates.
This more restrained approach, Richard Betts argues, is largely shared by the American public if not elite policymakers.
A variety of Columbia University Press authors have been asked to comment on recent events in North Korea, including Victor Cha coauthor of Nuclear North Korea: A Debate on Engagement Strategies, who appeared on PBS Newshour to discuss the death of Kim Jong-il and its possible impact on North Korea and the United States.
Meanwhile, Cha’s coauthor David Kang spoke about the legacy of Kim Jong-il on NPR. In the interview, Kang addressed the possibility of a kind of “Arab Spring” happening in North Korea:
We tend to focus in America on the repressive side because there is certainly – it’s a police state. And there are 100, 200,000 people in prison camps. There’s a massive military and police presence. At the same time, as Sandra pointed out, this is the only game in town and so it’s very hard – if you imagine people who maybe unhappy down in a village somewhere, for them to organize and get together and actually engage in an Arab Spring is extremely difficult in North Korea.
So, in many ways I think the idea that there’ll be a popular uprising is really unlikely and what most of us think about is it would be some kind of palace coup or some top-down kind of problems that would eventually lead to an overthrow in North Korea. Not necessarily bottom-up with people taking to the streets.
Earlier this year, Richard Betts, author of American Force: Dangers, Delusions, and Dilemmas in National Security, wrote a much-discussed article in Foreign Affairs exploring the controversial visions of world politics put forth by Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington, and John Mearsheimer. He discussed the article at the Carnegie Council and below is a video of his talk (you might need to adjust the player by scrolling).
In introducing Richard Betts’s talk, Joanne Myers of the Carnegie Council said,
Although all satisfied the demand for new paradigms, with greater or lesser success, Professor Fukuyama’s rang truest when the Berlin Wall fell, Professor Huntington’s did so after 9/11, and Professor Mearsheimer’s may do so once China’s power is full-grown.
Professor Betts reminds us that theories, however powerful, oftentimes do not always hold up as reliable predictors of particular developments. Still, all three ideas remain beacons, as the issues they flagged and their policy recommendations continue to shape the debate on Capitol Hill today.
As world events are rapidly changing and none of these three visions rings completely true today, perhaps it is time, as our guest writes, “to integrate the most relevant elements of these three approaches into a fourth, one that would penetrate the American political mainstream of today.
“The non-scholarly and unstoppably influential book of all time for me is The Communist Manifesto. Even today, reading it gives me a thrill.”—Partha Chatterjee
We have been fortunate enough to publish in the United States books from the great Indian publisher Permanent Black , which is known for its titles in South Asian history, politics, and culture.
In the interview, Chatterjee discusses democracy in the non-Western, Indian context, how Lineages of Political Society relates to his other work, and contemporary Indian politics. The interview is also notable for Chatterjee’s more personal reflections. Here he is on the impact of his upbringing in Kolkata (Calcutta):
I am sure the experience [of growing up in Kolkata] has been central to my intellectual formation. The Kolkata I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s was often described as the most horrifying example of urban degradation anywhere in the world. I vividly remember as a college student waiting at bus stops besieged by begging mothers with infants in their arms; vast swathes of the city’s pavements were inhabited by homeless people from the countryside…. I also think the relative isolation of Kolkata in the academic life of India and its lack of well-endowed universities and institutes actually helped me to stay out of the obligations and temptations to which those located in Delhi, for instance, are subject. I had the chance to improvise, innovate, and think outside the prevailing orthodoxies.
Betts describes himself as a Cold War hawk who became a post–Cold War dove. In this collection of essays, he addresses all the central issues of recent U.S. strategy: the maintenance of primacy and the prospective rise of China, humanitarian intervention and the struggles in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the problems posed by weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and the possibility of a link between the two. This is not mainstream international relations scholarship. Betts combines serious thought, common sense, and deep historical knowledge, rather than simply applying abstract theories, and his conclusions are expressed in plain English, rather than with mathematical models. His judgments are therefore contingent, but they are always considered and often incisive. Betts is not opposed to the occasional use of force for the right purposes, and he explains why it is difficult to get strategic policy right. But he deplores the persistent American tendency toward military activism, especially in pursuit of what he describes as a “liberal empire.” As he himself recognizes, he is by no means a lone voice arguing for American restraint, but he is certainly among the most articulate.
In the conclusion to his bookAmerican Force: Dangers, Delusions, and Dilemmas in National Security, Richard Betts explores some of the possible dangers that might confront the United States in the coming years. In particular he considers issues and possible threats such as China, terrorism, the Middle East, and U.S. dependence on foreign oil. He also briefly discusses the possible options and their consequences:
Terrorists’ acquisition of usable weapons of mass destruction. Typical terrorism has a fearsome psychological impact, but it actually inflicts few casualties compared with even small wars and does not pose a serious material threat in itself. If terrorists could deploy nuclear or efficient biological weapons, however, the potential casualties would be far higher. Unless U.S. intelligence could find, fix, and pounce on such weapons, there is little chance of preventing their use since terrorists are not easily subject to deterrence. Acquisition of WMD by dangerous regimes like North Korea or Iran is also a severe threat, but at least is more manageable since rogue states have a return address and thus are more subject to deterrence.
What to do? For counterterrorism, first, business as usual (which means energetic intelligence collection and special operations), and second, better civil defense preparations. For dealing with nuclear proliferation by states, diplomatic and economic carrots and sticks, and covert action to disrupt and retard nuclear development programs where it can be effective. None of these actions assures success, but more ambitious efforts at overt preventive war are likely to accelerate the threat more than suppress it.
We were sad to hear of the recent death of notable philosopher Michael Dummett, author of The Nature and Future of Philosophy (2010) and other titles. Both the Guardian and the Telegraph published excellent obituaries on Michael Dummett highlighting his important contributions to analytic philosophy and his standing as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century.
On top of his impressive contributions to philosophy, particularly his work on Frege, and his influence on other philosophers, Dummett was also a leading campaigner against racism in England and for the protection of immigrant rights. Dummett criticized the political system in Britain and particularly the Home Office for encouraging hostility to immigrants and non-whites in Britain.
In 2010 we were fortunate to have the opportunity to publish Dummett’s The Nature and Future of Philosophy, which in many ways offers a kind of encapsulation of his ideas about the discipline of philosophy. In the book, Dummett analyzes the current state of philosophy as it is practiced in academia and elsewhere. Despite the proliferation and growth of philosophy departments, the discipline’s between the analytical and continental camps has obscured its relevance. Dummett sets forth a proposal for renewal and reengagement by returning to a focus on the nature of philosophical inquiry as it has developed for centuries, especially its exceptional openness and perspective—which has, ironically, led to our present crisis. He discusses philosophy in relation to science, religion, morality, language, and meaning and recommends avenues for healing around a renewed investigation of mind, language, and thought. Employing his trademark frankness and accessibility, Dummett asks philosophers to resolve theoretical difference and reclaim the vital work of their practice.
We wanted to wish everyone a Happy New Year and thank readers of our blog and Columbia University Press titles for their interest in our books and our authors. In a seemingly ever-shifting publishing environment, we are grateful for the continuing interest among readers for serious, thoughtful books that offer new ways of thinking about politics, culture, society, and the world around us. We published a range of titles in 2011 that we felt made a difference and below is our Spring 2012 catalog which offers a sampling of what you can look forward to in the coming months. (Click on the view in full screen icon to get a better view.)
The exhibit currently at the Museum of the City of New York upon which the book is based was also featured in today’s New York Times. As the article points out the grid, now at 200, while not always appreciated for its aesthetic value has served the city well allowing it to expand, and became a model for other cities. Among the more obvious benefit of making the city more navigable, the grid also has promoted sociability, ecological efficiency, and of course allowed some landowners. to make a lot of money
In describing reactions to the grid, Sam Roberts writes in his review of the book The Greatest Grid:
Some planners despised the grid for its rigidity and for its contribution to gridlock, a term popularized during the 1980 transit strike by the Traffic Department engineers Sam Schwartz and Roy Cottam. But others hailed it as a utilitarian, egalitarian and resilient tool that fostered development in a city of pedestrians. It imposed a Cartesian orderliness on the city, much as this book does on its subject matter.
Similar to our list in animal studies, the field itself has expanded to include works coming from a range of fields in the humanities, including philosophy, art, literature, film, theater, and religion. The expanding number of classes and programs in the field consider issues ranging from the treatment of animals and the ethical questions that raises to exploring what animals think and what they have to “say.”
Among the various scholars interviewed about the nature and direction of animal studies is Kari Weil, author of the forthcoming book, Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now?. In the article Weil considers how environmental science had laid a foundation by giving humans “the sense that we are a species among other species and [are] subject to the forces of nature.”
The following is a letter from Columbia University Press’s editorial director and associate directorJennifer Crewein response to a recent article in The Chronicle Review on books in translation.
I would otherwise wholeheartedly applaud Carlin Romano’s article “American Readers’ Translation Privation” (The Chronicle Review, November 18, 2011), if it were not for the fact that he makes no mention of university presses, many of which are seriously committed to making available seminal works of fiction and nonfiction in translation.
In the past 12 months, Columbia University Press alone has published 15 new books in translation, including works by the European philosophers and cultural critics Gianni Vattimo, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Rancière. Our fiction offerings include a Bengali novel by Tarashankar Bandopadhyay, a book of Chinese stories by Huang Fan, and A Room Where the Star-Spangled Banner Cannot Be Heard—a translation from the Japanese of a novel by an American writer, Levy Hideo, who is the first Western novelist to write in Japanese. In addition, we published 11 paperback reprints of translations, ranging from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks to a work by the French chemist and father of molecular gastronomy, Hervé This.
These books constitute 19 percent of our total output in the same period, significantly more than the 3 percent that is usually invoked for American publishers.
This level of commitment to translation can be found at many university presses. We understand the importance of making global thought and world literature available to American readers unable to read them in the original language, and that is why we go to the extra trouble of finding peer reviewers who are fluent in other languages, applying for funding, and supervising translators. Anne Solange-Noble knows that we know who she is!
In her newest book, Kristeva explores artistic representations of severed heads from the Paleolithic period to the present. Surveying paintings, sculptures, and drawings, Julia Kristeva turns her famed critical eye to a study of the head as symbol and metaphor, as religious object and physical fact, further developing a critical theme in her work—the power of horror—and the potential for the face to provide an experience of the sacred. The following is an excerpt from the book:
One drawing remains etched in my memory, given to me without ceremony but as a sign of favor, in the way that only gifted beings and mothers know how. It was one of those cold, white winters that freeze the Balkans and bring families together around their coal stoves. Hunched over the glowing grate, I warmed my icy cheeks and numb fingers as I listened absentmindedly to a children’s radio show: “What is the quickest means of transportation in the world? Send us your answer, with a drawing to match, on a postcard, to the following address . . . ” “I know, it’s an airplane,” my little sister piped up. “No, it’s a rocket,” I countered, pleased at having the last word. “I’d say instead that it’s thought,” Mama proposed. I could only concede, but not without my usual smart remark: “Maybe, but you can’t draw a thought, it’s invisible.” “You’ll see.” I can still picture the card that she drew with my name on it, which won me first prize in the radio contest. To the left, a big snowman in the process of melting, his head falling off, as though severed by the invisible guillotine of the sun. To the right, the planet earth in its interstellar orbit, offering its imaginary expanses for armchair travels
In fact, there was nothing special about that drawing. Certainly, the spareness of the sketch, the vacuousness of the melting body, the severed head all merged with an ingenious idea: only the speed of thought exceeds the speed of bodies, whether cosmic, human, or products of human technology. But, to my young eyes, it subtly demonstrated that quickness of thought I so admired in the answer my mother had proposed. The drawing let it be seen, as much in the concision of its concept (a perishable body transcends itself and conveys itself through the power of reason) as in the cheerful quickness of the line (without collapsing into caricature, the nervous, spirited line betrayed the melancholy of our mortal condition as well as the triumphant irony of deep reflection).
My Life with the Taliban
Abdul Salam Zaeef; Translated from the Pashto and Edited and Introduced by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn; Foreword by Barnett R. Rubin
In the most recent issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, Dean Starkman, co-editor of the forthcoming The Best Business Writing 2012, writes about the development and the recent history of the business press
Starkman terms this development the “CNBC-ization” of business news which has made coverage “more granular, insider-dependent, hurried and riveted on (short-term) needs of investors.” This type of journalism, Starkman suggests, focuses less on covering business and instead becomes an extension of the financial system. Placing this shift in a historical context, Starkman writes, “The shift also seems to represent something less modern: a return to the business press’s early twentieth-century roots as a servant to markets—and a retreat from its later role as watchdog over them.”
In concluding the article, Dean Starkman writes:
Investor-focused reporting was ascendant as the twenty-first century dawned, just as the financial system was entering a fateful phase. At the same time, the media business itself was undergoing a radical dislocation, one that continues. We have crossed over into a new media era, one in which the rules, norms, forms, and whole institutions are in flux. There’s reason for both hope and despair.
Still, the choice facing business journalism in the wake of the Crash of 2008 isn’t so different from the one facing the field after the Crash of 1929: you can shrug off the event and double down on market-serving news. Or you can step back, rethink the mission, and relearn the lesson of the great Barney Kilgore [former editor of The Wall Street Journal]: serve the market while also looking beyond it. That is to say, there’s really no choice at all.
This week we will be featuringThe Severed Head: Capital Visions by Julia Kristeva and in conjunction with this, we are also giving away other titles by Kristeva.
To enter the giveaway please submit by email your name and mailing address by 1 pm eastern time on Friday, January 13th to pl2164@columbia.edu. The winner will be drawn at random. (Unfortunately, the giveaway is only available to those living in the United States or Canada.)
In addition to the Severed Head, we will also be giving away the following books by Julia Kristeva:
Most managers probably don’t consider themselves designers—they manage people and processes. But consider this: Instead of just thinking about who does what, how and when, what if managers began to think about how these tasks interact with customers, how the space these activities are done in (both the real space and metaphorical space) create efficiency, buy-in, job fulfillment, and profitability? By treating management as a design process, managers can create systems that have quality built in rather than simply offering rules and guidelines for employees to follow. This book is the guide to making that shift, and is an important resource for those who lead people.
For more on the book here is Tim Ogilvie discussing Designing for Growth:
In the following passage fromThe Severed Head: Capital Visions, Julia Kristeva explores the iconography and symbolism of beheadings during the French Revolution:
More Roman, Marat takes great pleasure in what he believes to be the “serene joy” of the people contemplating “the head of the tyrant [that] had just fallen under the sword of the law” and salutes “a religious holiday.” In effect, we are witnessing a “syncope of the sacred,” which only suspends one religion with the ambition of immediately founding another.But this new religiosity is lacking in imagination and rudimentary in symbolism: the passage to the act itself takes the place of culture and justice.
The jubilation of the masses before this spectacle has been compared to prehistoric skull rituals and the totemic meal. This comparison does not flatter modernity, to say the least. The gritty rhetoric, the repression or denial of death often takes the mediocre, infantile aspect of the bawdy story. A few engravings tragically emphasize the “caustic forms” of this Dantean era. Less numerous, it seems, than the royalist images, most of the figurations are republican caricatures representing the head of Louis XVI. The most widespread and widely imitated engraving in France and abroad is signed with two pseudonyms, “Fious,” for the draftsman, and “Sarcifu,” for the engraver. Redundant imagery characterizes these productions, which are limited to representing three essential subjects: the severed head is displayed on the Place de la Révolution, like a Medusa head, as some present-day historians note; the portrait of the guillotine victim is engraved without any narrative context, for the voyeuristic pleasure of “sacred” vengeance; the king is accompanied on his descent into Hell.
