Thank you very much for the most generous welcome and indeed the very generous words from everybody. It is really great to be here, because, as Sandy says, I do have a long association with George Mason even though this is actually my first visit to the University and especially to S-CAR. I think you are in a wonderful place. You know the research that goes on here is really very important in the field of conflict and peace research. And I would say for international politics actually, so I’m very much looking forward to our interactions this evening. What I want to do is not to be so theoretical this evening, but nevertheless you’ll see that the theory and the conceptualizations that I work with are very much there in the journey that I am going to take you through.
Now what is that journey? As you know and as you have seen from the publicity for this lecture, the title is Human Rights, Sovereign Rights, and the Potentials of Conflict Resolution. In a sense I see a challenge that’s being presented to us now in the 21st Century and that challenge is that we are witnessing the extremes of violence going on across the world. The challenge is, how do we respond intellectually and, if you like, praxiologically? How do we respond?
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The Annan peace process that tried to halt hostilities between the rebels and Bashar al-Assad’s government put in place several conventional tools that did not account for the multifaceted political reality of the conflict. This work will propose that the Syrian conflict suffers from three different levels of political deadlock, which have thus far stalled the peace process. Much emphasis has been placed on easing hostilities at the Syrian national level in an attempt to prevent any further bloodshed, and to help maintain the social and political structures that are still standing in Syria. While these structures would inevitably serve as a potential base for a smooth and peaceful democratic transition, a holistic analysis of the obstacles faced outside of Syria needs to be initiated in order to understand the highly complex nature of the conflict’s political substance.
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Please join Unrest Magazine and the Center for the Study of Narrative and Conflict Resolution (CNCR) for a special film screening of How to Start a Revolution. The film is a documentary about Gene Sharp, author of From Dictatorship to Democracy, whose work has inspired activists all over the world: from Ukraine’s Orange Revolution to Egypt and the Arab Spring to social activists in the United States. The film explores how Sharp’s ideas work in both theory and practice using extended interviews with Sharp, his assistant, his followers, and leaders of revolutionary movements worldwide, as well as user-generated content from around the globe, to reveal the power of nonviolent revolution on the streets.
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Erdoğan is, perhaps, one of the most controversial topics in Turkey, Europe, and some parts of the Middle East. For those who are unfamiliar, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is the current Prime Minister of the Turkish Republic and soon he will be celebrating his unrivaled 10th year in power. He has a host of accomplishments and here is a brief list: He won 3 consecutive elections in Turkey, all with record breaking voter support. He also has a lot of international support. He has been quite influential in the region and his quasi-zealous religious background, anti-Israel rhetoric, as well as, pro-Hamas stance provide him with a fan club among much of the Muslim population in the Middle East. He does not hesitate to answer any European leaders arrogant talk, usually in the same tone—providing him with great support among the populous who feel a certain sense of pride in their leaders talking back to the West. He revitalized the Turkish economy and made it one of the fastest growing economies in 2011.
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Our business in the field of fight is not to question, but to prove our might. – The Iliad
Fiction and literature have always dealt with human nature and its derivatives such as rebellion, revolution and war. Bearing in mind the upheavals of today – be it via the newest tweets from Egypt or fearless reporting from Syria – one could travel back almost three years, when a French book had kept Europe’s feuilletons busy and which reads now as a prophetic piece of writing; wrapped up as a huge novelistic footnote to the current narrative of change in politics. Mathias Énard, the author of Zone, has written a reflective tale of violence and tragedy set in Europe of the 1990s, but reaching back far in time. It is encompassing everything you ever wanted to know about the history of warfare in the Mediterranean Basin, the titular Zone, and more importantly, the fates of men who crossed this space for centuries.
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Recently, President Obama’s drone campaign in Libya has demonstrated open defiance, if not disregard, for moral and legal frameworks in international relations. Much has already been made of the United States’ War Powers Resolution, which asserts that this campaign should have ended on May 20, 2011 (1). It did not. Obama maintains that these actions did not fall under the War Powers Resolution, because drones are not “war”; “U.S. operations do not involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces, nor do they involve the presence of U.S. ground troops, U.S. casualties or a serious threat thereof, or any significant chance of escalation into a conflict characterized by those factors (2).” At first read this sounds a bit like the definition of “is.” Libyan ground forces cannot target the drones at the altitude they fly, nor could they kill the absent pilot. The administration’s defense made drones sound as harmless as gassing infants while they sleep.
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