Category: Appearances (vintage)

Planning US-wide speaking tour, Sept. and Oct.

One thing I’ve been pretty busy with this week has been doing some detailed planning for the nationwide speaking tour I’ll be conducting, in connection with my book Re-engage! America and the World After Bush, for September and October.
My colleagues at the Friends Committee on National Legislation and the World Affairs Councils of America have been extremely helpful in suggesting priorities and soliciting invitations, respectively. As of now, if the present tentative plans work out, it looks as if the tour could involve gigs in Kansas City, Chicago, Tennessee, New Jersey, Delaware, southern Texas, the Boston area, LA, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, and Philadelphia. See the more precise– though still tentative– schedule here.
However, a lot of these arrangements still need to be solidified. So if you live in one of those areas– or Portland, OR, or Seattle, WA– and would like to host* a book-related event, or can offer suggestions of bodies that could do this, we would still have time to consider it. Please email me as soon as you can.
(And if you would like to host a book-related event in some completely different place– and can offer a good-sized honorarium as well!– then I could probably find a way to fit you in, too… Well, either into this tour or into a follow-up tour I’ll likely do in early 2009.)
Look, folks, I’m not seeking to make any significant amount of money from any of this work… Either from sales of the book itself, or from the speaking events. (No, I am not like Mr. “Likes his luxury and likes triple-billing for it, too” Ehud Olmert.) Nor do I get any income from all this blogging; and nor do I have a well-paid day job like so many of those lucky bloggers from the professoriat.
I am a humble scribe. That’s what I am.
And no, annoyingly enough, Paradigm Publishers does not have any budget for the book tour, either.
Mainly, I want to do whatever I can over the months ahead to get the ideas in the book more widely circulated and discussed. So it would be really nice if any of you JWN readers could help out with the book tour a bit.
Thanks for anything any of you can do!
—-
* In this context, “host” = to organize, publicize, and pay the relevant expenses for an event.

Are foreign wars winnable? and other big questions

This morning I took part in a panel discussion at the U.S. Institute of Peace on Foreign Policy and the Next U.S. Administration The other panelists were Nikolas Gvosdev, editor of The National Interest, and Dan Twining, a youngish analyst with the present State Department’s Bureau of Policy Planning who previously worked for a while as a foreign-policy aide to Sen. John McCain. The session was ably chaired by Abi Williams, Vice President for Conflict Prevention at USIP.
It was an interesting and rich discussion. As I had expected, Gvosdev and I agreed about a lot of things. He is a very intelligent Realist. My view is that pacifism is the new realism. (Not sure if I managed to persuade him of that; but hey, he might become convinced of it some day!) Twining made a number of observations that I found really interesting, too, though we disagreed much more.
Wow. USIP’s a/v and web-editing staff have done a great job and have gotten an MP3 version of the discussion up onto their website already. Easy to find my main presentation: I was on first.
If you don’t want to listen to the audio, here’s a rough outline of what I said:
I started by describing three momentous consequences of the globalization the world system has seen in recent decades:

    1. Foreign wars have become nearly unwinnable. This for two reasons: (a) compared with, say, the situation in the 19th century, the global information environment has become much more transparent; and (b) the norm of human equality has become much more widely (and deeply?) acknowledged, even if still not by any means always respected.
    2. The US is no longer the Uberpower it seemed to be back in the 1990s, but we are now really in what Richard Haass has called the “non-polar world.”. This was a quick reprise of some of the analysis from Ch.6 of my Re-engage! book.
    3. Climate change has emerged as an issue of core importance in world politics.

I went on to say how these three big developments structure the global environment in which the new president will be operating, and made a few other points… I concluded by noting that we need to develop a new, much more people-centered definition of “the national interest”, and laying out my list of the three top things the next president should do within his first 100 days in office.
These are:

    1. Announce a date certain for the withdrawal of all US troops from Iraq, and invite the UN to convene the negotiation(s) which will allow that to happen in an orderly way.
    2. Close Guantanamo; and
    3. Announce that he is committed to participating in good faith in the post-Kyoto global negotiations on climate change.

Those of you who’ve read my Re-engage! book will probably recognize how this presentation built on some of the book’s key themes.
More on the increasing unwinnability of foreign wars, and on the “Top 3 Things for the new president”– later. Right now, I’m pretty tired.

On Chicago Public Radio’s ‘Worldview’, Wednesday noon; some Mom-bragging

My book Re-engage! and I will be featured on Jerome McDonnell’s great ‘Worldview’ program out of Chicago Public Radio Wednesday, at noon CST.
You can also hear it through their website there.
Sorry I haven’t done much substantive blogging recently. I’ve been in New York today for the graduation of my wonderfully talented daughter Leila Rached with an M.A. degree from the Peace Education program at Columbia Teachers’ College.
Leila is also a full-time teacher of some five years’ experience. She teaches third grade in a severely stressed part of Brooklyn. I went to visit her classroom there in January and found the students sharp, focused, and engaged. They are great writers, too!
For her MA thesis, Leila designed a whole third-grade curriculum program in Conflict Resolution, Human Rights, and Environmental Education for her class.
And okay, while I’m in Mom-bragging mode, my son is getting a Master’s degree in early June, too. This is his second one. It’s from MIT’s program in Technology and Policy. His main focus is on energy and environmental issues. He’s been looking at the validity of the different ways people try to account for the emissions-reducing benefits of renewable power generation.
I can’t tell you all how incredibly proud I am of the people my three kids have become, and the work they’re doing. I love spending time with them and the partners who have brought so much additional richness into all of our lives. I truly realize how lucky I am able to be able to spend good time with them.

Speaking next Tuesday, Capitol Hill

Next Tuesday, I’ll have the honor of being part of a panel of people speaking on the theme of “Re-calculating Annapolis”, in the Rayburn House Office Building.
The co-panelists will be Rob Malley, head of the Crisis Group’s Middle East department; Daniel Levy, whiz-kid of the Israeli peace movement; Andrew Whitley, currently with UNRWA, previously head of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division; and Ghaith al-Omari, previously an advisor to Abu Mazen.
Here are the sponsors of the event:

    Churches for Middle East Peace
    Americans for Peace Now
    Brit Tzedek v’Shalom
    Israel Policy Forum
    The Arab American Institute
    American Task Force on Palestine, and
    The Foundation for Middle East Peace

Amb. Phil Wicox, the president of FMEP and a distinguished former US diplomat, including head of Counter-terrorism, will be chairing the discussion.
Every single one of these organizations does a great job and has talented and thoughtful people working for it. It is particularly great that work together on projects like this one, demonstrating right here in Washington DC that Arab-Israeli peace is not a zero-sum game in which if one “side” wins the other loses. Not at all! With a sustainable, fair peace agreement, everyone wins.
(Disclosures: I have sat on the Leadership Council of Churches for Middle East Peace since the LC was founded four or five years ago. FMEP has on occasion given support to my travel expenses, including for my latest visit to Damascus.)
It should be an interesting discussion. A lot has changed since the Annapolis conference, which was only ten weeks ago. Of course, a lot has also stayed the same: lack of progress in the negotiations; Israeli settlement projects continuing to get funded and built, especially in and around Jerusalem; deadly conflict between Israel and Gaza, impacting mainly on Gaza but spreading fear and uncertainty both sides of the line; another suicide bombing in Israel; Israel. the US, and– particularly tragically– also Fateh continuing to try to exclude and crush Hamas despite its popular support; re-marginalization of Syria from the diplomacy; etc.
If you’re interested in coming to the discussion, you will need to RSVP to the email address given on the announcement as they need an idea of the numbers to provide the light lunch to. This is planned as a “widely attended event”, so members of Congress and their staffers are allowed to take advantage of the free lunch offer.
If you can’t make it, I imagine they’ll be videoing it for C-SPAN so you can watch it later.

Public discussion on my Africa book, Washington DC, Sept. 26

I am happy to announce that there will be a public discussion (and book-signing) of my book Amnesty After Atrocity, organized by the InfoShop at the World Bank, next Wednesday, September 26.
It will be in the World Bank’s J Building, Auditorium J1-050, at 701, 18th St NW, Washington DC. Chairing the discussion will be Katherine Marshall, a really fascinating dynamo of a woman who was appointed by former World Bank President Jim Wolfensohn to be Vice-President for Ethics, Values, and Religion.
I hope there are some JWN readers in the DC region who would like to come. I would also really appreciate it if you could circulate the announcement of the event to anyone you think would be interested in coming. It’s here.
The announcement adds the following details: “Coffee and cookies will be served… (A security pass is not required for this event.)”
.

I’m speaking at USIP on December 11

.. about my atrocities book.
Here‘s the info. It looks like a good event: we’ve got some great people responding to my presentation.
Today, they had SCIRI head Abdul-Aziz Hakim at USIP. Wednesday, they’ll be releasing the Iraq Study Group report. Then next Monday it’s my thing. It’s at 2 p.m. Come if you can– but I think they need an RSVP.

Jordan to host religious leaders’ gathering on Iraq

AFP is reporting that Jordan will be hosting a gathering of Islamic religious leaders April 22, to discuss reconciliation in Iraq.
Actually, I’m going to be in Jordan April 17-21. I’ll be giving a lecture at the inauguration of a new U.N. University leadership institute there.
Convening this religious leaders’ gathering seems to me like a good move. (You can read my recent paper on “Religion and Violence” to see how I identified the important kinds of contribution that religious precepts, practices, and institutions can make to peacemaking.)
AFP quotes an official statement as saying that the gathering,

    will be attended by “a large number of key Iraqi religious leaders who represent the Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish Iraqis”…
    The conference will be placed under the patronage of King Abdullah II who will “join his voice to those of the Iraqi religious and tribal leaders in calling for an end to violence and religious tensions in Iraq.” [tribal leaders??? Well, I guess that’s a Hashemite thang… ~HC]
    It is expected to produce a statement signed by all the participants and indicating “that there is no religious legal basis for hostility and fighting among Shiites and Sunnis,” it said.
    “The tension and fighting underway in Iraq is taking cover behind religious and sectarian motives … which is not justified by our noble Muslim religion,” the statement said.
    Religious leaders from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran and Turkey, as well as from other Arab countries are also expected to attend.
    Participants are to include Sheikh Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi of the Cairo-based Al-Azhar, the highest authority in Sunni Islam, as well as Arab League secretary general Amr Mussa.

The international courts discussion grows

Well, my article in Foreign Policy on international war-crimes courts has been getting a gratifying amount of attention. My intention in publishing it was, after all, to open up the discussion on this topic to include the previously under-heard point of view that questions or even criticises the general social utility of such courts…
This Thursday, I’m doing a call-in show on the topic on the San Francisco-based radio station KALW-FM. It’s an NPR affiliate there. It runs from 1-2 p.m. Eastern Time, so I guess that’s 10-11 a.m. Pacific Time.
Tune on in, Bay Area readers. And call in with all your questions.
How many times can I mention JWN in one hour, I wonder?
Also, FP just sent me a bunch of letters that they’ll be running in response to my article in, I think, their next issue. Seven letters including only one that’s supportive of my argument. Of the six critics, five are law professors. Vested interests, anyone? Okay, I know this is not totally a valid case for me to make– I realise that these people are also voicing some substantive criticisms of my argument that need to be addressed… And indeed, will be, since FP are giving me a princely 400 words to come back at ’em…
Good. Maybe I could stir things up a bit by mentioning Ramesh Thakur’s term “judicial colonialism” in there, somewhere?
So I see that one of these letters is from David Scheffer, now a law prof, previously Pres. Clinton’s “Special Ambassador for War Crimes Affairs”. Actually, it was hearing David talk about the criminal prosecutions program in post-genocide Rwanda that got me started on that whole entire research project and now soon-to-be book on Transitional Justice.
I remember it as though it were yesterday. It was September 2000, at a conference the Hilton Humanitarian Foundation was holding in Geneva, where David and I were both speakers. I heard him say something like, “Well, the Rwandan government’s plan to prosecute all the perpetrators of the genocide is going ahead very well indeed. We’re most pleased with their diligence. However, there is a bit of a backlog there, with currently around 135,000 suspects in jail and awaiting trial… And so far, unfortunately, the government has very little capacity to try them, so some of them have been there for more than five years already without having the chance to get into a courtroom… ”
And I thought, Oh my G-d, that’s huge! Especially given that the whole population of the country was then somewhere under 8 million. So I came away from the conference determined to start looking into it… and… and…
So when do I get to write the mega-long piece about Palestinian politics that I’ve promised to Deb Chasman at Boston review, you may ask?
Erm… maybe on the 6-hour train-ride going up to NYC this Sunday? Alternatively, I could reframe the piece from being mega-long to being short, sharp, and elegantly composed? Nah. That sounds even harder… Don’t worry, I’ll think of something… (Maybe blogging less could be an option?)