Ron Hassner | |
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| Born | Ron E. Hassner 1971 |
| Alma mater | Stanford University ( Ph.D. ) Columbia University ( M.A. ) London School of Economics and Political Science ( B.Sc. ) |
| Institutions | University of California, Berkeley |
Main interests | Religious violence |
Ron Hassner is an American political scientist and international relations scholar. He is a professor of political science at University of California, Berkeley. He holds a Chancellor's Chair in political science and is the Helen Diller Family Chair in Israel studies at Berkeley. [1] [2]
Hassner's work focuses on religion and conflict, especially territorial disputes over sacred spaces. His research also encompasses religion in the military and the effectiveness of interrogational torture. He is a faculty director of the Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies at U.C. Berkeley. [3] Hassner is a recipient of Berkeley's campus-wide Distinguished Teaching Award. [4]
Hassner holds a B.Sc. in International Relations from The London School of Economics (1995), a masters in International Affairs from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University (1997), a masters in Religious Studies from Stanford University (2000), and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University (2003). He was a post-doctoral scholar at Harvard University's Olin Center.
In 2004, Hassner joined the political science faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. Since then, he was visiting scholar at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya. In 2014, he received Berkeley's campus-wide Distinguished Teaching Award. [4]
In 2023, Hassner was recognized with a Distinguished Scholar Award from the "Religion and International Relations" section of the International Studies Association. [5] Later that year, he received the Susanne Hoeber Rudolph Outstanding Scholar in Religion and Politics Award from the American Political Science Association. [6]
Hassner is a scholar of religion and international conflict. He has studied territorial disputes, including disputes over holy places, the role of religion in militaries and on the battlefield, and the history of torture under the Spanish Inquisition.
In War on Sacred Grounds, [7] Hassner argued that conflicts over holy places are difficult to resolve because these sites pose an indivisibility problem: they cannot be shared or divided the way other pieces of land are often shared to resolve conflict. [8] [9] The Temple Mount in Jerusalem and the Great Mosque of Mecca function as key case studies as do contested shrines in India. [10]
In this book and in related articles and book chapters he also explains the many motivations for conflicts at sacred sites, including the use of these structured as insurgent hideouts and as prominent targets in civil wars. [11]
His work subsequently shifted to analyzing religion as a factor during war, including such wars in which religion is not a motivator. In Religion in the Military Worldwide, [12] he commissioned essays on the many ways in which religion shapes military service around the world, including countries like Canada, Turkey, Japan, and Iran. In Religion on the Battlefield, [13] Hassner looks at the effects of religion on tactics and strategy. The focus here is on wars in which religion did not necessarily play a motivating role, to show that even in crucial military settings—such as World War I and World War II—religion enabled and constrained military decision making. [14] [15]
These essays explore religious rituals, conflicts over religious freedom in the military, how religion affects promotion or unit formation, and how religion in the military affects religion in society more broadly. He shows how sacred time and space, rituals and authority structures, had an impact on soldiers, commanders, and units. Salient examples include the bombing of Rome in World War II, and the Yom Kippur War. In this book and related publications, Hassner attempts to shift the focus of the study of religion and war away from studying terrorists and insurgents and onto the effects of religion on conventional armies, including Western secular armies.
Hassner's most recent scholarship is on torture. He argues that the "myth of the ticking time bomb scenario" as a dangerous yet influential metaphor that bears no relationship to reality. [16] He argues that much of the current debate on torture draws on flimsy and biased sources. [17] Though much current torture criticism relies on the claim that "torture doesn't work", Hassner shows that the evidence to support this claim is weak. Moreover, Americans find the claim to be unpersuasive: they believe that torture is quick and effective. In contrast, Americans find the claim that torture is cruel to be a far more persuasive argument against torture. [18]
In Anatomy of Torture, [19] he analyzes hundreds of trials from the archives of the Spanish Inquisition to uncover the causes, character, and consequences of torture. His book analyzes dozens of cases of torture from Spain and Mexico in the 16th and 17th centuries, relying on archival evidence from Europe and the Americas. These files demonstrate that "torture yielded information that was often reliable: witnesses in the torture chamber and witnesses that were not tortured provided corresponding information about collaborators, locations, events, and practices. Nonetheless, inquisitors treated the results of interrogations in the torture chamber with skepticism."[ This quote needs a citation ] The torture conducted by the Inquisition yielded corroborative evidence that the Inquisition found useful but it did so slowly and at tremendous social, political, and moral cost. Hassner urges caution in applying those findings to current torture debates.
Torture is the deliberate infliction of severe pain or suffering on a person for reasons including punishment, extracting a confession, interrogation for information, or intimidating third parties.
Civil religion, also referred to as a civic religion, is the implicit religious values of a nation, as expressed through public rituals, symbols, and ceremonies on sacred days and at sacred places. It is distinct from churches, although church officials and ceremonies are sometimes incorporated into the practice of civil religion. Countries described as having a civil religion include France and the United States. As a concept, it originated in French political thought and became a major topic for U.S. sociologists since its use by Robert Bellah in 1960.
A military alliance is a formal agreement between nations that specifies mutual obligations regarding national security. In the event a nation is attacked, members of the alliance are often obligated to come to their defense regardless if attacked directly. Military alliances can be classified into defense pacts, non-aggression pacts, and ententes. Alliances may be covert or public.
Bassam Tibi, is a Syrian-born German political scientist and professor of international relations specializing in Islamic studies and Middle Eastern studies. He was born in 1944 in Damascus, Syria to an aristocratic family, and moved to West Germany in 1962, where he later became a naturalized citizen in 1976.
Robert Jervis was an American political scientist who was the Adlai E. Stevenson Professor of International Politics in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University. Jervis was co-editor of the Cornell Studies in Security Affairs, a series published by Cornell University Press.
Religious violence covers phenomena in which religion is either the subject or the object of violent behavior. All the religions of the world contain narratives, symbols, and metaphors of violence and war. Religious violence is violence that is motivated by, or in reaction to, religious precepts, texts, or the doctrines of a target or an attacker. It includes violence against religious institutions, people, objects, or events. Religious violence includes both acts which are committed by religious groups and acts which are committed against religious groups.
Ian Steven Lustick is an American political scientist and specialist on the modern history and politics of the Middle East. He currently holds the Bess W. Heyman Chair in the department of Political Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.
The ticking time bomb scenario is a thought experiment that has been used in the ethics debate over whether interrogational torture can ever be justified. The scenario can be formulated as follows:
Suppose that a person with knowledge of an imminent terrorist attack that will kill many people is in the hands of the authorities, and he will disclose the information needed to prevent the attack only if he is tortured. Should he be tortured?
James L. Gelvin is an American scholar of Middle Eastern history. He has been a faculty member in the department of history at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) since 1995 and has written extensively on the history of the modern Middle East, with particular emphasis on nationalism and the social and cultural history of the modern Middle East.
Ernst Bernard Haas was an American political scientist who was known for his contributions to international relations theory. He was the Robson Professor of Government at the political science department of the University of California, Berkeley.
Mark Juergensmeyer is an American sociologist and scholar specialized in global studies and religious studies, and a writer best known for his studies on comparative religion, religious violence, and global religion. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and William F. Podlich Distinguished Fellow and Professor of Religious Studies at Claremont McKenna College.
Karen Barkey is the Haas Distinguished Chair of Religious Diversity at the Othering & Belonging Institute and a professor of sociology at University of California, Berkeley. She is also the director of the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration, and Religion (CDTR) at UC Berkeley. She was previously a professor of sociology and history at Columbia University. She was awarded the Germaine Tillion Chair of Mediterranean studies at IMéRA for 2021–2022.
Benzion Netanyahu was a Polish-born Israeli encyclopedist, historian, and medievalist. He served as a professor of history at Cornell University. A scholar of Judaic history, he was also an activist in the Revisionist Zionism movement, who lobbied in the United States to support the creation of the Jewish state. His field of expertise was the history of the Jews in Spain. He was an editor of the Hebrew Encyclopedia and assistant to Benjamin Azkin, Ze'ev Jabotinsky's personal secretary.
Christians have had diverse attitudes towards violence and nonviolence over time. Both currently and historically, there have been four attitudes towards violence and war and four resulting practices of them within Christianity: non-resistance, Christian pacifism, just war, and preventive war. In the Roman Empire, the early church adopted a nonviolent stance when it came to war because the imitation of Jesus's sacrificial life was preferable to it. The concept of "Just War", the belief that limited uses of war were acceptable, originated in the writings of earlier non-Christian Roman and Greek thinkers such as Cicero and Plato. Later, this theory was adopted by Christian thinkers such as St Augustine, who like other Christians, borrowed much of the just war concept from Roman law and the works of Roman writers like Cicero. Even though "Just War" concept was widely accepted early on, warfare was not regarded as a virtuous activity and expressing concern for the salvation of those who killed enemies in battle, regardless of the cause for which they fought, was common. Concepts such as "Holy war", whereby fighting itself might be considered a penitential and spiritually meritorious act, did not emerge before the 11th century.
Smadar Lavie is a professor emerita of anthropology at the University of California Davis, and a Mizrahi anthropologist, author, and activist. She specializes in the anthropology of Egypt, Israel and Palestine, emphasizing issues of race, gender and religion. She received her doctorate in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley (1989).
The University of California, Berkeley School of Law is the law school of the University of California, Berkeley. The school was commonly referred to as "Boalt Hall" for many years, although it was never the official name. This came from its initial building, the Boalt Memorial Hall of Law, named for John Henry Boalt. This name was transferred to an entirely new law school building in 1951 but was removed in 2020.
Interrogational torture is the use of torture to obtain information in interrogation, as opposed to the use of torture to extract a forced confession, regardless of whether it is true or false. Torture has been used throughout history during interrogation, although it is now illegal and a violation of international law.
Noura Saleh Erakat is a Palestinian-American activist, university professor, legal scholar, and human rights attorney. She is currently an associate professor at Rutgers University, specializing in international studies. Her primary focus is the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and she is a vocal critic of Israel.
David Menashri is an Israeli professor and scholar of modern Iranian history. A leading Iranian expert, he is also the founding director of The Alliance Center for Iranian Studies at Tel Aviv University.
Turkey has an embassy in Kampala. Uganda has an embassy in Ankara.
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