Faculty Facts Friday
Today I’d like to share the second installment of Faculty Facts. As I put together these summaries of research and professional activities, I’ll continue to try to show the breadth of professors’ interests by profiling representatives of various fields in each post. In a professional school with a multidisciplinary curriculum, the range of activities is especially broad. In case you missed it, the first Faculty Facts post appeared last week.
Tom Dannenbaum, Assistant Professor of International Law
I have recently completed a book on the criminalization of aggression, which will come out in the next few months. The book argues that the revival of the crime has more significant implications for soldiers on either side of such wars than has thus far been appreciated. It builds on a recent article, Why Have We Criminalized Aggressive War?, which provides an account of the criminal wrongfulness of aggression, and which was awarded the Lieber Prize by the American Society of International Law. Moving forward, I am working on several projects, including a piece on the legitimacy of the International Criminal Court, a piece on the law and ethics of medical care in armed conflict, and a theory of war crimes.
Professor Dannenbaum’s profile.
Monica Duffy Toft, Professor of International Politics
I continue to research the role of religion in global politics and the onset of large-scale violence. I am finishing a book on demography and national security and beginning a major project on U.S. military interventions.
Professor Toft’s profile. The website for the Center for Strategic Studies, which Professor Toft directs.
Ayesha Jalal, Mary Richardson Professor of History at Tufts University
I am working on a new project tentatively entitled “Islamic Universalism, Liberalism and the Age of Empire” that probes Muslim responses to liberal values and thought projected by Western empires, most notably the British in India as well as in West and South East Asia. This builds on my most recent research and writing examining the inter-connectivities, and especially the intellectual, cultural and political exchanges, between the Indus-Gangetic plain and the wide world of Islam on the Indian Ocean Rim, which is being brought out as a jointly edited volume called Islam is the Ocean.
My purpose in conducting this inquiry is to assess the validity of the claim — initially made by Orientalist scholars, often linked with colonial administrations in different parts of Asia but which since has been accepted as something of an academic “orthodoxy” — that Muslims cannot be liberal in the true sense of the word because of the limitations imposed on their thinking by the imperatives of their faith. In addition to subjecting the concept of liberalism to rigorous historical and intellectual scrutiny with a view to questioning its exclusively Western trajectory, I am in the process of tracing debates during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in which Muslims, operating at a transnational level, took the initiative of challenging Western writers and policymakers who portrayed the Faithful as averse to reform and progress. In subsequent phases of the research, I will be looking at the impact of the post-WWII international system based on modern nation-states in molding conceptions of “liberal” thinking in the Muslim world during the Cold War and the post-Cold War periods. In sum, this project addresses many of the key issues discussed in the contemporary debate on Muslims and liberalism by offering an analytically focused, sharply critical and historically grounded perspective.
Professor Jalal’s profile. She previously wrote a Faculty Spotlight post.
John Shattuck, Professor of Practice in Diplomacy
I am on leave from Fletcher this semester and I’m serving as a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley, where I am engaged in a comparative research and writing project on illiberal governance and democratic resilience in the U.S. and Europe. My research on democratic resilience in the U.S. will be issued this spring as a report by the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, where I am a Senior Fellow. I delivered the keynote address, “The Crisis of Democracy in the U.S. and Europe,” at the Genron Institute international conference on challenges to democracy in Tokyo in November; and will be a keynote speaker this spring at conferences at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Georgetown University, Harvard Law School, and Brandeis University. I chair the international advisory board of the Center on Ethics, Justice and Public Life at Brandeis University.
I’ve recently published two research papers, and a third is forthcoming.
“How Resilient is Liberal Democracy in the US?,” published by the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Harvard Kennedy School, February 15, 2018
“Democracy and Illiberal Governance,” The American Prospect, August 29, 2017
“Will Democracy in America Survive Donald Trump?,” forthcoming from The American Prospect, March/April 2018