Symposium Presenters:
Gareth Evans has been since January 2000 President of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (www.crisisgroup.org), an independent non-government organization with over 110 full-time staff on five continents working to prevent and resolve deadly conflict and extremist violence. He came to Crisis Group after 21 years in Australian politics, thirteen of them as a Cabinet Minister. As Foreign Minister (1988-96) he was best known internationally for his role in developing the UN peace plan for Cambodia, helping conclude the Chemical Weapons Convention, and helping initiate new Asia Pacific regional economic and security architecture. He has written or edited eight books – including Cooperating for Peace, launched at the UN in 1993 – and has published over ninety journal articles and chapters on foreign relations, human rights and legal and constitutional reform. He was Co-Chair of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, which published its influential report, The Responsibility to Protect, in December 2001; and a Member of the UN Secretary General’s High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change which reported in December 2004. He is currently a member of the Zedillo International Task Force on Global Public Goods and the Blix Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Michel Feher, philosopher and founding editor/publisher of Zone books, NY. Author of Powerless by Design. The Age of the International Community (London, Durham, Duke University Press) 2000 and, most recently, editor of “Politique non gouvernementale” (Vacarme34) Winter 2006. His essays -- in English -- related to the topic of the conference include : “Terms of Reconciliation,” in Carla Hesse and Robert Post eds., Human Rights in Political Transitions : Gettysburg to Bosnia (New York, zone books) 1999, “Robert Fisk’s Newspapers” (Theory and Event, Volume 5, Issue 4) 2001, “Saudi Mirror” (Public Culture, Volume 18, Issue 1) Winter 2OO6 (forthcoming), and “Triumphs and Travails of a Cold War Remedy” (PMLA, Volume 121, Issue 5) October 2006 (forthcoming).
Jerry Fowler is staff director of the Committee on Conscience, which guides the genocide prevention efforts of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and host of the award-winning web-based talk show and podcast series, Voices on Genocide Prevention. His publications include “Out of that Darkness: Preventing Genocide in the 21 st Century,” in Century of Genocide: Eyewitness Accounts and Critical Views (Routledge, 2004). He also directed the short film A Good Man in Hell: General Romeo Dallaire and the Rwanda Genocide. Mr. Fowler has taught at George Mason University Law School and George Washington University Law School. For the 2006-7 academic year, he will be William F. Podlich Distinguished Visitor and Visiting Scholar at Claremont McKenna College.
Jeremy I. Levitt is Professor of Law at Florida International University College of Law and Distinguished Scholar at Northern Illinois University College of Law. Dr. Levitt is a public international lawyer, political scientist, and Africanist with expertise and publications in the law of the use of force, human rights law, international organizations, democratization, African politics, state dynamics and regional collective security. Professor Levitt has demonstrated a talent for teaching, passion for legal and multidisciplinary scholarship and strong commitment to public service. In the past five years, Dr. Levitt has authored two books, and co-authored a law review volume, in addition to several law review and other articles. His latest book, The Evolution of Deadly Conflict in Liberia: From ‘Paternaltarianism’ to State Collapse, has been praised as “original” and the “definitive work on the causes of Liberia’s cycle of deadly conflict” by noted political scientists and international lawyers.
Jon C. Pevehouse, Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the International Studies Program at UW-Madison. He received his BA in Political Science from the University of Kansas in 1995. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Ohio State University in 2000. His dissertation won the American Political Science Association Helen Dwight Read Award for the best dissertation written on international relations that year. His current work involves an examination of presidential war powers and Congressional attempts to check presidential war-making behavior in the United States. He has recently finished a book on the topic that is forthcoming from Princeton University Press. His first book Democracy from Above? Regional Organizations and Democratization (Cambridge University Press) examined how regional organizations can enhance or erode the prospects for democracy as well as democratic consolidation. He has also published articles in various political science and international relations journals. Jon Pevehouse will be presenting a paper co-authored with political science Phd Students Tim Hildebrandt, Courtney Hillebrecht, and Peter Holm.
Fernando Tesón is Tobias Simon Eminent Scholar and Professor of Law, Florida State University. Known for his scholarship relating political philosophy to international law, and in particular his defense of humanitarian intervention, Professor Tesón is author of Humanitarian Intervention: An Inquiry into Law and Morality (3rd ed. Transnational Publishers, 2005); Rational Choice and Democratic Deliberation (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming June 2006) [with Guido Pincione]; and A Philosophy of International Law (Westview Press 1998). Most recently he has defended the war in Iraq as humanitarian intervention, in "Ending Tyranny in Iraq,", 19 Ethics & International Affairs (2005). He has served as a Professor of Law and Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at Arizona State University, where he taught for 17 years prior to joining Florida State University's faculty. Before entering academia, Professor Tesón was a career diplomat for the Argentine Foreign Ministry in Buenos Aires for four years. He resigned from the Argentine foreign service to protest against the human rights abuses of the Argentine government. He has served as visiting professor at Cornell Law School, Indiana University School of Law, University of California Hastings College of Law, the Oxford-George Washington International Human Rights Program, and is Permanent Visiting Professor, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Ben Valentino is currently an Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. His work focuses on international security, especially the use of violence against civilian populations. Previously, he has held appointments including: Research Associate at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation, Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University, Postdoctoral Fellow at the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University, and Research Associate at the Center for Basic Research in the Social Sciences at Harvard University. Dr. Valentino received his Ph.D. in Political Science from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology in September 2000. His book, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century, was published by Cornell University Press in 2004.
Thomas G. Weiss is Presidential Professor of Political Science at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York and Director of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, where he is also co-director of the United Nations Intellectual History Project, and until recently was also editor of Global Governance and served as research director of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. He has written extensively about international organization, peace and security, humanitarian action, and development. His recent authored books include Ahead of the Curve? UN Ideas and Global Challenges (2001); The Responsibility To Protect: Research, Bibliography, and Background (2001); The United Nations and Changing World Politics (2004), 4th edition; Military-Civilian Interactions: Humanitarian Crises and the Responsibility to Protect (2005), 2nd edition; UN Voices: The Struggle for Development and Social Justice (2005); Sword & Salve: Confronting New Wars and Humanitarian Crises (2006); and Internal Displacement: Conceptualization and its Consequences (2006). Two recent edited volumes are Terrorism and the UN: Before and After September 11 (2004); and Wars on Terrorism and Iraq: Human Rights, Unilateralism, and U.S. Foreign Policy (2004). He is currently working on The UN and Global Governance: An Idea and its Prospects and is editing the Oxford Handbook on the United Nations and The Transformation of Humanitarianism?