ABSTRACT

From 1975 to 1990, Lebanon experienced a long war involving various national and international actors. The peace agreement that followed and officially propelled the country into a "postwar" era did not address many of the root causes of war, nor did it hold main actors accountable. Instead, a politics of "no victor, no vanquished" was promoted, in which the political elite agreed simply to consign the war to the past. However, since then, Lebanon has found itself still entangled in various forms of political violence, from car bombings and assassinations to additional outbreaks of armed combat.

In this talk, Sami Hermez discusses his newly released book War Is Coming. The book argues that the country's political leaders have enabled the continuation of violence and examines how people live between these periods of conflict. What do everyday conversations, practices, and experiences look like during these moments? How do people attempt to find a measure of certainty or stability in such times? Hermez's ethnographic study of everyday life in Lebanon between the volatile years of 2006 and 2009 tackles these questions and reveals how people engage in practices of recollecting past war while anticipating future turmoil. Hermez demonstrates just how social interactions and political relationships with the state unfold and critically engages our understanding of memory and violence, seeing in people's recollections living and spontaneous memories that refuse to forget the past. With an attention to the details of everyday life, War Is Coming shows how even a conversation over lunch, or among friends, may turn into a discussion about both past and future unrest.

Shedding light on the impact of protracted conflict on people's everyday experiences and the way people anticipate political violence, Hermez highlights an urgency for alternative paths to sustaining political and social life in Lebanon.

 

SPEAKER BIO

Sami Hermez, PhD, is assistant professor in residence of anthropology at Northwestern University in Qatar. He obtained his doctorate degree from the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University. His recently published book with Penn Press, War is Coming: Between Past and Future Violence in Lebanon (2017), focuses on the everyday life of political violence in Lebanon and how people recollect and anticipate this violence.  His broader research concerns include the study of social movements, the state, memory, security, and human rights in the Arab World. He has held posts as Visiting Scholar in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, Visiting Professor of Contemporary International Issues at the University of Pittsburgh, Visiting Professor of Anthropology at Mt. Holyoke College, and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Lebanese Studies, St. Antony’s College, Oxford University. At Northwestern in Qatar he teaches classes in anthropology that include topics such as violence, gender, and anthropology in the Middle East.

This event has reached full capacity and we are no longer able to accept RSVPs.

We will be livestreaming this talk on April 4th at https://livestream.com/accounts/1973198/events/7109075  beginning at 12:00pm.

Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon will discuss key international issues affecting Scottish, UK and international politics.  She will touch on a range of areas including Brexit, climate change, refugees and Syria and the relationship between the US and Scotland. This will be followed by a Q&A.

 

 

Alexander Stubb has served as Prime Minister, Finance Minister, Foreign Minister, Trade and Europe Minister of Finland. He was a Member of the European Parliament from 2004-2008 and in the national government from 2008-16. He was the Chairman of the National Coalition Party from 2014-16 and is currently a Member of the Finnish Parliament.

Stubb's background is in academia and civil service. He has published 16 books, tens of academic articles and hundreds of columns. He holds a Ph.D. From the London School of Economics and Political Science, a Master's degree from the College of Europe in Bruges, and a B.A. from Furman University in South Carolina. He also studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. He worked as an expert adviser at the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs in Helsinki and in Brussels, and in President Romano Prodi's team at the European Commission. He has been a visiting Professor at the College of Europe in Bruges.

His expertise includes European and International Affairs, Foreign and Security Policy, the Euro and the Global Economy. His current interests are Brexit, global affairs, the Fourth Industrial Revolution (digitalisation, robotisation and artificial intelligence) and health and exercise science. Stubb is a sought after speaker and a frequent commentator on international affairs for many global news channels. He writes a regular column for the Financial Times and Dagens Industri, the Swedish business journal.

Stubb speaks Finnish, Swedish, English, French and German. He is an avid sportsman, having played ice-hockey, handball, and national team golf in his youth. His current passions are cycling and triathlon. He participated in the Ironman World Championships in Hawaii in October 2016.

Following a century of violent anti-religious campaigns, China is now filled with new temples, churches and mosques--as well as cults, sects and politicians trying to harness religion for their own ends. Driving this explosion of faith is uncertainty--over what it means to be Chinese, and how to live an ethical life in a country that discarded traditional morality a century ago and is still searching for new guideposts. Ian Johnson lived for extended periods with underground church members, rural Daoists and Buddhist pilgrims. Throughout his career in journalism and in his new book Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao (Pantheon/Knopf in the United States and Penguin in the U.K., both April 2017), Johnson has distilled these experiences into a cycle of festivals, births, deaths, detentions and struggle—a great awakening of faith that is shaping the soul of the world’s newest superpower. This panel discussion, featuring a keynote speech delivered by Johnson, will explore the resurgence of religion and value systems in China.

Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao will be available for sale. 

Panelists:

 

Ian Johnson is a Pulitzer-Prize winning writer focusing on society, religion, and history and 2016 Shorenstein Journalism Awardee. He works out of Beijing and Berlin, where he also teaches and advises academic journals and think tanks.

Johnson has spent over half of the past thirty years in the Greater China region, first as a student in Beijing from 1984 to 1985, and then in Taipei from 1986 to 1988. He later worked as a newspaper correspondent in China, from 1994 to 1996 with Baltimore's The Sun, and from 1997 to 2001 with The Wall Street Journal, where he covered macro-economics, China's WTO accession and social issues. In 2009, Johnson returned to China, where he writes features and essays for The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, National Geographic, and other publications. He teaches undergraduates at The Beijing Center for Chinese Studies, and also runs a fellowship program there. In addition, he formally advises a variety of academic journals and think tanks on China, such as the Journal of Asian Studies, the Berlin-based think tank Merics, and New York University's Center for Religion and Media. 

 

Orville Schell, Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations, Asia Society is a long-time China observer, author, journalist, and former Dean and Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism.

Schell is the author of fifteen books, ten of them about China, and a contributor to numerous edited volumes. His most recent books are: Wealth and Power, China’s Long March to the 21st Century; Virtual Tibet; The China Reader: The Reform Years; and Mandate of Heaven: The Legacy of Tiananmen Square and the Next Generation of China’s Leaders. He has written widely for many magazine and newspapers, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Time, The New Republic, Harpers, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Wired, Foreign Affairs, the China Quarterly, and The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.

 

Xueguang Zhou, Kwoh-Ting Li Professor in Economic Development; Professor of Sociology, Stanford University

One of Zhou's current research projects is a study of the rise of the bureaucratic state in China. He works with students and colleagues to conduct participatory observations of government behaviors in the areas of environmental regulation enforcement, in policy implementation, in bureaucratic bargaining, and in incentive designs. He also studies patterns of career mobility and personnel flow among different government offices to understand intra-organizational relationships in the Chinese bureaucracy.

His recent publications examine the role of bureaucracy in public goods provision in rural China (Modern China, 2011); interactions among peasants, markets, and capital (China Quarterly, 2011); access to financial resources in Chinese enterprises (Chinese Sociological Review, 2011, with Lulu Li); multiple logics in village elections (Social Sciences in China, 2010, with Ai Yun); and collusion among local governments in policy implementation (Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 2011, with Ai Yun and Lian Hong; and Modern China, 2010).

 

About the Award:

The Shorenstein Journalism Award, which carries a cash prize of $10,000, honors a journalist not only for a distinguished body of work, but also for the particular way that work has helped American readers to understand the complexities of Asia. The award, established in 2002, was named after Walter H. Shorenstein, the philanthropist, activist, and businessman who endowed two institutions that are focused respectively on Asia and on the press: the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) in the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University, and the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

In 2011, Shorenstein APARC re-envisioned the award in recognition of the fact that Asia has served as a crucible for the role of the press in democratization in places such as South Korea, Taiwan, India, Pakistan, and Indonesia. It has also figured greatly in the emergence of social media and citizen journalism. New tests of the role of the media are emerging in China, Vietnam, and other authoritarian societies in Asia. Will the Internet be a catalyst for change, or can it also be a carrier of new forms of cyber nationalism and an instrument of authoritarian control? How are Asia’s journalists responding to that challenge?

Martin Kenney is a Distinguished Professor of Community and Regional Development at the University of California, Davis; a Senior Project Director at the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy; and Senior Fellow at the Research Institute for the Finnish Economy.  He has been a visiting scholar at the Copenhagen Business School, Cambridge, Hitotsubashi, Kobe, Stanford, Tokyo Universities, and UC San Diego. His scholarly interests are in entrepreneurial high-technology regions, technology transfer, the venture capital industry, and the impacts of online platforms on corporate strategy, industrial structures and labor relations. He co-authored or edited seven books and 150 scholarly articles. His first book Biotechnology: The University-Industrial Complex was published by Yale University Press. His most recent edited books Public Universities and Regional Growth, Understanding Silicon Valley, and Locating Global Advantage were published by Stanford University Press where he edits the book series Innovation and Technological Change in the Global Economy.  His co-edited book Building Innovation Capacity in China was published by Cambridge University Press in 2016 and has been translated into Chinese. He is a receiving editor at the world’s premier innovation research journal, Research Policy and edits a Stanford University book series.  In 2015, he was awarded University of California Office of the President’s Award for Outstanding Faculty Leadership in Presidential Initiatives.  His research has been funded by the NSF, the Kauffman, Sloan, and Matsushita Foundations, among others.  He has given over 500 talks at universities, government agencies, and corporations in Europe, Asia, and North and South America.

Agenda

4:15pm: Doors open
4:30pm-5:30pm: Talk and Discussion
5:30pm-6:00pm: Networking