This event is jointly sponsored by the Mediterranean Studies Forum and the Forum on Contemporary Europe at Stanford University.

For more information: The Mediterranean Studies Forum

About the speaker

Steven A. Cook is the Douglas Dillon fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is an expert on Arab and Turkish politics as well as U.S.-Middle East policy. Dr. Cook is the author of Ruling But Not Governing: The Military and Political Development in Egypt, Algeria, and Turkey (Johns Hopkins University Press, May 2007).

Prior to joining the Council, Dr. Cook was a research fellow at the Brookings Institution (2001-2002) and a Soref research fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (1995-96) He has published widely in a variety of foreign policy journals, opinion magazines, and newspapers including Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Wall Street Journal, Journal of Democracy, Weekly Standard, New Republic Online, New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, and the International Herald Tribune. Dr. Cook is also a frequent commentator on radio and television.

Dr. Cook holds a BA in international studies from Vassar College, an MA in international relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and both an MA and PhD in political science from the University of Pennsylvania. He speaks Arabic and Turkish and reads French.

About the moderator

Scott Sagan is a professor of political science and co-director of Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation. Before joining the Stanford faculty, Sagan was a lecturer in the Department of Government at Harvard University and served as a special assistant to the director of the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon. He has also served as a consultant to the office of the Secretary of Defense and at the Sandia National Laboratory and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Sagan is the author of Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security (Princeton University Press, 1989), The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton University Press, 1993), and with co-author Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: A Debate Renewed (W.W. Norton, 2002). He is the co-editor of Peter R. Lavoy, Scott D. Sagan, and James L. Wirtz, Planning the Unthinkable (Cornell University Press, 2000). Sagan was the recipient of Stanford University's 1996 Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and the 1998 Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching. As part of CISAC's mission of training the next generation of security specialists he and Stephen Stedman founded Stanford's Interschool Honors Program in International Security Studies in 2000.

About Ruling But Not Governing: The Military and Political Development in Egypt, Algeria, and Turkey:

Ruling But Not Governing highlights the critical role that the military plays in the stability of the Egyptian, Algerian, and, until recently, Turkish political systems. This in-depth study demonstrates that while the soldiers and materiel of Middle Eastern militaries form the obvious outer perimeter of regime protection, it is actually the less apparent, multilayered institutional legacies of military domination that play the decisive role in regime maintenance. Steven A. Cook uncovers the complex and nuanced character of the military's interest in maintaining a facade of democracy. He explores how an authoritarian elite hijack seemingly democratic practices such as elections, multiparty politics, and a relatively freer press as part of a strategy to ensure the durability of authoritarian systems. Using Turkey's recent reforms as a point of departure, the study also explores ways external political actors can improve the likelihood of political change in Egypt and Algeria. Ruling But Not Governing provides valuable insight into the political dynamics that perpetuate authoritarian regimes and offers novel ways to promote democratic change.

Sponsored by FSI and the Council on Foreign Relations. 

In recent decades the Middle East's strategic architecture has changed significantly with the rise in the regional influence of the non-Arab states of the Middle East: Iran, Turkey and Israel and the considerably reduced influence of the key Arab states, that used to be the prime movers in the Arab world: Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Secular nationalism is in apparent retreat as free elections in Turkey and the Palestinian Authority seem to indicate. What does this all mean for the Arab-Israeli peace process, and especially for the arrival at a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians? What does this mean for the chances of success of greater US and European involvement?

Synopsis

To Prof. Susser, the Middle East is dealing with a variety of key issues. He explains that the fallout of Iraq has led to widespread anxiety that the Middle East could shatter into a chaos of sectarian violence, beginning with a breakdown in Iraq. In addition, Prof. Susser notes the social economic decline in the Middle East which has caused emigration and, most importantly, a changing power dynamic in the region. Citing Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia as previous regional superpowers, he believes that the current major players are Iran, Turkey, and Israel, all of which are non-Arab. Prof. Susser argues this power shift was accelerated by the fall of the USSR, as well as the presence of the US. He focuses particularly on the role of Iran, a country he feels is trying to establish a “crescent of influence.” Prof. Susser believes the Israel-Hezbollah war was the start of a new era of conflicts between Israel and Iran as they battle over the regional architecture that will shape the future of the Middle East. He argues that Lebanon is therefore a key battleground in the conflict.

Prof. Susser feels this conflict is a struggle against Iran and Shiite influence. One can notice the shift in dynamic in the region through the fact that other Arab states are now on the same side as Israel, whereas before no Arab state would side with the Israelis. Prof. Susser believes this is partly because there is a shifting power balance from Sunnis to Shiites in the Middle East, a radical change that goes against the traditional order of the region.

Prof. Susser moves on to focus to another potential radical change, a two state solution between Israel and Palestine as set out by the Annapolis conference in November 2007. He argues that it is most unlikely that the US will actually get the two sides to sign a final agreement resolving the conflict in the near future. At the same time, Prof. Susser reveals his belief that it is imperative that negotiations do not shoot to high. This “courts failure” and leads to disaster. In fact, Prof. Susser argues for “courting success.” He explains that this must be achieved through realistic goals such as a secure ceasefire, and that the Palestinians may be less reluctant in agreeing to interim solutions. Finally, Prof. Susser emphasizes that if an interim approach is unsuccessful and a permanent solution is not agreed upon, then Israel must not ignore the unattractive but perhaps necessary option of unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. Prof. Susser argues that although this may seem like a failure, the status quo works better for Arabs such as Hamas who seek to delegitimize Israel.

About the speaker

Professor Asher Susser, Director for External Affairs of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern Studies at TAU. Professor Susser holds a PhD in Modern Middle Eastern History at Tel Aviv University and he taught for over twenty-five years in the University's Department of Middle Eastern History and is presently a visiting Professor at Brandeis University. He has been a Fulbright Fellow, a visiting professor at Cornell University, the University of Chicago and Brandeis University and a visiting fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. In 2006 Professor Susser was selected as TAU's Faculty of Humanities Outstanding Lecturer. In 1994 Professor Susser was the only Israeli academic to accompany Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to his historic meeting with King Hussein of Jordan for the signing of the Washington Declaration.

Presented by the Forum on Contemporary Europe.

Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul in 1952 and grew up in a large family similar to those which he describes in his novels Cevdet Bey and His Sons and The Black Book, in the district of Nisantasi. As he writes in his autobiographical book Istanbul, from his childhood until the age of 22 he devoted himself largely to painting and dreamed of becoming an artist. After graduating from the American Robert College in Istanbul, he studied architecture at Istanbul Technical University for three years, but abandoned the course when he gave up his ambition to become an architect and artist. He went on to graduate in journalism from Istanbul University, but never worked as a journalist. At the age of 23 Pamuk decided to become a novelist, and giving up everything else retreated into his flat and began to write.

His first novel Cevdet Bey and His Sons was published seven years later in 1982. The novel is the story of three generations of a wealthy Istanbul family living in Nisantasi, Pamuk's own home district. The novel was awarded both the Orhan Kemal and Milliyet literary prizes. The following year Pamuk published his novel The Silent House, which in French translation won the 1991 Prix de la découverte européene. The White Castle (1985) about the frictions and friendship between a Venetian slave and an Ottoman scholar was published in English and many other languages from 1990 onwards, bringing Pamuk his first international fame. The same year Pamuk went to America, where he was a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York from 1985 to 1988. It was there that he wrote most of his novel The Black Book, in which the streets, past, chemistry and texture of Istanbul are described through the story of a lawyer seeking his missing wife. This novel was published in Turkey in 1990, and in French translation won the Prix France Culture. The Black Book enlarged Pamuk's fame both in Turkey and internationally as an author at once popular and experimental, and able to write about past and present with the same intensity. In 1991 Pamuk's daughter Rüya was born. That year saw the production of a film Hidden Face, whose script by Pamuk was based on a one-page story in The Black Book.

His novel The New Life, about young university students influenced by a mysterious book, was published in Turkey in 1994 and became one of the most widely read books in Turkish literature. My Name Is Red, about Ottoman and Persian artists and their ways of seeing and portraying the non-western world, told through a love story and family story, was published in 1998. This novel won the French Prix Du Meilleur Livre Etranger, the Italian Grinzane Cavour (2002) and the International IMPAC Dublin literary award (2003). Snow, which he describes as 'my first and last political novel,' was published in 2002. In this book set in the small city of Kars in northeastern Turkey he experimented with a new type of 'political novel,' telling the story of violence and tension between political Islamists, soldiers, secularists, and Kurdish and Turkish nationalists. In 1999 a selection of his articles on literature and culture written for newspapers and magazines in Turkey and abroad, together with a selection of writings from his private notebooks, was published under the title Other Colours.

Pamuk's most recent book, Istanbul, is a poetical work, combining the author's early memoirs up to the age of 22, and an essay about the city of Istanbul, illustrated with photographs from his own album, and pictures by western painters and Turkish photographers.

Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006. The press release read "who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the class and interlacing of cultures."

http://www.orhanpamuk.net/

Sponsored by the Mediterranean Studies Forum, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies' S.T. Lee Lecture, the Division of International Comparative & Area Studies, the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, and the Forum on Contemporary Europe.

Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe (speaker) is a visiting scholar at CISAC. Her PhD dissertation, entitled "Humanitarian Military Intervention: the Moral Imperative Versus the Rule of Law," focused on conflicting ethical and legal justifications for humanitarian military intervention. In an earlier publication, The Promise of Law for the Post-Mao Leadership in China, she examined the prospects for the development of the rule of law in China. Future projects will address the rule of law with respect to norms on use of force.

Donahoe earned her PhD in ethics and social theory from the Graduate Theological Union at the University of California Berkeley. She holds a JD from Stanford law school and an MA in East Asian studies from Stanford. She also earned an MA in theological studies from Harvard and spent a year studying Mandarin at Nankai University in Tianjin. After law school, Donahoe clerked for the Hon. William H. Orrick of the United States Federal District Court for the Northern District of California. She served as a teaching fellow at Stanford Law School and practiced high-tech litigation at Fenwick & West in Palo Alto, CA. She is a member of the California Bar.

Laura Donohue (respondent) is a fellow at CISAC and at Stanford Law School's Center for Constitutional Law. Donohue's research focuses on national security and counterterrorist law in the United States, United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland, Israel, and the Republic of Turkey. Prior to Stanford, Donohue was a fellow at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, where she served on the Executive Session for Domestic Preparedness and the International Security Program. In 2001 the Carnegie Corporation named her to its Scholars Program, funding the project, "Security and Freedom in the Face of Terrorism." At Stanford, Donohue directed a project for the United States Departments of Justice and State and, later, Homeland Security, on mass-casualty terrorist incidents. She has written numerous articles on counterterrorism in liberal, democratic states. Author of Counter-terrorist Law and Emergency Powers in the United Kingdom 1922-2000, she is completing a manuscript for Cambridge University Press analyzing the impact of British and American counterterrorist law on life, liberty, property, privacy, and free speech. Donohue obtained her AB (with honors, in philosophy) from Dartmouth College, her MA (with distinction, in war and peace studies) from University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, and her PhD in history from the University of Cambridge. She received her JD from Stanford Law School.