the guy by the door …

With the ceasefire “holding”¹, it might be useful for a longer view:

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The Outreach Center at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Middle East Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School are announcing a panel that will address the recent events in Gaza.

Gaza In Context: Background and Prospects From the Current Crisis

Wednesday, January 21st
12 Noon – 1:30 pm
Harvard Kennedy School, Littauer Building, Room 280
79 JFK Street, Cambridge MA 02138 (click here for a map)

Speakers: Duncan Kennedy, Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence, Harvard Law School

Naz K. Modirzadeh, Senior Associate, International Humanitarian Law Research Initative, Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research, Harvard University

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[Photo: Wikmedia foundation.²]

Prof Duncan is one of the stars of Harvard’s legal left. I heard him give a paper – “Three Globalizations of Law and Legal Thought: 1850-2000” – at the Workshop on the Political Economy of Modern Capitalism. I am totally bereft of clue as to what he said. Egyptian Eyes tells me that it was a very hard paper. Hopefully, this talk will be human understandable and/or his colleagues and/or students will be able to translate and/or elaborate for him.³

I don’t know Prof Naz, but you can read his paper, Taking Islamic Law Seriously: INGOs and the Battle for Muslim Hearts and Minds for The Harvard Human Rights Journal.

¹In the war biz, a ceasefire “holding” doesn’t mean “nobody dying.” There are, of course always deaths due to unrelated causes. There are deaths due to “holdover effects” like children killed playing with unexploded munitions. And there are always “isolated incidents” that lead to a “small’ number of deaths – relatively speaking. The calculus of ceasefire compliance ignores the first two categories and indicates “holding” if the third category is “negligible”.

²I tried to take his picture for Wikipedia. He may have questions about the political economy of Wikipedia, but they can be ignored because nobody has really worked it out with any richness of detail. It’s a cheap way to reach some unknown number of people. But being miffed about Cambridge’s other village idiot badgering him for free legal advice makes more sense. Especially since he was represented by one of Prof. Duncan’s graduates who is known to be able to speak human.

³my snarkiness notwithstanding. But seriously folks, communication between the legal left and the artsy fartsy left could be, it seems to me, better. I am part of the later and a bit self snarky.