Current Events:

Nobel Prize Winner Joseph Stiglitz on The Three Trillion Dollar War BCICS is pleased to announce that Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz will be speaking on campus about his new book, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict. The event, co-sponsored by the Kellogg School of Management, will be held Friday, April 18th in the Tribune Audi­torium at the Allen Center starting at 9:00 am. Joseph E. Stiglitz is University Professor at Columbia University in New York and Chair of Columbia University’s Committee on Global Thought. In 2001, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for his analyses of markets with asymmetric information. Stiglitz was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers from 1993-95, during the Clinton administration, and served as CEA chairman from 1995-97. He then became Chief Economist and Senior Vice-President of the World Bank from 1997-2000.     Dr. Stiglitz is the author of numerous books on economics and international trade, including the bestsell­ing Globalization and Its Discontents. In his newest book Stiglitz and Harvard co-author Linda J. Bilmes explore the hidden costs of the Iraq war, including the accelerated depreciation of our nation’s military equipment, health care and disability compensation for returning veterans, and the negative effects of the war on the U.S. and global economies. Please join us for what is sure to be a provocative and sobering account of the true financial and human costs of the Iraq war. This event is free and open to the public. For more details please contact us at BCICS at 847-467-2770.

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BCICS presents:
Torture in the Era of Democracy

Following the success and well-deserved attention enjoyed by the Torture in the Era of Democracy speaker series, BCICS will host another timely event on the tenth anniversary of the opening of Tamms Correctional Center (Southern Illinois’ Supermax prison).

“We believe that Tamms has been open ten years too long,” said Lau­rie Jo Reynolds of the Tamms Year Ten Campaign. “Taxpayers deserve to know that the most expensive adult prison in Illinois is torturing its inmates. We want to see legislation to end the torture of prisoners in Illinois.”

Tamms Closed Maximum Security Prison opened in March of 1998. Prisoners are held in permanent solitary confinement and experience extreme sensory deprivation and social isolation. Housing a prisoner at Tamms costs nearly twice as much as any other adult prison in Illinois and there is growing concern about the public safety impact of housing prisoners in conditions that provoke mental illness.

Jean Maclean Snyder, a lawyer with the MacArthur Justice Center of the University of Chicago Law School and Reginald Akkeem Berry, a former Tamms prisoner, will discuss conditions inside Tamms, Stephen Eisenman, associate professor of art history at Northwestern, will moder­ate this discussion at BCICS’s Conference Room on April 29th at 4:00 pm.

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BCICS Presents :: Thu 10/04 : 5:00 – 6:30 p.m.
Amy Wendling, Department of Philosophy, Creighton University
“New Directions for Interpreting Marx's Work”

The publication history of Marx’s texts is bizarre, subject to more than a scholar’s usual share of political vicissitudes. Because of this, the bulk of Marx’s original manuscripts are in not in London, Berlin, or Moscow, but at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. In the past, a lack of interest in or even disdain for the works of Marx in English-language scholarship, coupled with the study of a highly selected and edited portion of his texts, has been one of the lingering consequences of the Cold War. Under Stalinist publishing norms, a deification of certain of Marxist notions that were politically expedient led to the suppression of scholarly editions of Marx’s works. We continue to suffer from the long-term consequences of such hostility, and the thinker and his philosophical legacy threaten to disappear under the weight of accumulated political baggage. Thankfully, this is changing. Drawing on archival discoveries and the new international editions of Marx’s works founded in 1989, I describe some of the most promising new directions in Marx scholarship both here and abroad. I will touch on value theory debates, the importance of Marx’s theory of technology, the new understanding of the philosophical importance of his later work, and the global contributions to understanding this work that have come from Asian and Latin-American scholars.

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BCICS Presents : Mon 10/08 : Noon – 1:00 p.m.
Boris Kagarlitsky, Director of the Institute of Globalisation and Social Movements
“Russia: the End of Stability?”
Ripton Room, Scott Hall 201, 601 University Place

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 BCICS and Political Science Department : Friday 10/26 – Saturday 10/27  
Conference: “Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power in Historical Institutionalism”
Location TBA

 
BCICS Presents :: Tue 11/06 : 5:00 – 6:30 p.m.
Cass Sunstein, University of Chicago School of Law
“REPUBLIC.COM 2.0”

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PREVIOUS EVENTS:

BCICS Presents :: Tue 03/27 : Noon – 1:30 p.m.
Francois Grignon, Africa Program Director for the International Crisis Group
"The Challenges of Peace-Building: the Congo and Beyond"

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Political Science Department and BCICS Present :: Fri 03/30 3:30 – 4:30 p.m.
Bruno Palier, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) Researcher
"The Politics of Welfare Reform in Bismarckian-Continental European Countries"
Ripton Room, Scott Hall, 601 University Place

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Political Science Department and BCICS:: Mon 04/24 : Noon– 1:30 p.m.
Lucio Baccaro, Institute for Work and Employment Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Political Economy of Social Concertation"

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BCICS and Radio Television and Film Department :: Sun 05/06 : 2:00 – 4:30 p.m.
Symposium on Iranian-British Filmmaker- Ebrahim Golestan
"Film Screening and Discussion : The House is Black”
Northwestern University Block Cinema, 40 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston

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"After Hegemony?" 
Perry Anderson, Professor of History and Sociology, UCLA
Tuesday, May 15 :: 5:00 pm
please note change of location : Lower Level Conference Room, Chambers Hall (600 Foster - Corner of Foster and Sheridan Road)

The concept of 'hegemony' is one of the key political terms of the past 100 years, but has rarely been considered systematically, either as a theoretical concept or as an instrument of comparative history. The lecture will look at four distinct traditions of thought that have used the term: Russian, Italian, German and American, and at their different fields - internal, international, global - of application. Employing this framework, it will discuss the emergent configuration of inter-state power, and the current world conjuncture in the light of the longer-term perspective it affords.

Perry Anderson has been Professor of History and Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles from 1988 to the present. He has served as the Editor of New Left Review during : 1962-1982 and 2000-2003. He has written a number of important books, including: Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, Lineages of the Absolutist State, The Origins of Postmodernity, A Zone of Engagement, and Spectrum: From Right to Left in the World of Ideas.

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BCICS Presents :: Mon 05/21 : Noon - 1:30 p.m.
"A Turkish Merchant in Venice: Encounters in the Early Modern Mediterranean World"
Suraiya Faroqhi, Professor of History, University of Munich
BCICS Building, 1902 Sheridan Road

Professor Suraiya Faroqhi is an internationally renown historian of the Ottoman empire and Turkey and the author of more than one hundred articles and twenty books in English, German and Turkish like, Towns and Townsmen in Anatolia, Approaching Ottoman History, Subjects of the Sultans: Culture and Everyday Life in the Ottoman Empire, Der Bektaschi-Orden in Anatolien,... . She has contributed greatly to the development of Ottoman history and historiography as well as the history of Ottoman cities, trade, pilgrimage, Ottoman women, material culture, food and festivities based on the exploration of the rich Ottoman archives, unique in the world.

She will speak about commercial and cultural encounters between Venetians and Turks in the diverse landscape of the Mediterranean port-cities during the early modern period. Please join us for a lecture and luncheon at 12 noon on May 21st at BCICS (1902 Sheridan Rd). For more information, you may contact Fariba Zarinebafat at : zarinebaf@northwestern.edu or Rita Koryan at r-koryan@northwestern.edu (847) 467-2770.

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Previous Events:

BCICS Presents : CRITICAL APPROACHES TO SECURITY IN EUROPE (pdf format)
February 26, 5:00 p.m., BCICS Building, 1902 Sheridan Road
"Globalized (in)Security: the Field and the Ban-opticon" (pdf format)
Didier Bigo, Professor of International Relations, Scienes-Po Paris, France

Didier Bigo is Professor of International relations (maitre de conférences des universités), at Sciences-Po Paris, Researcher at CERI/FNSP. He is visiting professor at King’s College London department of War studies for 3 years
He is the co-editor with Rob Walker of the new ISA journal International Political Sociology, published by Blackwell.
He is the scientific coordinator of the 6PCRD (CHALLENGE) http://www.libertysecurity.org .
He is also the director of the Center for study of conflict and the editor of the quarterly journal "Cultures & Conflits" published by l'Harmattan and edited once a year in Alternatives (Lynne Rienner ed). http://www.conflits.org
He has published different articles on the field of sociology of mobilisation and conflict, sociology of polices and armies at the european level, IR theory. His main focus is the relationship between conflict and security (external as well as internal) issues and the analysis of the transformation of political violence.
His recent publications include:

• "Security, Exception, Ban and Surveillance", in David Lyon, Theorizing Surveillance, the Panopticon and Beyond, Willan Publishing, 2006, pp. 46-68 ouvrage collectif
• Didier Bigo, Anastasia Tsoukala (dir) : Illiberal practices of liberal regimes, the (in)security games. L harmattan, Cultures and Conflicts, a multilingual collection 2006
• Didier Bigo, Elspeth Guild (dir) : Controlling frontiers: free movement into and within Europe, Ashgate, April 2005, 300p

"Decoupled from History: North Korea in the Axis of Evil"
Bruce Cumings, History, University of Chicago
Tuesday January 23 - Noon, CICS Building