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Yenching Auditorium
2 Divinity Avenue
2 : 3 0 pm
Opening Remarks
symposium
Asymmetric Warfare
Monday, March 30, 2015
P a n e l o n e | 2 : 4 5 pm
Strategy, Law, and Narrative
Andrew Bacevich, Asymmetric:Warfare::
Politics:Partisan
Moshe Halbertal, Moral Challenges
of Asymmetric Warfare
Elaine Scarry, Nuclear Weapons
Eliminate the Right of Self Defense
Noah Feldman, Chair
5 : 0 0 pm
Keynote lecture
Jeremy Waldron, Asymmetric War:
Lawfare and Provocation in an Insurgency
P a n e l t w o | 6 : 4 5 pm
Cultures of Asymmetry
Faisal Devji, ISIS: A Politics
of the Surface
Lital Levy, You Just Can’t Compare:
On the Double Edges of Comparison in the
Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Emile Simpson, A-symmetry of
Enemy Personality and the Paradox
of Forever War
Homi Bhabha, Chair
Andrew J. Bacevich is Professor of History
and International Relations Emeritus at
Boston University. A graduate of the US
Military Academy, he received his PhD in
American diplomatic history from Princeton.
He is the author of Breach of Trust: How
Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their
Country (2013), Washington Rules: America’s
Path to Permanent War (2010), The Limits of
Power: The End of American Exceptionalism
(2008), and The New American Militarism:
How Americans Are Seduced by War (2005),
among other books.
Homi K. Bhabha is Anne F. Rothenberg
Professor of the Humanities, Director of the
Mahindra Humanities Center, and Senior
Advisor to the President and Provost at
Harvard University. He is a leading cultural
and literary theorist and the author of
numerous works exploring postcolonial
theory, cultural change and power, cosmopolitanism, human rights, and various other
themes. In The Location of Culture (1994),
he presents a theory of cultural hybridity to
understand the connections between colonialism and globalization, and reconceives
concepts such as colonial mimicry, hybridity,
and social liminality to argue that cultural
production is always most fertile where it
is most ambivalent and transgressive. His
forthcoming books will include a collection
of essays on contemporary diasporic artists
and another on culture, security, and
globalization.
Faisal Devji is Reader in Modern South
Asian History and Fellow of St. Antony’s
College at the University of Oxford, where he
is also Director of the Asian Studies Centre.
He has held the Yves Oltramare Chair at the
Graduate Institute in Geneva, as well as
positions at Yale and the New School for
Social Research, and is an Institute of Public
Knowledge Fellow at New York University
and a CISA Fellow at the University of the
Witswatersrand. Devji is the author of four
books on global Islam, militancy, and Indian
political thought: Landscapes of the Jihad,
The Terrorist in Search of Humanity, The
Impossible India, and Muslim Zion.
Moshe Halbertal is Professor of Jewish Thought and Philosophy at Hebrew
University. He is the author of many books,
including Idolatry (co-authored with Avishai
Margalit, 1992), People of the Book: Canon,
Meaning, and Authority (1997), Concealment
and Revelation: Esotericism in Jewish
Tradition and Its Philosophical Implications (2007), On Sacrifice (2012), Maimonides: Life and Thought (2013), and several
books published in Hebrew, including Interpretative Revolutions in the Making (1997)
and By Way of Truth: Nahmanides and the
Creation of Tradition (2000). Halbertal was
the recipient of the Michael Bruno Memorial
Award of the Rothschild Foundation and
the Goldstein-Goren Book Award for the
best book in Jewish thought in the years
1997 to 2000. In 2010, he was named
a member of Israel’s Academy for the
Sciences and the Humanities.
Lital Levy is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, where
she teaches Hebrew and Arabic literatures
and literary theory. Previously, she was
a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of
Fellows. She specializes in contact zones
of Arabic and Hebrew. Her research encompasses the intellectual history of Arab Jews,
literature and film from Israel/Palestine,
the question of Jewish literature as world
literature, and the comparative history of
modern non-Western “renaissance” and
“enlightenment” movements. She is the
author of Poetic Trespass: Writing between
Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine (2014),
which examines questions of multilingualism, translation, and the cultural politics of
language in Israel/Palestine, and which won
the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award from the
Association of Jewish Studies.
Noah Feldman is Felix Frankfurter Professor
of Law at Harvard University and a Senior
Fellow of the Society of Fellows. He is a
contributing writer for both the New York
Times Magazine and Bloomberg View. He
served as senior constitutional advisor to the
Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, and
advised members of the Iraqi Governing
Council on the drafting of the Transitional
Administrative Law or interim constitution.
He served as a law clerk to Justice David
H. Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court (1998–
1999). Professor Simpson’s books include
Cool War: The Future of Global Competition
(2013), Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs
of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices
(2010), The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State
(2008), Divided By God: America’s ChurchState Problem and What We Should Do
About It (2005), What We Owe Iraq: War
and the Ethics of Nation Building (2004),
and After Jihad: America and the Struggle
for Islamic Democracy (2003).
Elaine Scarry is Walter M. Cabot Professor
of Aesthetics and the General Theory of
Value at Harvard University. Her writings
include The Body in Pain, On Beauty and
Being Just, and most recently, Thermonuclear Monarchy: Choosing Between
Democracy and Doom. Her essays appear
in Best American Essays of 2007, 2005,
and 1995. Her work focuses on the problem
of citizenship in the face of intentionally
inflicted injury: torture, war, and the
monarchic structures in place since the
invention of nuclear weapons.
Emile Simpson is an Ernest May Fellow in
History and Policy at the Harvard Kennedy
School of Government. He is the author
of War From the Ground Up: TwentyFirst-Century Combat as Politics (2012),
which was shortlisted for the Royal United
Services Institute and British Army Book
of the Year. He is also a columnist at
Foreign Policy. He formerly served in the
British Army as an infantry
officer, completing three tours
in Afghanistan. His current
research is in the history of
international law.
Jeremy Waldron is University
Professor (in the School of
Law) at New York University.
He previously taught at Edinburgh, Berkeley, Columbia,
and most recently as Chichele
Professor of Social and
Political Theory at Oxford. His
books include Liberal Rights
(1993), The Dignity of Legislation (1999), Law and Disagreement
(1999), Torture, Terror, and Trade-offs
(2010), The Harm of Hate Speech (2012),
and Dignity, Rank and Rights (2012). He
is the author of many published articles
and reviews. Particularly well-known
are his essays on constitutionalism,
homelessness, judicial review, and the
rule of law, and his historical writings on
John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and John
Stuart Mill. Professor Waldron is a
member of the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the
British Academy. Earlier this year he
delivered the 2015 Gifford Lectures at
Edinburgh on the theme “One Another’s
Equals: The Basis of Human Equality.”
Sponsored by the Mahindra Humanities
Center at Harvard’s Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation Seminar on Violence and
Non-Violence
Free and open to the public.
Seating is limited.
mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard.edu