Charles Asher Small
ISGAP Director and the Koret Distinguished Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University:
“The Need to Create Interdisciplinary Antisemitism Studies”
The lecture will provide an overview of the need to develop a high calibre interdisciplinary study of antisemitism; especially given the different phases of anti-Judaism and the role it played historically in Western civilization as well as within Christian and Islamic thought. Given the rapid rise of contemporary antisemitism as a social movement in some societies, which is occuring within the context of globalization, the need to examine this scourge will be explored.
Amichai Magen
Professor of the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy, and Strategy, The Interdisciplinary Center (IDC), Herzliya, Head of Politial Development at the International Institute for Counter Terrorism (ICT), IDC and Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University:
“The Crisis of Governance in the Middle East: Legal and Policy Challenges”
The onset of mass revolts in large parts of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in early 2011 raised global hopes that the Arab world was finally on the verge of an historic democratic transformation – a positive “Arab Spring”. Yet it also generated grave fears that the “old” Arab dictatorships would quickly be replaced by a “new” brand of religious authoritarianism – an “Islamist Winter” inimical to liberalism and modernity. Two years on reality is no less dramatic but it is far more complex. The MENA region is clealry in the midst of a profound crisis of governance; one that involves not only new dynamics of democratization and authoritarianism, but also state failure and the rise of Non-State Armed Groups (NSAG’s). These require Europe, Israel, and the United States to rethink core legal and policy principles in the contemporary international system.