Identity and Fanaticism
Monday 03 March, 2014
2:30 - 4:30pm, $0/Rsvp
New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute
247 East 82 Street, Young Auditorium
"I have specially in mind that a small but determined group, active in every nation, composed of individuals who, indifferent to social considerations and restraints, regard warfare, the manufacture and sale of arms, simply as an occasion to advance their personal interests and enlarge their personal authority.
"But recognition of this obvious fact is merely the first step towards an appreciation of the actual state of affairs. Another question follows hard upon it: how is it possible for this small clique to bend the will of the majority, who stand to lose and suffer......?"
--Einstein to Freud, Why War?
"...Here, I believe, we already have all the essentials: violence overcome by the transference of power to a larger unity, which is held together by emotional ties between its members."
--Freud to Einstein, Why War?
What are the processes and influences-e.g., biological, developmental, social-that transform individuals into members of a group? When is ethnic, religious, national or other group identity no longer affiliation, but fanaticism?
Participants:
Chip Gagnon is Associate Professor of Politics at Ithaca College, and a long-time Visiting Scholar at Cornell University's Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science, with a focus on International Relations, from Columbia University, where he also received certificates in Soviet/Russian Studies and East European Studies. He is author of numerous articles as well as The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s (Cornell University Press, 2004), which was the winner of the American Political Science Association's award for Best Book on European Politics and Society, and co-winner of the Council for European Study's Best First Book Award. More recently he co-edited a volume, Post-Conflict Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach (Routledge, forthcoming July 2014) based on a series of workshops he organized at Cornell University. His research has focused on violence that is framed as ethnic, in particular the ways in which such violence is often the result of an elite strategy of demobilization. A related research interest is the way in which elites construct threatening images of the outside world as a domestic political resource. Another research project focuses on the concept of religious missionary work as a way to understand democracy promotion and other secular forms of international intervention, focusing in particular on the Balkans.
Elise Giuliano is a political scientist at Columbia University where she teaches courses on secession and nationalism, Russian politics, and international relations. She is the academic advisor to graduate students at Columbia's Harriman Institute for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies.
Prof. Giuliano's research focuses on the intersection of politics and identity. Her book- Constructing Grievance: Ethnic Nationalism in Russia's Republics (Cornell University Press, 2011)-examines why some mass populations in Russia's ethnic republics supported nationalist separatism while others remained quiescent. In 2012 the book won the ENMISA Book Award of the International Studies Association for the best book published over the past two years in the study of the international politics of ethnicity, nationalism, or migration. Prof. Giuliano is currently researching the politics of blame following natural and man-made disasters in Russia.
After working as a consultant in Moscow and Novgorod for USAID on a privatization project in the 1990s, she conducted field research in Tatarstan, Russia as a Fulbright-Hays scholar. Prof. Giuliano has taught at the University of Miami and Barnard College. She currently serves on the Advisory Board of the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN) and is a member of the Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia (PONARS Eurasia).
Prof. Giuliano was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University, the University of Notre Dame, and Columbia University. She received a Ph.D. in Political Science and an M.A. in International Relations from the University of Chicago, and a B.A. in Russian Studies from the University of Pennsylvania.
Leora Kahn is founder and president of PROOF: Media for Social Justice. She works on global projects with Amnesty International and the United Nations. Her 2007 book Darfur: 20 years of War and Genocide has won several awards and an exhibition of this work is traveling in the US under the auspices of the Holocaust Museum of Houston. Her book, Child Soldiers, published in November 2008, features an introductory essay by Louis Moreno Ocampo, chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court. She curated an exhibition on child soldiers in collaboration with the UN's Office on Children and Armed Conflict. It has traveled to Rome, New York, Bonn, Vienna, Mexico City as well as the United States. Ms. Kahn's film credits include Rene and I, an award-winning documentary about the life an extraordinary woman who was experimented on by Josef Mengele during the Holocaust. She also co-produced Original Intent; a documentary that explores the judicial philosophy promoted by President George W. Bush and Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. She was director of photography at Workman Publishing and Corbis as well as working at the New York Times Magazine, Time magazine and numerous other publications.
She had been a fellow in the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University where she conducts research on rescuers and rescuing behavior. She lectures and teaches widely on topics in human rights and photography and transitional justice. She is a Fulbright Senior Specialist and recently taught at University of Haifa. She is fellow at the Adrienne de Rothschild/Columbia University and Cambridge University for social entrepreneurs that involve starting a network between Jews and Muslims.
Ms. Kahn's recent work has taken her to Rwanda, Cambodia and Bosnia where she has researched and interviewed rescuers from these genocides An exhibition comprised of photos and texts of these interviews is now traveling in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Cambodia as well as the United States, sponsored by the US State Department. She has developed a worldwide project on rape and transitional justice with partners, TRIAL and UNFPA.
Nathan Szajnberg is the Wallerstein Research Fellow in Psychoanalysis of the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, on the Faculty at New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and formerly Freud Professor of Psychoanalysis at the Hebrew University. He is the author or editor of four books and one novella: Educating the Emotions (on Bruno Bettelheim's ideas); Lives Across Time (with Henry Massie); Reluctant Warriors (the maturation and inner lives of elite Israeli soldiers) and Sheba and Solomon's Return: Ethiopian Children in Israel (the foundational study for this roundtable). He studied at the University of Chicago College and Medical School, where his teachers included Bruno Bettelheim and Saul Bellow. He graduated from the St. Louis Psychoanalytic Institute. He is a Training Analyst of the Israel Psychoanalytic Society and IPA.