Newsroom

Diplomat in Residence Frederic Hof Says 2012 Mediation Provides Roadmap for Revived Lebanon-Israel Talks on Maritime Separation Line in the Mediterranean

“Today, the Lebanese seem motivated to reach an agreement that would calm the nerves of international energy companies, spur exploration and eventually produce significant revenue for a broken economy. Israel should be prepared to accept the outcome it accepted in 2012,” writes Hof, who led the US mediation effort from late 2010 until November 2012. “It would not be advisable for Israelis, Lebanese or Americans to ignore altogether the results produced in 2012 by an intensive, good-faith mediation.”

Simon Gilhooley on Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court Confirmation and Tracing the Origins of “Originalism” to Slavery

“At the core is a fundamentally conservative effort to limit the possibilities of our constitutional order to the imagination of historical figures from the 18th century, many of whom believed in freedoms of religion, assembly and speech, but also in the existence of a natural aristocracy, chattel slavery and a rigid racial hierarchy,” writes Professor Gilhooly. “Until we acknowledge this ‘origin’ of originalism in defenses of slavery, we are ill equipped to imagine a constitutional order that transcends our society’s history of racial injustice.”

Samantha Rose Hill on Hannah Arendt’s Beliefs about Loneliness, Ideology, and Totalitarianism

“Totalitarianism uses isolation to deprive people of human companionship, making action in the world impossible, while destroying the space of solitude,” writes Hill in Aeon. “The iron-band of totalitarianism, as Arendt calls it, destroys man’s ability to move, to act, and to think, while turning each individual in his lonely isolation against all others, and himself. The world becomes a wilderness, where neither experience nor thinking are possible.”

More News

Opinion: Roger Berkowitz on the Information Collapse of the Trump Era

Opinion: Roger Berkowitz on the Information Collapse of the Trump Era

“Our infatuation with images and our flight from the real world is all around us. The President lied about the size of the crowds at his inauguration. He lied to the American people about the coronavirus. He is now lying about the threat of voter fraud,” writes Berkowitz. “The end goal of lying as a way of life is not that the lies are believed, but the cementing of cynicism. When cynicism reigns, not only is everything permitted but also everything is possible. Cynicism is the fertile ground in which power grows unstoppable absent the constraints of reality.”

Read More in LitHub

Post Date: 10-18-2020

Interview: Bard’s Sanjib Baruah Discusses India’s Complex Relationship with Its Northeastern Borderlands, the Subject of His Recent Book In the Name of the Nation

Interview: Bard’s Sanjib Baruah Discusses India’s Complex Relationship with Its Northeastern Borderlands, the Subject of His Recent Book In the Name of the Nation

“When you work on a region like Northeast India you are constantly reminded of the problematic nature of the nation state as a political institution. You understand why political formations before the advent of the nation state did not try to make political boundaries coincide with cultural or ethnic boundaries. Only state formations that allow significant decentralization of political authority could be expected to accommodate Northeast India’s ethno-cultural diversity and its colonial inheritance of layered and uneven sovereignty. Unfortunately, the trend in India in recent years has been towards more and more centralization. Perhaps there is something inherent in the logic of the nation state that pushes centralization and valorizes internal homogeneity. But the effort to exercise centralized control in such a context can only generate new conflicts.”

Full story in Vital Interests

Post Date: 10-13-2020

India and Its Northeast: An Interview with Sanjib Baruah, Professor of Political Studies

India and Its Northeast: An Interview with Sanjib Baruah, Professor of Political Studies

Sanjib Baruah’s new book In the Name of the Nation: India and Its Northeast, published in 2020 by Stanford University Press, takes the history of the troubled relationship between India and its Northeast “as a vantage point to reflect on how the generalization of the territorially circumscribed nation-form, and of the sovereignty of the nation-state, has played out since decolonization.” In doing so, Baruah develops a sketch of how these political forms—seemingly inevitable—are actually “highly contingent artifacts.”

Read the Interview in Borderlines

Post Date: 08-26-2020

Bard’s Omar Encarnación on the Real Reason the U.S. Lags on LGBTQ Rights

Bard’s Omar Encarnación on the Real Reason the U.S. Lags on LGBTQ Rights

Professor of Political Studies Omar G. Encarnación writes for Foreign Policy magazine in response to last week's historic Supreme Court ruling extending the 1964 Civil Rights Act to LGBTQ people. Professor Encarnación examines the foreign experience to try to find answers for why advances in LGBTQ rights are so difficult in our country.

Read the Story in Foreign Policy

Post Date: 06-22-2020

George Floyd Protests Draw Attention to How Little Has Changed on Race and Justice, Writes Professor Sanjib Baruah

George Floyd Protests Draw Attention to How Little Has Changed on Race and Justice, Writes Professor Sanjib Baruah

“In India, critics have legitimately called out the hypocrisy of elites who express digital solidarity with American protesters but ignore police violence and racial prejudice at home,” writes Sanjib Baruah, Professor of Political Studies at Bard College, for the Indian Express. Baruah examines the uprising in the U.S. and the response in India in the context of a global history of racial thinking and the ideology of racial hierarchy.

Full Story in the Indian Express

Post Date: 06-20-2020

Political Studies Professor Omar G. Encarnación on Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and the Resiliency of Right-Wing Populism During the Coronavirus Pandemic

Political Studies Professor Omar G. Encarnación on Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and the Resiliency of Right-Wing Populism During the Coronavirus Pandemic

“Around the world, right-wing populist leaders are exploiting the pandemic for their own political benefits . . . In Bolsonaro’s case, the pandemic is providing him with a golden opportunity to remind the public of one of the things that got him elected in the first place: his law-and-order background (he was a parachutist in the Brazilian Army) and affection for the military,” writes Encarnación in Foreign Policy. “Since the crisis erupted, Bolsonaro has brazenly encouraged the militarization of the government by, among other things, expanding the powers of the generals in his administration beyond the confines of military affairs and by amplifying calls for a military takeover at rallies where he has been in attendance.”

Full Story in Foreign Policy

Post Date: 05-28-2020

Political Studies Events

10/30
Friday

Thursday, October 29, 2020
CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art Marking one week prior to the presidential election and flying until the votes have been counted and the election results are ratified, CCS Bard will present Flag, 2005, by Frank Benson. Flag was first flown at CCS Bard in 2005 as part of an exhibition titled Uncertain States of America. Fifteen years later, the echoes of that title reverberate through our media as well as our psyches. Hoisting Flag at this time, on the 50-ft. pole at the entrance to the Center for Curatorial Studies and Hessel Museum of Art, provides a visual representation of the distorted and perilous period in which we live, as the nation struggles through several simultaneous crises and hurtles toward the most consequential election of our lives.

CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art

2020

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

Tuesday, October 27, 2020

Thursday, October 22, 2020

Wednesday, October 7, 2020

Friday, October 2, 2020

Thursday, October 1, 2020

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

Thursday, September 24, 2020

Friday, September 18, 2020

Monday, March 9, 2020

Thursday, March 5, 2020

Friday, February 21, 2020

Neil Roberts; Associate Professor of Africana Studies, Political Theory, and the Philosophy of Religion at Williams College
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm EDT/GMT-4
His talk features pieces of his latest book project that examines what it means to live free, the challenges of genres of pessimism, and finally provides a way forward for the pessimistic.
Neil Roberts received a B.A. in Afro-American Studies and Law & Public Policy from Brown University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago with a specialization in political theory. A high school teacher, debate coach, and NCAA Division 1 soccer player prior to graduate school, Roberts is the recipient of fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation as well as a member of the Caribbean Philosophical Association Board of Directors.

His present writings deal with the intersections of Caribbean, Continental, and North American political theory with respect to theorizing the concepts of freedom and agency. Roberts is co-editor of both the CAS Working Papers in Africana Studies Series (with Ben Vinson) and a collection of essays (with Jane Anna Gordon) on the theme Creolizing Rousseau (2015), and he is the guest editor of a Theory & Event symposium on the Trayvon Martin case. In addition to being on the Executive Editorial Board of the journal Political Theory and former Chair of CPA Publishing Partnerships that includes The C.L.R. James Journal and books with Rowman and Littlefield International, he is author of the award-winning book Freedom as Marronage (University of Chicago Press, 2015) and the collaborative work Journeys in Caribbean Thought (2016). His most recent book is A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass (2018) from The University Press of Kentucky. Roberts served as President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association from 2016 to December 2019. Since July 2018, he has been the W. Ford Schumann Faculty Fellow in Democratic Studies.

Newsroom

Diplomat in Residence Frederic Hof Says 2012 Mediation Provides Roadmap for Revived Lebanon-Israel Talks on Maritime Separation Line in the Mediterranean

Diplomat in Residence Frederic Hof Says 2012 Mediation Provides Roadmap for Revived Lebanon-Israel Talks on Maritime Separation Line in the Mediterranean

Simon Gilhooley on Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court Confirmation and Tracing the Origins of “Originalism” to Slavery

Simon Gilhooley on Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court Confirmation and Tracing the Origins of “Originalism” to Slavery

Samantha Rose Hill on Hannah Arendt’s Beliefs about Loneliness, Ideology, and Totalitarianism

Samantha Rose Hill on Hannah Arendt’s Beliefs about Loneliness, Ideology, and Totalitarianism

Opinion: Roger Berkowitz on the Information Collapse of the Trump Era

Interview: Bard’s Sanjib Baruah Discusses India’s Complex Relationship with Its Northeastern Borderlands, the Subject of His Recent Book In the Name of the Nation

India and Its Northeast: An Interview with Sanjib Baruah, Professor of Political Studies

Bard’s Omar Encarnación on the Real Reason the U.S. Lags on LGBTQ Rights

George Floyd Protests Draw Attention to How Little Has Changed on Race and Justice, Writes Professor Sanjib Baruah

Political Studies Professor Omar G. Encarnación on Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and the Resiliency of Right-Wing Populism During the Coronavirus Pandemic

Political Studies Events

2020

Political Studies Resources