Past sessions
May 5, 2008 - Hard and Soft Power: Can the UN bring Stability?
Session: Celebrating their 60th anniversary in 2007, United Nations peace operations have turned into a veritable growth industry. From East Timor to Afghanistan and Darfur, well more than 100,000 peacekeepers work toward a transition from conflict to peace and stability. Many observers warn about a dangerous overstretch of the UN peace apparatus. What are lessons learned for improving the effectiveness and legitimacy of UN peace operations? Do the US, Europe and China live up to their responsibilities? How does the UN compare to other players in the peace operations business (the US, NATO, the EU and NGOs)?
Chair: Dr. Markus Jachtenfuchs, Director of the MPP Programme and Professor of European and Global Governance at the Hertie School of Governance, Berlin. He formerly worked at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES). Since 2004, Professor Jachtenfuchs has been a member of the editorial board of the Journal of International Relations and Development.
Thorsten Benner, Co-founder and Associate Director of the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi), Berlin. He currently directs a two-year research project on “Learning to Build Peace: UN Peace Operations and Organizational Learning” for which he has conducted fieldwork in Liberia and East Timor. His projects also include “The New Protectorates: International Administration and the Dilemmas of Governance” in which GPPi cooperates with the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford. He has published widely on the UN system including “The US and the EU at the UN: Making the Most of the Ban Years” (with Edward C. Luck).
Prof. Dr. Thomas Risse, Director of the Center for Transnational Relations, Foreign and Security Policy at the Otto Suhr Institute of Political Science at the Free University Berlin. He is coordinator of the Collaborative Research Centre 700 "Governance in Areas of Limited Statehood", funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Risse recently co-edited Regieren ohne Staat? Governance in Räumen begrenzter Staatlichkeit (2008) and The End of the West? Crises and Change in the Atlantic Order (forthcoming, Cornell University in May 2008). He is associate editor of the journal International Organization. In the academic year 2007, Risse was a Visiting Professor at the Harvard Center for European Studies. In 2003, he received the Max Planck Research Prize for International Cooperation.
Location: Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, Reichpietschufer 50, 10785
April 28, 2008 - Turning a Blind Eye: Genocide in the 20th Century
(with assistance from Karolina May-Chu) Karolina May-Chu has studied German Literature and American Studies at the University of Potsdam, Germany. She wrote her Master's thesis on the Armenian diaspora in the United States and the role of the Armenian Genocide in the diaspora's identity formation. She has worked as program manager for the CES Berlin Dialogues and as event manager for the WZB. Currently she lives in the United States and works as a freelance translator. Her translations include a travel guide for Potsdam as well as a history book dealing with the German-American encounter in Germany in the 1950s.
Session: A dozen years ago, dual crises of genocide – one in the former Yugoslavia, the other in Rwanda – shocked the international community into the recognition that such crimes were still possible. Since this juncture in the mid-1990s, the "specter of genocide" has returned, in other countries and other contexts, and the term was explicitly invoked by the former U.S. Secretary of State, Colin Powell, in the case of Darfur. Will heightened awareness make humanitarian interventions more likely in coming years? Does the UN-sponsored Responsibility to Protect (R2P) project hold new promise? How can the international community separate the decision to intervene from the calculation of national interest by the powerful? These are but a few of the difficult questions that encumber public discussions of genocide and intervention, yet – we believe – these fundamental questions still receive too little serious attention. In our session we would therefore like to explore the possibilities and responsibilities of political actors and civil society in the stopping and prevention of genocide.
Chair: Prof. Dr. Constantin Goschler, Chair for Contemporary History at Ruhr University Bochum. He has previously taught at the Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena, at the Charles University in Prague and at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Professor Goschler's main focus has been on the history and politics of restitution, redress and transitional justice for the victims of Nazi crimes. He is also interested in the history of science and the history of political ideas in the 19th and 20th centuries. He is the author of Schuld und Schulden: Die Politik Der Wiedergutmachung für NS-Verfolgte seit 1945.
Binaifer Nowrojee, Binaifer Nowrojee is originally from Kenya and is a distinguished human rights advocate. She is a Human Rights Program Clinical Instructor at Harvard Law School, and is currently director of the Open Society Initiative for East Africa. Nowrojee worked for Human Rights Watch for eleven years, the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, Amnesty International and the Swedish NGO Foundation for Human Rights. Nowrojee is the author of numerous articles and books on human rights, including the areas of humanitarian intervention, gender-based violations, and forced displacement.
Dr. Gérard Prunier, French academic and historian specializing in the Horn of Africa and East Africa. In 1984, he joined the CNRS scientific institution in Paris as a researcher. Prunier is now the Director of the French Centre for Ethiopian Studies in Addis Ababa. He is the author of The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide (2005) and Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide (2005), among others.
Dr. Jeffrey Richter, Senior historian in the Office of Special Investigations of the United States Department of Justice. His office investigates allegations of participation in state-sponsored extrajudicial killing, torture, and genocide by individuals who later immigrated to the United States. His work on the office's Holocaust cases has led to the denaturalization of former camp guards trained at the SS facility in Trawniki. Since the expansion of the Office of Special Investigations' jurisdiction in 2004 to include the pursuit of perpetrators of more recent human rights violations, Dr. Richter has specialized in African cases, including those stemming from the Rwandan genocide. He is also Associate Professorial Lecturer in History and Judaic Studies at the George Washington University and the author of a dissertation on postwar police reform in postwar Germany.
Location: Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, Reichpietschufer 50, 10785
February 18, 2008 - Competing Cold War Cultures: Crossing the Border?
Session: This session grows out of an interest in how popular culture in general and film culture specifically was experienced in the pre-Wall divided Berlin of the 1950s. With open borders and competing film offerings from West Germany and the U.S. in West Berlin and DEFA and the Soviet Union in the East, how were Berliners uniquely positioned within the early Cold War? How did filmmaking and film-going practices defy political alliances and allow for ideological transgressions? What opportunities existed for East-West narratives and co-productions? To what extent can we claim that these films and Berlin's unique cultural political landscape contributed to a sense of German national unity?
Chair: Brigitta Wagner, Ph.D. candidate in German and Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University. She lives in Germany and the U.S. and has been involved in various areas of the film industry, including journalism, festival work, and production. Her interests include Cold War German film politics, contemporary German film and culture, urban visual culture, and documentary film production. Her dissertation, Berlin Films and the Cultural Politics of Spatial Memory, examines urban representation in the revival and production of Berlin films after 1989.
Wolfgang Kohlhaase (Speaking in German), Wolfgang Kohlhaase had his start in cinema as a dramaturg in the GDR's DEFA studios. Since 1952, he has worked as a screenwriter. In 1954, he began a long collaboration with director Gerhard Klein that resulted in four renowned youth and young adult films: Alarm im Zirkus (1954), Eine Berliner Romanze (1956), Berlin - Ecke Schönhauser (1957), and Berlin um die Ecke (1965/1990). Kohlhaase went on to become one of the most prolific screenwriters in East Germany, where he also had the chance to work as a director. Recently, he has received critical acclaim for Die Stille nach dem Schuss (2000) and Sommer vorm Balkon (2005). His most recent project, Whisky mit Wodka (2008), a second film with director Andreas Dresen, is the story of an actor who has a problem with alcohol.
Prof. Stefan Soldovieri, Associate Professor and Graduate Coordinator of the Program in German Literature, Culture, and Theory at the University of Toronto. His book, Managing the Movies: Censorship, Modernization, and the GDR Film Crisis of 1965/66, is forthcoming at the University of Toronto Press and his most recent publication is "Finding Navigable Waters: Inter-German Film Relations and Modernization in two DEFA Barge Films of the 1950s," Film History 18.1 (2006): 59-72. He is presently researching a project tentatively entitled "Cold War Diversions: Inter-German Film Relations and Popular Cinema," in which he is concerned with uncovering the narrative, visual, production-related, and ideological dimensions of dialogue between the cinemas of the FRG and GDR.
Prof. Katie Trumpener, Emily Sanford Professor of Comparative Literature and English (and Film Studies) at Yale. She is currently finishing The Divided Screen: The Cinemas of Postwar Germany (to be published by Princeton University Press). She has published widely on East and West German film, literary and cultural history, and more generally on European literature and visual culture. Her most recent essays on East and West German New Wave cinema appeared in New German Critique and in The Power of Intellectuals in Contemporary Germany, ed. Michael Geyer. Under the auspices of the University of Massachusetts DEFA Archive, she co-organized a week-long symposium on DEFA and Eastern Europe New Wave cinema; she also wrote essays accompanying the American video releases of two DEFA films: Slatan Dudow's Our Daily Bread and Joachim Vogel's And Your Love Too.
Location: Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, Reichpietschufer 50, 10785
February 11, 2008 - The New Scramble for Africa: Oil, Geopolitics and the Quest for the Development Dividend
Session: The new Gulf is in West Africa. The US, Europe and rising powers such as China are competing for access to the world's fastest growing source of oil. Local elites, consumer governments and international oil companies are striking profitable deals fuelling corruption and bad governance. So far, the petrodollars only benefit cleptocratic elites, not the impoverished populations. The international community is scrambling for ways to ensure that African populations receive a development dividend from their oil riches. What contribution can voluntary schemes such as the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) favored by Germany and other G-8 countries make? Do we need to step up civil society pressure for mandatory regulation and disclosure?
Chair: Thorsten Benner, Associate Director of the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) in Berlin that has just launched a major research program on "Changing Rules of the Game: Global Energy Governance in the 21st Century". He has worked on the governance issues related to the extractive sector and is the author of Stemming the Tide of Conflict Diamonds: the Kimberley Process.
Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, University Lecturer in African Politics, Oxford University and Fellow, Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi), Berlin. He is author of Oil and Politics in the Gulf of Guinea (Hurst Publishers and Columbia University Press, 2007) and a co-editor of the forthcoming China Returns to Africa. A Superpower and a Continent Embrace (Hurst Publishers and Columbia University Press 2008). He has worked in the field of governance and the energy sector for the World Bank, the European Commission, Catholic Relief Services and conducted extensive fieldwork in West Africa.
Commentator: Michael Peel, Legal Correspondent, Financial Times, London. Author of Delta: Nigeria and the Battle for Oil (forthcoming 2008). Until 2006, he was the FT's West Africa correspondent focusing on the many problems of bad governance and corruption in Africa's oil sector.
Location: Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, Reichpietschufer 50, 10785
February 4, 2008 - Germans, Indians and the Wild West
Session: This session focuses on the many layers of symbolic meanings that Indians, the "Wild West", and the Winnetou novels of Karl May hold for so many generations of Germans. The discussion focuses on the idealization of nature and the pre-modern lifestyle of the American Indians, race fascination, the tension between modernity and the freedom of life at the frontier, escapism and the fascination of adventure, camaraderie, and lawlessness, and aspects of anti-Americanism.
Chair: Dr. Christoph Strupp, Research Fellow (2001-06) at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. His research interests include Historiography, 19th and 20th Century German and Dutch Cultural and Political History, and the History of Science. He is the author of Johan Huizinga: Geschichtswissenschaft als Kulturgeschichte (2000) and co-editor of a two-volume bibliography of German book publications on the United States: German Americana 1800-1955, 1956-2005 (2005/7). Christoph Strupp is currently holding a DGIA-Fellowship. He is participating in a research project of the Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte (FZH) in Hamburg on Foreign Consular Reporting from Germany, 1933-1941.
Prof. H. Glenn Penny, “Red Power: Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich and Indian Activist Networks in East and West Germany.” Associate Professor of History at the University of Iowa. His book, Objects of Culture, was the first comparative study of German ethnographic museums as well as the first in-depth analysis of the international market of material culture that took shape during the late nineteenth century. Penny is now working on a book tentatively titled The German Love Affair with the American Indian. In 2000, Glenn Penny won the Friends of the German Historical Institute Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize in German History.
Prof. Dr. K. Markus Kreis “Let's Play Cowboys and Indians! Buffalo Bill's Legacy.” Prof. Dr. Kreis has done extensive research and writing on Wild West shows in Germany and encounters between German missionaries and Lakota Indians. In 2004, Kreis won a Research Award from the University of Dortmund for the project, "Schools for the Sioux Indians (in the overall project German-American exchange)". He retired in March of 2006.
Dr. Pamela Kort, “The Search for Origins.” Independent curator and art historian specializing in twentieth-century art in German-speaking Europe. She has written extensively on modern and contemporary European artists, including Paul Klee, Jörg Immendorff, Joseph Beuys, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, among others. She has served as Associate Curator, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Germany (2001-03) and Associate Curator, Neue Galerie, New York: Museum for German and Austrian Art (2000-01). She also served as curator of the exhibition, I Like America: Fictions of the Wild West, at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2006-2007) and as co-editor of the catalogue.
Location: Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, Reichpietschufer 50, 10785
January 28, 2008 - The Minimum Wage in Germany: Blessing or Curse?
(with the assistance of Dr. Elke Jahn, Visiting Professor of Economics, University of Aarhus; senior researcher and head of the research group Temporary Agency Work at the Institute for Employment Research (IAB), and IZA research fellow; and of Dr. Klaus West, head of the office of the president of the Mining Chemical and Energy Industrial Union, Hannover)
Session: Over the past months, the issue of introducing a minimum wage into Germany has been fraught with disagreement and conflict. By January 28, 2008 there will have been more reactions by politicians, employers, unions, and workers. Although there will not be any measurable data by January 28, our four very knowledgeable speakers will reflect on the reasons to introduce the minimum wage into the German labor market, what the impact might be on the expanding economy, and whether it would help or hurt employment. Does the minimum wage invariably have an adverse effect on employment? How will the lives of the current population of unemployed, or marginally employed, change? January is a particularly appropriate time to have this session as interest in the topic is still running high.
Chair: Thomas Fricke, Chief Economics Editor at the Financial Times Deutschland. Previously Fricke worked as researcher at the Paris research institute Observatoire Français des Conjonctures économiques (OFCE) and as journalist at the Berliner Tagesspiegel, the Wirtschaftswoche and the Manager Magazin. Since 1999, he has been writing for the Financial Times Deutschland in the fields of economics and business cycles in Germany. He is focusing on the analysis of the German ‘economic miracle.’ He publishes the weekly economics column ‘Frickonomics” in the FTD where he comments on current economic trends and events. Fricke studied economics and political science at Aachen and Paris.
Dr. Hagen Lesch, A Senior Researcher on labor unions at the Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft Köln (IW) and a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences, Cologne. Since 2000 he has been directing the IW´s Wage Policy and Collective Bargaining Section. Between 1991 and 2000, Lesch worked as a Research Fellow and Senior Researcher of Economics at the Institut “Finanzen und Steuern” (IFSt), Bonn. Lesch graduated with a diploma in economics at the University of Bonn, where he also obtained his PhD. He has published books and articles on wage issues, including Das deutsche System der Lohnfindung unter Anpassungsdruck (2001), Streitpunkt lohnpolitischer Verteilungsspielraum (2002), Die Allgemeinverbindlichkeit von Tarifverträgen (2003), and Ökonomik des Tarifrechts“ (2006).
Dr. Rudolf Welzmüller, Member of the Executive Board at IG Metall´s Department of Collective Bargaining. Welzmüller has been working at IG Metall for 18 year, first in the economics department and then in the tariff politics department. Before entering the labor union, he worked as an Academic Instructor at the Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliches Institut (WSI) in Düsseldorf. At IG Metall, he has recently been made in charge of the European coordination of tariff policies. Among his numerous publications on labor union issues are “Koordinierung in Europa” (2005), “Marktaufteilung und Standortpoker in Europa” (1990), and “Preispolitik und Akkumulation. Untersuchung zur Preissetzungspolitik auf oligopolitischen Märkten, dargestellt am Beispiel der Chemischen Industrie“ (1982). Welzmüller graduated as an industrial business management assistant. Under the “second-chance education,” he studied economics in Munich and Frankfurt/Main.
Anton Wirmer, (Speaking in German) Anton Wirmer is former Assistant Secretary of State and currently a lawyer for the German trade association Bundesarbeitsgemeinschaft der Mittel- und Großbetriebe des Einzelhandels (BAG). Wirmer studied theology and law. From 1975 to 1996 Wirmer worked at the German Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs. There he worked in the area of labor market as well as budget and finances. In 1996 he began working for the Federal Chancellery where he became head of Unit 3: Social Affairs, Transportation, Agriculture, Environment, Research, and Education. In 1998 he became a lawyer and consultant, mainly for the BAG. He is also Managing Director of the Society for European Social Policy (GES).
Location: Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, Reichpietschufer 50, 10785
January 21, 2008 - The GDR as Historical Fiction: Literature and Film
Session: The idea for this session was inspired in part by the success of Das Leben der Anderen, as well as other novels and films—by both West and East Germans--about daily life in the GDR. Questions to be considered are: To what extent is it possible to capture the experience of living in East Germany in the medium of film or in novels and other written texts? Are there particularly “eastern” and “western” attitudes toward the GDR that are expressed in literature and film? Do “eastern” and “western” viewers and readers have different responses? How do retrospective (post-unification) representations of the GDR differ from those created before 1989? These issues are to be addressed based on personal experience and written observations.
Chair: Prof. Peter Jelavich, Professor of Cultural and Intellectual History of Europe since the Enlightenment, with emphasis on Germany, at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Munich and Theatrical Modernism: Politics, Playwriting, and Performance, 1890-1914 (1985), Berlin Cabaret (1993), and Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture (2006). He currently is writing a book on censorship of the arts in Germany from 1890 to the present.
Thomas Brussig, A novelist, scriptwriter and playwright, was born in 1965 in East Berlin. After 1990 he studied sociology (FU Berlin) and film (Potsdam-Babelsberg). His best-selling novels Helden wie wir, about the fall of the Berlin wall, and Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee, about the lives of East Berlin youths in the 1970s, have been filmed by Sebastian Peterson and Leander Haußmann. He also wrote the script for Haußmann’s NVA, about the travails of draftees in the East German army (which he himself experienced).
Dr. Jens Gieseke, Historian in the Office for Research and Education, Federal Commission for the Stasi Records, Berlin. He was born in 1964, and studied history, politics and law at the Universities of Hannover and Potsdam. He is the author of Der Mielke-Konzern: Die Geschichte der Stasi 1945-1990 (2006); Die hauptamtlichen Mitarbeiter der Staatssicherheit: Personalstruktur und Lebenswelt (2000); and Die DDR-Staatssicherheit: Schild und Schwert der Partei (2001), and most recently has edited Staatssicherheit und Gesellschaft: Studien zum Herrschaftsalltag in der DDR (2007).
Location: Meeting Room 10.22 (Second floor), Hertie School of Governance/European School for Management and Technology (esmt). Entrance: Schlossplatz 1, 10178
January 14, 2008 - Waiting for Political Transformation in the Former East
Session: What are the successes and failures of the integration of East Germany into the Federal Republic? Was the transformation process in East Germany different from those in other eastern European states? Among the failures of US policy in Iraq is a one-size-fits-all approach to democracy and capitalism. Does the record of institutional transfers to the East teach us anything about cultural barriers to the spread of democracy and capitalism?
Chair: Prof. Jonathan Zatlin, Assistant Professor of History at Boston University. He is the author of The Currency of Socialism: Money and Political Culture in East Germany (2007), which analyzes the economic and cultural function of money in East Germany from 1971 to 1990. He has also written on public opinion in the second German dictatorship, the East German automobile industry, socialist consumer policy under Honecker, economic sources of racism in Soviet-style regimes, and the Stasi, and is co-editor of Selling Modernity: German Advertising in the Twentieth Century (2007). His next book project examines economic anti-Semitism and the Jewish reaction in modern Germany.
PD Dr. Katharina Bluhm, Institut für Soziologie, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena. Her publications include three books: Experimentierfeld Ostmitteleuropa? Deutsche Unternehmen in Polen und der Tschechischen Republik (2007); Research Report of the EU Project "National Corporate Cultures and Institutional Competitiveness Strategies – the Challenge of Globalisation for European SMEs (2005); and Zwischen Markt und Politik. Probleme und Praxis von Unternehmenskooperation in der Transitionsökonomie (1999). She is currently based in the division on "Internationalisierung und Organisation" at the WZB. Prof. Bluhm spoke on the role of the EU in the transition process.
Steffen Reiche, (Speaking in German) ISPD (Cottbus), MdB. He was one of the founders of the SPD in the GDR in 1989, before it was legally authorized and has remained in politics since the Wende. He was a member of the Board of the SPD and the SPD-East from 1990-2000. From 1990-2005, he served as a member of the Volkskammer in the GDR; from 1999-2005, he was a member of the Landtag in Brandenburg; from 1994-1999, Reiche was Minister for Education, Research and Culture; from 1999-2004, he was Minister for Education, Youth and Sports in the State of Brandenburg. He is currently a Member of the Bundestag from Cottbus, where he serves on the Parliamentary committee for the Sorbs. He spoke in German on "Die Perspektive der Mitgliedschaft in der EU als Motor für Reformen."
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Seibel, Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Seibel studied at the Universities of Marburg, Speyer, and at Kassel, where he did both his PhD and his Habilitation. He became a Full Professor of Political and Administrative Science at the University of Konstanz in 1990. His current research projects are "Holocaust and Polykratie in Westeuropa, 1940-1944"; "Opfer der Neuen Weltordnung: Die politische Konstruktion von Erfolg und Scheitern Internationaler Interimsverwaltungen"; and "Individualisierung und Handlungslogik der Verfolgung: Die Differenzierung von Verfolgungsnetzwerken der Holocaust in Belgien, 1940-1944." He has published many books and articles, including Verwaltete Illusionen: Die Privatisierung der DDR-Wirtschaft durch die Treuhandanstalt und ihre Nachfolger 1990-2000, and Networks of Nazi Persecution: Bureaucrats, Business, and the Organization of the Holocaust with Gerald Feldman (2005)
Toralf Staud, Toralf Staud worked on the information paper of Neues Forum in 1989/1990, and was one of the founders of the newspaper Altmark Zeitung in 1991. From 1991-1998, he studied in Leipzig and Edinburgh, and then became a freelancer for AP, MDR, Sächsische Zeitung, Neues Deutschland, die tageszeitung, and Die Zeit. From 1998-2005, he was Political Editor of Die Zeit, first in Hamburg, and then in Berlin. For two years, he wrote for Greenpeace-Magazin. Staud has published three books: Auf dem Moped in die Freiheit - Wendegeschichten aus der Altmark (2000), Moderne Nazis. Die neuen Rechten und der Aufstieg der NPD (2005), and Wir Klimaretter - so ist die Wende noch zu schaffen (2007).
Location: Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, Reichpietschufer 50, 10785
November 12, 2007 - Femmes Fatales: Japan's Bathing Beauties, Berlin’s Flappers, and America’s Teen-Age 'Sluts'
Session: This session focuses on young women in periods of historical transition. The modern girl appeared in cities around the world during the early to mid-twentieth century. Refusing the model of dutiful daughter or wife, she expressed her individuality through her body and her work. Berlin flappers, Japanese beauty queens, and American teen-agers in dress and style epitomize the concept of 'girls around the world.'
Chair: Prof. Dr. Barbara Pfetsch, Professor of Communication and Media Policy at the University of Hohenheim, Germany. She previously held the position of senior researcher at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB) and taught at the Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Mannheim. She was a Fellow at John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, at the Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University, and at the Harvard Center for European Studies. Her research focuses on comparative analyses of political communication and on media and the public sphere. Pfetsch has published several books, including Comparing Political Communication (2004) and Politische Kommunikationskultur (2003), as well as numerous articles and book chapters.
Prof. Jan Bardsley, Associate Professor of Japanese Humanities, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, specialist on the history and literature of Japanese feminism, and currently working on bathing suit contests and Ms. Universe competitions with Japanese girls. She is the co-editor of Bad Girls of Japan (2005), the author of The Bluestockings of Japan: New Woman Fiction and Essays from Seito, 1911-16 (forthcoming, 2007) and co-editor of Bowing to Etiquette: Manners and Mischief in Japan (forthcoming).
Prof. Uta Poiger, Associate Professor of History, University of Washington Seattle, Visiting Associate Professor of History at Harvard University, author of Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (2000) and co-editor of the anthologies Transactions, Transgressions, Transformations: American Culture in Western Europe and Japan (2000) and The Modern Girl Around the World (forthcoming).
Emily White is the author of Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the Myth of the Slut (2002), and You Will Make Money in Your Sleep (2007). She has published articles in numerous magazines including the New York Times Magazine, Nest, Bookforum, The Village Voice, and The Stranger. From 1995-2000 she was Editor in Chief The Stranger, an alternative weekly in Seattle. She is currently Arts and Entertainment editor at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Seattle's major daily newspaper.
Commentator: Prof. em Dr. Adelheid von Saldern, Professor of Modern History, University of Hannover; author of many books and articles, including The Challenge of Modernity: German Cultural and Social Studies, 1890-1960 (2002), Inszenierter Stolz. Stadtrepräsentationen in drei deutschen Gesellschaften (2005) and Stadt und Kommikation in bundesrepublikanischen Umbruchszeiten (2006).
Location: Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, Reichpietschufer 50, 10785
November 5, 2007 - Broken Men and Strong Women: Towards a Cultural History of Democratization in Germany after 1945
Session: This session examines the private lives of Germans as individuals and as families reuniting after the end of World War II, and the rebuilding of human relationships against the background of almost inconceivable physical and emotional loss. Parallels will be drawn to experiences of other countries.
Chair: Prof. Uta Poiger, Associate Professor of History, University of Washington Seattle, Visiting Associate Professor of History at Harvard University, author of Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (2000) and co-editor of the anthologies Transactions, Transgressions, Transformations: American Culture in Western Europe and Japan (2000) and The Modern Girl Around the World (forthcoming)
Prof. Frank Biess, Associate Professor of Modern German History at the University of California, San Diego. He holds a Humboldt Fellowship for the period January 2007-December 2008. This year he is based in Göttingen His research has focused on the social, political, and cultural history of 20th Century Germany. His book Homecomings: Returning POWs and the Legacies of Defeat in Postwar Germany was published in 2006. The book combines the political history of reconstruction with the social history of returnees and the cultural history of war memories and gender identities. He teaches courses on Modern German, Italian, and European History.
Prof. Heide Fehrenbach, Presidential Research Professor in the Department of History at Northern Illinois University. She currently holds a Guggenheim Fellowship for her research and teaching on Germany. Her first book, Cinema in Democratizing Germany (1995) discussed the role of cinema in restructuring the postwar German national and gender ideologies. Race After Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America (2005) focuses on transnational responses to children born to German women and African-American soldiers during the military occupation. She is now researching the effects of war, military occupation and the rise of international adoption on the notions of family, immigration and citizenship.
Location: Hotel Gates Berlin, Knesebeckstrasse 8-9
October 15, 2007 - Waging Peace
Session: The session focuses on peacekeeping as a reliable method of securing long-term stability, and nation-building as the partner of peacekeeping.
Chair: Thorsten Benner, Co-founder and Associate Director of the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi), Berlin. He currently directs a two-year research project on “Learning to Build Peace: UN Peace Operations and Organizational Learning” for which he has conducted fieldwork in Liberia and East Timor. His projects also include “The New Protectorates: International Administration and the Dilemmas of Governance” in which GPPi cooperates with the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford. He has published widely on the UN system including “The US and the EU at the UN: Making the Most of the Ban Years” (with Edward C. Luck).
Prof. Mentor Agani, Lecturer in Sociology and Political Science at the University of Prishtina. His research focuses on theories of nation and nationalism, global transformations and the status of Kosovo. Prof. Agani has been working at Kosovo radio and TV as a producer and moderator. Prof. Agani completed his studies in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at University of Pittsburg, USA, as part of the US Department of State’s Ron Brown Fellowship Program. He was deputy director in the Kosovar Civil Society Foundation, and editor-in-chief of the magazine Ura (The Bridge), published by the Kosovar Center for Humanistic Studies. Prof. Agani has translated into Albanian several books from English and from Serbo-Croatian. He was a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard University Center for European Studies for the 2006-2007 academic year.
Prof. David Little, T. J. Dermot Dumphy Visiting Professor of the Practice in Religion, Ethnicity, and International Conflict, Harvard Divinity School, as well as a Faculty Associate, at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Little has been on the faculty of the Harvard Divinity School since 1999. Before that he was senior scholar in religion, ethics and human rights at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C. From 1996-1998 Little was on the State Department Advisory Committee on Religious Freedom Abroad. His work in recent years has taken him, as adviser and researcher, to areas of the world such as Sudan, Sri Lanka, Bosnia, Northern Ireland, and Israel in which religion and ethnicity play a central role in social conflict. He has written about nationalism, ethnicity, human rights, religious liberty, and religion and American foreign policy. His recent books include Sri Lanka: The Invention of Enmity, and Islamic Activism and U.S. Foreign Policy (coauthored).
Lt. General Karlheinz Viereck, Commander of the Bundeswehr Operations Command in Potsdam. Previous military posts include General Staff Officer at the NATO Headquarters AIR BALTAP in Denmark; Deputy Commander, then Commander of the Flying Group of Fighter Bomber Wing 36 "Westfalen" in Hopsten; Deputy Chief of Staff and Director Operations at the Joint Operations NATO Headquarters North in Norway; Commander of the 4th Air Division in Aurich, Germany; Deputy Commander of the Bundeswehr Operations Command; and Operation Commander of the European Union Force in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (EUFOR RD CONGO). Lt. Viereck started his military career in the Bundeswehr in 1970 and completed his pilot training in the USA at Sheppard AFB in 1974. He is the holder of the Bundeswehr Cross of Honor in Silver and Gold.
Location: Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, Reichpietschufer 50, 10785
October 8, 2007 - Religion and Nationalism: Iraq in Comparative Perspective
Session: The session focuses on the triggers for religion and violence in the Middle East and the Balkans, with special emphasis on Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, and Bosnia. We are interested in the role of religion and of politics, when and why they meet, and the results.
Chair: Steffen Hagemann, Research Assistant at the Otto-Suhr Institute, Free University Berlin. In 2006-2007, he was a Visiting Researcher at the Bucerius Institute for Research in German History and Society in Haifa, Israel, where his project was “Between Quietism and Violence –Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel”. His main fields of interest are religion and politics, fundamentalism and political culture. He has published a book, Für Volk, Land und Thora (2006), on the influence of ultra-Orthodox and messianic Fundamentalisms in Israel.
Prof. Amatzia Baram, Professor of Middle Eastern History at the University of Haifa, Israel. He is a prolific author and editor of several books and dozens of scholarly articles on Saddam Hussein and Iraqi politics and history. He testified about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction in September 2002 before the House Committee on Government Reform, and has consulted widely about Iraq with senior U.S. administration officials. He has been a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, Georgetown University, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, St. Antony's College (Oxford), and Hebrew University's School for Advanced Studies. Baram directed the Jewish-Arab Center and the Gustav Heinemann Middle East Institute at the University of Haifa from 1999 to 2002. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of the History of Islamic Countries at Hebrew University.
Prof. David Little, T. J. Dermot Dumphy Visiting Professor of the Practice in Religion, Ethnicity, and International Conflict, Harvard Divinity School, as well as a Faculty Associate, at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Little has been on the faculty of the Harvard Divinity School since 1999. Before that he was senior scholar in religion, ethics and human rights at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington D.C. From 1996-1998 Little was on the State Department Advisory Committee on Religious Freedom Abroad. His work in recent years has taken him, as adviser and researcher, to areas of the world such as Sudan, Sri Lanka, Bosnia, Northern Ireland, and Israel in which religion and ethnicity play a central role in social conflict. He has written about nationalism, ethnicity, human rights, religious liberty, and religion and American foreign policy. His recent books include Sri Lanka: The Invention of Enmity, and Islamic Activism and U.S. Foreign Policy (coauthored).
Dr. Thomas Scheffler, Currently teaching within the Carsten Niebuhr Institute for Near Eastern Studies at Copenhagen University. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science at the Free University of Berlin and has been a Senior Researcher at the Center for Modern Oriental Studies, Berlin (1993-1995), at the German Orient Institute Beirut, Lebanon (1996-1999), and at the Political Science Department of the Free University of Berlin (2000-2001). In 2001-2002 he was a Rockefeller Visiting Fellow at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. He is the author of numerous studies on political Islam, ethno-religious conflict, and interreligious dialogue in the Middle East. His books include Religion between Violence and Reconciliation (editor, 2002) and Ethnicity and Violence (editor, 1991, in German).
The session will focus on political and social transformation in the Near East
Location: Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, Reichpietschufer 50, 10785
October 1, 2007 - Truth Commissions, Transitional Justice, Victims and Perpetrators
Session: The session focuses on international efforts to bring peace and healing to societies emotionally damaged by violent conflicts and totalitarian regimes.
Chair: Belinda Cooper, Adjunct professor at New York University's Center for Global Affairs and a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute, where she co-founded the Program on Citizenship and Security. She holds a law degree from Yale Law School and has taught human rights, international law, transitional justice and gender and law at Humboldt University in Berlin, the New School, Seton Hall Law School and Ohio Northern University Law School. She has edited a volume on the interconnections between the Nuremberg tribunal and the current international criminal tribunals entitled "War Crimes: The Legacy of Nuremberg." Cooper lived in Berlin, Germany from 1987-1994 and returned in 2002 as a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. She has taken part in human rights fact-finding missions and has coauthored reports on domestic violence in Armenia, Uzbekistan, and Tanzania. Cooper has written for a wide variety of publications in German and English, including The New York Times, Newsweek, World Policy Journal and the Christian Science Monitor. She is also a translator of German scholarly books and articles, including most recently a textbook on international criminal law, and has worked as a translator on the case of Turkish-German Guantanamo detainee Murat Kurnaz.
Marianne Birthler, Federal Minister of the Stasi Files. Before joining the Ministry, Frau Birthler was employed in foreign trade and held several offices in the Evangelical Church. In the late ‘80’s, she was actively involved in various opposition groups in the former GDR, such as the “Solidarity Church Workshop” and the “Initiative for Peace and Human Rights”. During the ‘90’s, she served as the General Speaker of the Board of Bündnis 90/Die Gruenen. Frau Birthler has held several honorary offices and functions, including memberships in the German UNICEF Committee, the Advisory Board of Transparency International, the committee of the Student Competition in German History, the Green Academy of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, and the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen memorial. Frau Birthler was educated in Foreign Trade Economics and as catechist and parish worker for the Evangelical Church.
Priscilla Hayner, Director of the International Center for Transitional Justice’s Peace and Justice Program. She currently directs the Geneva office and manages the Center´s Liberia Program. Ms. Hayner is an expert on truth commissions around the world and has written widely on the subject of official truth-seeking in political transitions. She is the author of Unspeakable Truths (2001), which explores the work of more than 20 truth commissions worldwide. Prior to founding the ICTJ, she was a consultant at the Ford Foundation, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and a program officer on international human rights and world security for the Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation in New York. She holds degrees from Earlham College and the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. In 2007, she was awarded the Human Rights Award by the Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights for her extensive work on transitional justice.
Lars Waldorf, Lecturer in International Law and Human Rights at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London. His research focuses on dispute resolution mechanisms (gacaca) in Rwanda, used to try hundreds of thousands of suspected genocidaires. Since 2001, he has covered genocide trials at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda for Diplomatie Judiciaire, a web-based magazine on international justice. Mr. Waldorf has also worked as a civil rights lawyer for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and the Washington Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs. Mr. Waldorf graduated with a BA from Harvard College and a JD from the Harvard Law School, where he was a Fellow in the Human Rights Program after 2004. His teaching experiences include The New School and Harvard. He has published widely on Rwanda and transitional justice, most recently “Censorship and Propaganda in Post-genocide Rwanda” in Media and the Rwanda Genocide (Thompson 2007) and “Mass Justice for Mass Atrocity: Rethinking Local Justice as Transitional Justice” (2006).
Location: Hertie School of Governance, Schlossplatz 1, Berlin-Mitte, Seminar room, second floor
July 16, 2007 - The 'Conquest of Nature' and Modern German History
Chair: Prof. Jennifer Jenkins, Associate Professor, Canada Research Chair in Modern German History, Department of History, University of Toronto
Prof. David Blackbourn, Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard and Director, Center for European Studies, will discuss his book The Conqueset of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany to be published in Germany by DVA in summer 2007
July 9, 2007 - Dual Loyalties? Lobbies, Citizenship and Foreign Policy
Chair and Moderator: Prof. Jonathan Laurence, Department of Political Science, Boston College, and co-author of Integrating Islam: Political and Religious Challenges in Contemporary France (with J. Vaisse), 2006 (co-organizer)
Prof. Dr. Ruud Koopmans, Director of the research unit "Migration, Konflikte und Integration im Zeichen der Transnationalisierung" at Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin fuer Sozialforschung
Prof. Riem Spielhaus, Director of the Muslim Academy in Berlin, Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies at the Institute for Asian and African Research at Humboldt University
Prof. Tony Smith, Cornelia M. Jackson Professor of Political Science, Tufts University, and author of A Pact with the Devil: Washington's Bid for World Supremacy and the Betrayal of the American Promise, forthcoming 2007
July 3, 2007 - Extraordinary Times: The US and Europe in the Cold War Eras
Chair and Moderator: Prof. Jonathan Laurence, Asst. Prof. of Political Science, Boston College, and co-author of Integrating Islam: Political and Religious Challenges in Contemporary France (with J. Vaisse), 2006 (co-organizer)
Ian Johnson, Nieman Fellow, Harvard University, 2007-08; author of A Mosque for the Taking (forthcoming) which describes the history of the Islamic Center of Munich and the Muslim Brotherhood's arrival in Europe.
Prof. Louise Richardson, Executive dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study; Senior Lecturer in Government, and Lecturer on Law at Harvard law School. Her most recent publications are What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat (2006). She is also the editor of The Roots of Terrorism (2006).
Dr. Guido Steinberg, Member of Research Unit of Middle East and Africa, Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, Berlin, Advisor on International Terrorism, Federal Chancellery, Berlin (2002-2005) (invited)
June 25, 2007 - The Evolution of American Defense Policy since the Cold War
Chair: Prof. Jacques Hymans, Asst. Professor of Government, Smith College, and author of The Psychology of Nuclear Proliferation (2006) (co-organizer)
Brigadier Nigel Aylwin-Foster, Deputy Commander of the Office of Security Transition in the Coalition Office for Training and Organizing Iraq's Armed Forces
Lt. Col. Suzanne C. Nielsen, Academy Professor and Director of the International Relations and National Security Studies Program at the United States Military Academy at West Point. While commanding an intelligence company, she deployed her unit twice to Bosnia. She hold a MA and PhD in political science from Harvard University and wrote her dissertation on "Preparing for War: the Dynamics of Peacetime Military Reform."
June 18, 2007 - GMOs: Transatlantic Differences and Beyond
(With assistance from Kyoko Sato, Department of Sociology, Harvard University and Princeton University)
Chair and Moderator: Prof. Frank Trentmann, Professor of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birkbeck College, University of London, and Director of the Cultures of Consumption Research Program at the University of London
Prof. Claude Fischler, Director of Research, Sociology, at CNRS; co-director of the Center for the Study of Transdisciplinary Sociology, Anthropology, and History, and member of a research team at the Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris
Prof. Ronald Herring, Professor of Political Economy and Political Ecology, Cornell University, working on state property in nature, politics of genetically engineered organisms, and connections between economic development and ethnicity.
June 11, 2007 - The Color Line: Affirmative Action in the US and Europe
Chair and Moderator: Dr. Belinda Cooper, Senior Fellow, World Policy Institute, The New School University, New York City.
Prof. Erik Bleich, Associate Professor of Political Science, Middlebury College (co-organizer).
Ellen Buchman, Field Director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund
Maleiha Malik, King's College London.
May 21, 2007 - Denial, Responsibility and Genocide: Armenians, Turks and Germans
Chair and Moderator: Prof. Dr. Hajo Funke, Professor for Politics and Culture at the Otto Suhr Institute for Political Science at the Free University Berlin.
Prof. Mustafa Aksakal, Asst. professor of History, Monmouth University, writing a book on the Ottoman decision to enter the First World War in 1914.
Prof. David Fidler, Asst. professor of History, Monmouth University, writing a book on the Ottoman decision to enter the First World War in 1914.
Prof. Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley.
April 30, 2007 - Public Health and Foreign Policy: Different Approaches to Controlling HIV-AIDS
Chair and Moderator: Sophie Schlette, Project Director for the Bertelsmann Stiftung for the planning and coordination of the International Network Health Policy & Reform since February 2002.
Dr. Harro Albrecht, 2006-2007 Nieman Fellow in Global Health Reporting at Harvard University, with funding provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He is a medical writer/editor at Die Zeit.
Prof. David Fidler, Professor of Law and Harry T. Ice Faculty Fellow at Indiana Law School.
Dr. M. Catherine Maternowska, Assistant Professor in the Departments of Obstetrics, Gynecology, Reproductive Sciences, and of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine, at the University of California San Francisco.
February 19, 2007 - "Hiphop Culture in Germany and the US: Righteous Anger or Self-Destruction?"
Chair and Moderator: Prof. Alexander Rehding, Professor of Music, Harvard
DJ Marius No. 1, founder, Chiefrocker Records (Das Hip Hop Label); DJ, NDR4, "Black Traxx"
Prof. Murray Forman, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University in Boston and a frequent media correspondent on hiphop and society. He is the author of The Hood Comes First: Race, Space and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop (2002) and co-editor of That's the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (2004). He is currently working on a book entitled 'One Night on TV is Worth Weeks at the Paramount: Music on Television Before Elvis'.
Prof. Levent Soysal, Founding Chair, Faculty of Communication, Kadir Has University, Istanbul; author of "Rap, Hiphop, Kreuzberg: Scripts of/for Migrant Youth Culture in the WorldCity Berlin," New German Critique
Monday, February 5, 2007 - "Film as Cultural Integration"
Chair and Moderator: Kris Manjapra, Project Liaison, Harvard CES-Berlin
Florian Gallenberger, writer and director of Schatten der Zeit, among many other films. Winner of the OSCAR for Best Student Short Film for Quiero Ser at the 2001 Academy Awards.
Prof. Deniz Goektuerk, Professor of German and Film Studies at the University of California at Berkeley.
Enrique Sanchez Lansch, director of the acclaimed theatrical documentary, Rhythm is it!, among numerous other films.
January 15, 2007 - The Midterm Election: On the Road to 2008
Chair and Moderator: Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff, Washington Bureau Chief, Die Zeit
Arthur Goldhammer is a translator specializing in French history, literature, philosophy, and social science. He has translated more than eighty works by many of France's most noted authors. In 2006-2007, he holds a Guggenheim Fellowship to write about democracy in America since the publication of Tocqueville's famous book in 1840
Prof. Glyn Morgan is Associate Professor of Government and Social Studies at Harvard, Morgan specializes and teaches courses in contemporary political philosophy and the history of European economic, social, and political thought.
December 11, 2006 - Well-Being in the European Economies
Chair and Moderator: Dr. Andreas Busch, Reader in European Politics, Department of Political and International Relations, University of Oxford
Prof. Antonio Bassanetti, Economist, Bank of Italy
Prof. Richard Freeman, Herbert Ascherman Chair in Economics, Harvard University; faculty co-chair of the Harvard University Trade Union Program, director of the Labor Studies Program of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and Senior Research Fellow in Labour Markets at the Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics
November 20th, 2006 - The Midterm Election: On the Road to 2008
Chair and Moderator: John Kornblum, U.S. Ambassador to Germanz from 1997 to 2001. Chairman of Lazard Freres in Germany and AICGS Board Member
Dr. Guido Goldman, Director of the Program for German Studies at Harvard and the Founding Director (1969-1994) of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies
November 13th, 2006 - Retreat, Revival or Transformation of the State?
Chair and Moderator: Prof. Dr. Claus Offe, Professor of Political Sociology, Hertie School of Governance, Berlin
Prof. Jonah Levy, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley. Levy's current research examines the relationship between partisanship and welfare reform in contemporary Wester Europe
Dr. Annette Toeller, Political Scientist. Annette Toeller is Assistant Professor at the Helmut-Schmidt-University of the Federal Armed Forces, Hamburg, where she teaches courses on public administration, German and comparative politics, environmental policy and European integration (co-organizer)
November 6th, 2006 - Legacies of Communism
Chair and Moderator: Torald Staud, Freelance journalist and author of Moderne Nazis: Die neuen Rechten und der Aufstieg der NPD (2005)
Anne Applebaum, Columnist and member of the editorial board, The Washington Post; Visiting Fellow, American Academy Berlin (Fall 2006); author of Gulag: A History, awarded 2004 Pulitzer Priye for non-Fiction
Jens Bisky, Editor, Feuilleton section, Süddeutsche Zeitung; author, Geboren am 13. August
(With the assistance of Thorsten Benner, Associate Director, Global Public Policy Institute Berlin)
October 30th, 2006 - Sabotaging Capitalism?: France, Germany, Italy
Chair and Moderator: Prof. Stein Kuhnle, Professor of Social Policy and Welfare State Reform, Hertie School of Governance Berlin
Dr. Eloi Laurent, Economist and Research Fellow at the Observatoire Francais des Conjunctures Economiques (OFCE) and Lecturer at the Institute for Political Studies, Paris; co-author of Integrity and Efficiencz in teh EU: The Case Against the European Economic Constitution (co-organizer)
Prof. Marco Leonardi, Professor of Economics, Department for the Studz of Labor, University of Milan
Prof. Dr. Ronnie Schöb, Professor of Economics and Management, University of Magdeburg, author of Arbeit ist Machbar, die Magdeburger Alternative
October 23rd, 2006 - Understanding Terrorism as Religion
Chair and Moderator: Prof. Michael Zuern, Dean of the Hertie School of Governance Berlin and Director of the Research Unit International Institutions and Conflicts at the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB)
Prof. David Little, T.J. Dermot Dunphy Professor of the Practice in Religion, Ethnicity, and International Conflict, Harvard Divinity School, and Faculty Associate, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs
Prof. Daniel Philpott, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Notre Dame, editor, The Politics of Past Evil: Religion, Reconciliation, and the Dilemmas of Transitional Justice, forthcoming 2006, and Revolutions in Sovereignty: How Ideas Shaped Modern Intenraitonal Relations, 2001
July 17th, 2006 - Is There Multiculturalism in France?: A Jewish Perspective
Chair and Moderator: Dr. Judith Eisenberg Vichniac, Political Scientist. Vichniac is Director of the Radcliffe Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard. She has taught courses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century social theory, the political development of Western Europe, political sociology, and history and memory. Her published works include The Management of Labor: The British and French Iron and Steel Industries, 1860-1918 (1990) and "Religious Toleration and Jewish Emancipation in France and Germany," in Democracy, Revolution and History (T. Skocpol et al., eds., 1998), a Festschrift in honor of Barrington Moore, Jr.
Martine Cohen, Sociologist, Groupe Sociétés, Religions, Laïcités (GSRL, CNRS-EPHE) and author of Associations laïques et confessionnelles: identités et valeurs, Sectes et democratie, and Les Transformations de l'autorité religieuse (2004).
Dr. Diana Pinto, Intellectual historian and writer living in Paris. A Senior Fellow of the London based Institute for Jewish Policy Research, she is now working on a project on "Jewish voices for the European res publica". The author of Entre deux mondes she has lectured widely on transatlantic issues and on Jewish life in contemporary Europe as a crucial chapter in the continent's pluralist challenges.
July 10th, 2006 - International Terror and International Justice
Chair and Moderator: Thorsten Benner, Associate Director, Global Public Policy Institute, Berlin (chair and co-organizer)
Prof. Gary Bass, Associate Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Princeton University, and author of Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals (Princeton University Press) and a forthcoming book on humanitarian intervention
Detlev Mehlis, Senior Public Prosecutor in the Office of the Attorney General in Berlin, responsible for prosecuting terrorism and organized crime cases, including the bombing of the discotheque La Belle in 1986 and the involvement of the terrorist Carlos in the attack on the French culture centre Maison de France in 1983. Since 1998, Mehlis has been the Chief of the Contact Office of the European Judiciary Network and Coordinator for the fight against organized crime in the State of Berlin. In 2005, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed Mehlis as the first Commissioner of the UN International Independent Investigation Commission into the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.
July 3, 2006 - Historical Crimes and International Justice: New Debates
Chair and Moderator: Dr. Constantin Goschler, Department of History, Humboldt University; author of Schuld und Schulden. Die Politik der Wiedergutmachung fuer NS-Verfolgte seit 1945 (2005)
Prof. Elazar Barkan, Prof. of Cultural Studies, Claremont Graduate University; Visiting Professor, Department of History, Columbia University; author of The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (2002)
Prof. John Torpey, Department of Sociology, Graduate Department, City University of New York; author of Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: On Reparations Politics (2005)
May 15th, 2006 - Hope for a New Tomorrow?: The Promise of America in Songs of Protests, 1940-1984
Chair and Moderator: Dr. Paul Stoop, Head of the Information and Communications Department of the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin fuer Sozialforschung
Jonathan Lehrich, radio announcer and producer for WHRB-FM and the Associate Director of the MIT Leadership Center
May 8th, 2006 - Making the World Safe for Empire
Chair and Moderator: Sergey Lagodinsky, Fellow, Global Public Policy Institute, Berlin
Prof. Charles S. Maier, Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History, Harvard University
Prof. Dr. Georg Nolte, Professor, Institute of International Law, University of Munich; and member, Venice Commission, Council of Europe
April 24th, 2006 - Sexuality and Politics in Post-War Germany: From Restoration to the 'Sexual Revolution' and its Aftermath
Chair and Moderator: Dr. Gerd Könen, Writer; Author of Vesper, Ensslin, Baader: Urzenen des deutschen Terrorismus (2003)
Prof. Dagmar Herzog, Professor of Modern European History, Graduate Center, City University New York; Author of Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in 20th Century Germany (2005)
Dr. Sybille Steinbacher, Assistant Professor of Modern History, Friedrich Schiller University Jena; Author of Auschwitz: Geschichte und Nachgeschichte (2004), published in English, Italian and Dutch in 2005; Currently writing a book on the German sexual revolution after World War II
February 20, 2006 - The Return of the Moral Majority? Gay Marriage, Religion and American Politics
Chair and Moderator: Dr. Jeffrey Richter, Co-chair, Adjunct Professor of History and Sociology, George Mason University
Patrick Guerriero, President, Log Cabin Republicans
Prof. D. Sunshine Hillygus, Assistant Professor of Government, Harvard University
Evan Wolfson, Executive Director, Freedom to Marry
February 6, 2006 - Past and Future Enlargements: EU Expectations and Reality
Chair and Moderator: Dr. Ulrike Guérot,Senior Trans-Atlantic Fellow, German Marshall Fund Berlin
Prof. Grzeogrz Ekiert, Prof. of Government, Chair of the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies, and Senior Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, Harvard University.
Dr. Wolfgang Merkel, Director of the Research Unit "Democracy: Structures, Performances, and Challenges" at the Wissenschaftszentrum für Sozialforschung.
January 23, 2006 - Soccer!
Chair and Moderator: Prof. Dr. Christiane Eisenberg, Professor of British History, Humboldt University.
Seamus Malin, Sports Commentator, ESPN, ABC, and NPR (co-organizer).
Prof. Andrei Markovits, Karl W. Deutsch Collegiate Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies, University of Michigan, and The Gambrinus Visiting Professor for Sport and Soccer Studies at the University of Dortmund(June 2006).
Dr. Paul Stoop, Head of Communications, Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB)
January 9, 2006 - Fundamentalism in the US and Europe
Chair and Moderator: Prof. Harvey Cox, Hollis Professor of Divinity, Harvard Divinity Schoo.
Prof. Jonathan Laurence, Assistant Professor of Political Science (chair).
Dr. Olivier Roy, Research Director, unit on the 'Iranian World,' Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris.
December 5, 2005 - The Current and Future Role of the Extreme Right in Germany
Chair and Moderator: Belinda Cooper is a Senior Fellow, World Policy Institute, The New School University , New York City.
Hubertus Heil is the recently elected (November 2005) Secretary General of the SPD.
Peter Jelavich is Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University.
Toralf Staud, until recently a journalist in the Berlin office of Die Zeit, primarily covered politics in east Germany, the NPD, and other right-wing groups.
November 22, 2005 - China: Human Rights vs. Economic Opportunity
Chair and Moderator: Prof. Tony Smith, Cornelia M. Jackson Professor of Political Science at Tufts University
Dr. Xiaorong Li, Research Scholar, Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, University of Maryland; former Executive Director and current Vice Chair of Human Rights in China (New York and Hong Kong)
Ian Johnson, Bureau Chief, Berlin, Wall Street Journal; formerly, correspondent in Beijing; recipient of Pulitzer Prize 2001 for reporting on Falun Gong
Prof. Dr. Eberhard Sandschneider, Otto-Wolff-Director of the German Council on Foreign Relations, Berlin (discussant)
October 24, 2005 - Stalemate: The Domestic Challenge to U.S. Foreign Policy
Chair: Prof. Dr. Eberhard Sandschneider,Otto-Wolff-Director of the German Council on Foreign Relations, Berlin
Guido Goldman, Director, Program for the Study of Germany and Europe; Founding Director, Center for European Studies, Harvard University
The Berlin Dialogues' Programs from previous years are available as PDF documents below
2004 - 2005 Berlin Dialogues Program
2003 - 2004 Berlin Dialogues Program
2002 - 2003 Berlin Dialogues Program
