Ron Hassner | |
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| Born | Ron E. Hassner 1971 |
| Alma mater | Stanford University ( Ph.D. ) Columbia University ( M.A. ) LSE ( B.Sc. ) |
| Institutions | University of California, Berkeley |
Main interests | Religious violence |
Ron Hassner 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] His research focuses on religion and conflict, especially conflicts over sacred places, religion in the military, as well as on territorial disputes and 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. He joined the political science faculty at the University of California, Berkeley in 2004. 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 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] he 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 he tries to shift the focus of the study of religion and war away from studying (primarily Muslim) terrorists and insurgents and onto the effects of religion on conventional armies, including Western secular armies.
Hassner's most recent work is on torture. He has dispelled 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", he shows that the evidence to back that 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.
The Roman Inquisition, formally Suprema Congregatio Sanctae Romanae et Universalis Inquisitionis, was a system of partisan tribunals developed by the Holy See of the Roman Catholic Church, during the second half of the 16th century, responsible for prosecuting individuals accused of a wide array of crimes according to Roman Catholic law and doctrine, relating to Catholic religious life or alternative religious or secular beliefs. It was established in 1542 by the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Paul III. In the period after the Medieval Inquisition, it was one of three different manifestations of the wider Catholic Inquisition, the other two being the Spanish Inquisition and Portuguese Inquisition.
Torture is the deliberate infliction of severe pain or suffering on a person for reasons such as punishment, extracting a confession, interrogation for information, or intimidating third parties. Some definitions are restricted to acts carried out by the state, but others include non-state organizations.
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.
A religious war or a war of religion, sometimes also known as a holy war, is a war which is primarily caused or justified by differences in religion and beliefs. In the modern period, there are frequent debates over the extent to which religious, economic, ethnic or other aspects of a conflict are predominant in a given war. The degree to which a war may be considered religious depends on many underlying questions, such as the definition of religion, the definition of 'religious war', and the applicability of religion to war as opposed to other possible factors. Answers to these questions heavily influence conclusions on how prevalent religious wars have been as opposed to other types of wars.
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 does not exclusively include acts which are committed by religious groups, instead, it includes acts which are committed against religious groups.
Islamic military jurisprudence refers to what has been accepted in Sharia and Fiqh by Ulama as the correct Islamic manner, expected to be obeyed by Muslims, in times of war. Some scholars and Muslim religious figures describe armed struggle based on Islamic principles as the Lesser jihad.
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 that he will disclose the information needed to prevent the attack only if he is tortured. Should he be tortured?
Scott Atran is an American-French cultural anthropologist who is Emeritus Director of Research in Anthropology at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in Paris, Research Professor at the University of Michigan, and cofounder of ARTIS International and of the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict at Oxford University. He has studied and written about terrorism, violence, religion, indigenous environmental management and the cross-cultural foundations of biological classification; and he has done fieldwork with terrorists and Islamic fundamentalists, as well as political leaders and Native American peoples.
James D. Fearon is the Theodore and Francis Geballe Professor of Political Science at Stanford University; he is known for his work on the theory of civil wars, international bargaining, war's inefficiency puzzle, audience costs, and ethnic constructivism. According to a 2011 survey of International Relations scholars, Fearon is among the most influential International Relations scholars of the last twenty years. His 1995 article "Rationalist Explanations for War" is the most assigned journal article in International Relations graduate training at U.S. universities.
Ernst Bernard Haas was an American political scientist who made numerous contributions to theoretical discussions in the field of international relations.
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.
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 Mizrahi U.S.-Israeli anthropologist, author, and activist. She specializes in the anthropology of Egypt, Israel and Palestine, emphasizing issues of race, gender and religion. Lavie is a professor emerita of anthropology at the University of California, Davis, and a visiting scholar at the Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Lavie received her doctorate in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley (1989) and spent nine years as assistant and associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis. She authored The Poetics of Military Occupation, receiving the 1990 Honorable Mention of the Victor Turner Award for Ethnographic Writing, and Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture receiving the 2015 Honorable Mention of the Association of Middle East Women's Studies Book Award Competition. Wrapped in the Flag of Israel's first edition was also one of the four finalists in the 2015 Clifford Geertz Book Award Competition of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. She also co-edited Creativity/Anthropology and Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity. Lavie won the American Studies Association's 2009 Gloria Anzaldúa Prize for her article, “Staying Put: Crossing the Palestine-Israel Border with Gloria Anzaldúa,” published in Anthropology and Humanism (2011). In 2013, Smadar Lavie won the “Heart at East” Honor Plaque for lifetime service to Mizraḥi communities in Israel-Palestine.
Political violence is violence which is perpetrated in order to achieve political goals. It can include violence which is used by a state against other states (war), violence which is used by a state against civilians and non-state actors, and violence which is used by violent non-state actors against states and civilians. It can also describe politically motivated violence which is used by violent non-state actors against a state or it can describe violence which is used against other non-state actors and/or civilians. Non-action on the part of a government can also be characterized as a form of political violence, such as refusing to alleviate famine or otherwise denying resources to politically identifiable groups within their territory.
An auto-da-fé was the ritual of public penance carried out between the 15th and 19th centuries of condemned heretics and apostates imposed by the Spanish, Portuguese, or Mexican Inquisition as punishment and enforced by civil authorities. Its most extreme form was death by burning.
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 Erakat is an American activist, university professor, legal scholar, and human rights attorney. She is currently an associate professor at Rutgers University, specializing in international studies. With her primary focus being the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, she is a vocal critic of the State of Israel.
Monica Duffy Toft is an American international relations scholar. Her research interests include international security and strategy, ethnic and religious violence, civil wars, and the relationship between demography and national security. Among her researches, her theory of indivisible territory explains how certain conflicts turn violent while others not, and when it is likely for a conflict to become a violent. Since 2017 she holds the position of Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy at Tufts University, and Director of the Fletcher School's Center for Strategic Studies.
In fictional representations, torture is often portrayed as a method for obtaining information through interrogation. Unlike the real world practice of torture, fictional representations of torture are often portrayed as being professional and efficient methods of obtaining reliable information, and as selective rather than indiscriminate. Torture can be a convenient plot device to extract information, and when the hero is the torturer, it almost always works, usually quickly. Popular culture representations have an effect on how torture is practiced in the real world; United States Army interrogators as well as the staff at Guantanamo Bay have copied torture techniques that they learned from TV. Positive depictions of torture during the Algerian War of Independence helped shape the public perception of torture, a trend that continued with American media produced after the September 11 attacks.
William Kendrick Pritchett was an American scholar of ancient Greek history. He authored over 30 books on the subjects of Greek warfare, topography, and time-keeping.
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