“Confronting Evil: Interdisciplinary Perspectives” Conference to be held at Harvard

The Program on Negotiation is pleased to co-present  “Confronting Evil: Interdisciplinary Perspectives,” a two-day conference which will bring together leading scholars to discuss the conceptual and practical dimensions of evil.   Topics to be addressed include: the concept and rhetoric of evil, the psychology of evil, witnessing evil in world affairs, and responding to evil.

Professor Robert H. Mnookin, Samuel Williston Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and Chair of PON, will moderate the final panel on “Responding to Evil: Should We Bargain with the Devil?”    Professor Gabriella Blum, a member of the Executive Committee for PON and the Rita E. Hauser Professor of Human Rights at Harvard Law School, will participate in the same panel.

Also presenting at the conference is Max Bazerman,  a member of the PON Executive Committee and the Jesse Isidor Straus Professor at the Harvard Business School.  Professor Bazerman will participate in the panel on “The Psychology of Evil: Cognitive, Behavioral, and Social Implications.”  Linn Normand, a former Graduate Research Fellow at PON who recently received her PhD from Oxford University in England, will join the panel on “Witnessing Evil in World Affairs: From Everyday Evils to Extraordinary Crimes.”

The conference will be held on the Harvard campus from April 19-20th, and is being co-sponsored by PON, the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University and the Volkswagen Foundation.

The event is free and open to the public, and no advanced registration is required.

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Conference Schedule:

FRIDAY, APRIL 19, Emerson Hall, Room 105

4:00 p.m. OPENING REMARKS: Wilhelm Krull, Homi Bhabha, Robert Mnookin

4:30 p.m.  The Concept and Rhetoric of Evil
Chair: Homi Bhabha
Panelists: Peter-André Alt, Avishai Margalit, Susan Neiman, and Elaine Pagels

 

SATURDAY, APRIL 20, Emerson Hall, Room 210

9:00 a.m. The Psychology of Evil: Cognitive, Behavioral, and Social Implications
Chair:  Mahzarin Banaji
Panelists: Max Bazerman, Joshua Greene, and Lee Ross

11:10 a.m. Witnessing Evil in World Affairs: From Everyday Evils to Extraordinary Crimes
Chair: Jacqueline Bhabha
Panelists: Gazmend Kapllani, Linn Normand, and Richard Shweder

2:30 p.m. Responding to Evil: Should We Bargain with the Devil?
Chair: Robert Mnookin
Panelists: Gabriella Blum, Charles Cogan, Philip Heymann, and Luis Moreno-Ocampo

5:00 p.m. Closing Reception

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Speakers Bios:

Peter-André Alt took office as the seventh president of Freie Universität Berlin in June 2010. Professor Alt, a Berlin native, studied German language and literature, political science, history, and philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin. He earned his doctorate in 1984 and completed the habilitation process in 1993. Since 1995, Alt has been a full professor of German language and literature, first at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (1995 – 2002), then at the University of Würzburg (2002 –2005), and since 2005 at Freie Universität Berlin. Alt has published numerous books on the literary culture of the 17th, 18th, and 20th centuries, including works on the aesthetics of evil, the literary and cultural history of dreams, the Enlightenment, Friedrich Schiller and Franz Kafka. From 2007 to 2009, Alt served as the Dean of the Department of Philosophy and Humanities, and from 2007 to 2010 he was a member of the Academic Senate of Freie Universität. He was the spokesperson for the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies from 2007 until 2010 and has been the Director of the Dahlem Research School since 2008. Alt is President of the German Schiller Society and Vice-Chairman of German U15, a newly founded association of leading German research universities.

Mahzarin Banaji taught at Yale University from 1986-2002 where she was Reuben Post Halleck Professor of Psychology.  Since then and at present she is Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University and simultaneously George A. and Helen Dunham Cowan Chair in Human Dynamics at the Santa Fe Institute (2011-2014). She also served as the first Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard from 2002-2008.  In 2005, Banaji was elected fellow of the Society for Experimental Psychologists, in 2008 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2009 was named Herbert A. Simon Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. She is also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Psychological Science (of which she was President). For her teaching Banaji received Yale’s Lex Hixon Prize for Teaching Excellence.  For her research she has been awarded a James McKeen Cattell Award, the Morton Deutsch Award for Social Justice, and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the Santa Fe Institute. Her work has been recognized by the Gordon Allport Prize for Intergroup Relations, and her career contributions by a Presidential Citation from the American Psychological Association and the Carol and Ed Diener Award for Outstanding Contributions to Social Psychology.

Max Bazerman is the Jesse Isidor Straus Professor at the Harvard Business School.  In addition, he is formally affiliated with the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, the Psychology Department, and the Program on Negotiation.  He is the author, co-author, or co-editor of nineteen books (including Blind Spots, co-authored with Ann Tenbrunsel, Princeton University Press, 2011) and over 200 research articles and chapters. Bazerman’s awards include a 2006 honorary doctorate from the University of London (London Business School), the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Aspen Institute, being named as one of Ethisphere’s 100 Most Influential in Business Ethics, one of Daily Kos’ Heroes from the Bush Era for going public about how the Bush Administration corrupted the RICO Tobacco trial, and the 2008 Distinguished Educator Award from the Academy of Management.

Homi K. Bhabha is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities, Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center, and Senior Advisor to the President and Provost at Harvard University. He is a leading cultural and literary theorist and the author of numerous works exploring postcolonial theory, cultural change and power, cosmopolitanism, human rights, and various other themes. His seminal work, The Location of Culture, presents a theory of cultural hybridity to understand the connections between colonialism and globalization. Bhabha is a Trustee of the UNESCO World Report on Cultural Diversity, a member of the Steering Committee of the Aga Khan Architectural Prize, and has served as Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Human Rights.  He serves on the advisory boards of the Man Asian Literary Prize, the Indo-US Commission on Museums and Culture, the German Research Foundation, and the Graduate School of North American Studies and the International Research Center “Interweaving Performance Cultures” at Free University Berlin. He received honorary degrees from Université Paris 8, University College London, and Free University Berlin. In 2012 he was conferred the Government of India’s Padma Bhushan Presidential Award in the field of literature and education.

Jacqueline Bhabha is FXB Director of Research, Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health, the Jeremiah Smith Jr. Lecturer in Law at Harvard Law School, the Director of the Harvard University Committee on Human Rights Studies, and a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.  She received a first class honors degree and an M.Sc. from Oxford University, and a J.D. from the College of Law in London. From 1997 to 2001, Bhabha directed the Human Rights Program at the University of Chicago.  Prior to 1997, she was a practicing human rights lawyer in London and at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.  She has published extensively on issues of transnational child migration, refugee protection, children’s rights and citizenship. She is the editor of Children Without A State (2011) and author of Moving Children: Child Migration in the 21st Century (2012).  Her current edited volume, Coming of Age: Reframing the Approach to Adolescent Rights, will be published in the fall of 2013.  Bhabha serves on the board of the Scholars at Risk Network, the World Peace Foundation and the Journal of Refugee Studies.  She is also a founder of the Alba Collective, an international women’s NGO currently working with rural women and girls in developing countries to enhance financial security and youth rights.

Gabriella Blum is the Rita E. Hauser Professor of Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law at Harvard Law School, and Co-Director of the HLS-Brookings Project on Law and Security. Following her studies of law and economics at Tel-Aviv University, Blum joined the Israel Defense Forces, and served as a senior legal advisor in the International Law Department, Military Advocate General’s Corps. During her military service, she was involved in the Israeli-Arab peace negotiations, Israeli strategic cooperation with foreign forces, and the administration of the Palestinian occupied territories. After completing the L.L.M. and SJD degrees at Harvard, she returned to the IDF, and then joined the Israeli National Security Council, Prime Minister’s Office, as a strategy advisor. In 2005, she returned to Harvard to join the Law School faculty. Blum is the author of Islands of Agreement: Managing Enduring Armed Rivalries (Harvard University Press, 2007), and of the co-authored book (with Philip Heymann), Laws, Outlaws, and Terrorists: Lessons from the War on Terrorism (MIT Press), as well as of several journal articles on international law and the laws of war.

Charles G. Cogan is an Associate at the Harvard Kennedy School. A graduate of Harvard, then a journalist, and then a military officer, he spent 37 years in the Central Intelligence Agency, 23 of them on assignments overseas.  From August 1979 to August 1984, he was chief of the Near East South Asia Division in the Directorate of Operations. From September 1984 to September 1989, he was CIA Chief in Paris. After leaving the CIA, he earned a doctorate in public administration at Harvard, in June 1992. His fifth book, French Negotiating Behavior: Dealing with “La Grande Nation” (United States Institute of Peace Press, 2003), was published as part of USIP’s “Cross-Cultural Negotiations Project.” A French-language version, with an update, is entitled, Diplomatie à la française (Éditions Jacob-Duvernet, 2005).  In recognition of the latter work, he was awarded in November 2006 the Prix Ernest Lémonon of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences of the Institut de France. In 2007, he was made an officer in the Légion d’Honneur.

Joshua D. Greene is the John and Ruth Hazel Associate Professor of the Social Sciences and the Director of the Moral Cognition Laboratory in the Department of Psychology, Harvard University.  He studies the psychology and neuroscience of morality, focusing on the interplay between emotion and reasoning in moral decision-making. His broader interests cluster around the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience.  Greene’s publications have appeared in Science, Nature, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the MacArthur Foundation. In 2012 he was awarded the Stanton Prize by the Society for Philosophy and Psychology. He is the author of the forthcoming book Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them (Penguin, Fall 2013).

Philip Heymann is currently the James Barr Ames Professor of Law and Director of the International Center for Criminal Justice at the Harvard Law School. At the U.S. Department of Justice he was Assistant to the Solicitor General, Assistant U.S. Attorney General in charge of the Criminal Division (1978-81) and Deputy Attorney General (1993-94).  At the U.S. Department of State he was Acting Administrator of the Bureau of Security and Consular Affairs, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of International Organizations, and Executive Assistant to the Undersecretary of State (1965-69). Among the many articles and books he has written, Heymann is the author of four books on combating terrorism: Terrorism and America; Terrorism (MIT Press, 2000), Freedom and Security (MIT Press, 2003); with co-author Juliette Kayyem, Protecting Liberty in an Age of Terror (MIT Press, 2005).  He is also the author of the Politics of Public Management (Yale University Press, 1987), Living the Policy Process (Oxford University Press, 2008), and Laws, Outlaws, and Terrorists (MIT Press, 2010) with co-author Gabriella Blum.

Gazmend Kapllani is an Albanian-born novelist and journalist, and currently a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.  His novel,  A Short Border Handbook (2009), a best-seller in Greece, was translated into Danish, English, French, and Polish, and was short-listed for the John D. Criticos Prize. My Name is Europe ( 2010) and The  Last Page (2012) explore how totalitarianism, immigration, borders, and Balkan history have shaped private lives and narratives.  For the past 20 years, he has lived in Athens and written in Greek. Kapllani received his Ph.D. in political science and history from Panteion University in Athens.  As a columnist for leading Greek newspapers, Kapllani has been an advocate for human rights. At Radcliffe, Kapllani is working on a novel focusing on the parallel lives of two important protagonists in modern Albanian history: the communist dictator Enver Hoxha and Albania’s first female writer, Musine Kokalari, who was exiled and imprisoned by Hoxha’s regime.  He will be teaching at Emerson College next year.

Dr. Wilhelm Krull is the Secretary General of the Volkswagen Foundation, which is located in Hanover, Germany. He is a member of the Board of the Governing Council of the European Foundation Centre and the Chairman of the Board of the German Bundesverband Deutscher Stiftungen.  From 2003 to 2005, he was Chairman of the Hague Club of major European foundations. He has been and still is a member of numerous advisory committees and governing boards of universities, Max Planck institutes, academies, and research organizations. At the European level, he chaired expert panels on benchmarking of scientific and technological productivity, as well as on monitoring and evaluating the EU Framework Programme. He was also strongly involved in successive expert panels of the European Science Foundation, as well as the Council of Ministers preparing the concept for establishing the European Research Council. Presently, he is a member of the Research, Innovation, and Enterprise Council of Singapore and of the International Advisory Board of the University of Helsinki.

Avishai Margalit is Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is a member of Israel Arts and Science Academy. Margalit was the George F. Kennan Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton from 2006 to 2011. He was awarded the Spinoza Lens Prize in 2001, the Emet prize in 2007, Israel prize in 2010, Leopold Lucas Prize in 2011, the Ernst Bloch Prize in 2012, and the Philosophical Book Award in 2012 by Forschungsinstitut für Philosophie Hannover for his most recent book: On Compromises and Rotten Compromises. Margalit’s books include: Idolatry (jointly with Moshe Halbertal) (Harvard University Press, 1992); The Decent Society (Harvard University Press, 1996); Views in Review: Politics and Culture in the State of the Jews (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998); The Ethics of Memory (Harvard University Press, 2002); Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (with Ian Buruma) (Penguin, 2004); and On Compromise and Rotten Compromises (Princeton University Press, 2010). Margalit is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.

Robert H. Mnookin is the Samuel Williston Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, the Chair of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, and the Director of the Harvard Negotiation Research Project.  A leading scholar in the field of conflict resolution, Mnookin has applied his interdisciplinary approach to negotiation and conflict resolution to a wide range of problems, both public and private. A renowned teacher and lecturer, Mnookin has taught numerous workshops for corporations, governmental agencies, and law firms throughout the world and trained many executives and professionals in negotiation and mediation skills. On behalf of the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva, he designed and has taught annual workshops for intellectual property professionals. Mnookin has served as a consultant to governments, international agencies, major corporations, and law firms. As a neutral arbitrator or mediator, he has resolved numerous complex commercial disputes. Mnookin has written or edited ten books and numerous scholarly articles. These include Beyond Winning: Negotiating to Create Value in Deals and Disputes, and Dividing the Child.  In his most recent book, Bargaining with the Devil:  When to Negotiate, When to Fight, he explores how to make decisions in the most challenging disputes.

Luis Moreno-Ocampo was the first Prosecutor (June 2003- June 2012) of the new and permanent International Criminal Court. The Court is based at The Hague, The Netherlands, and is following the path opened by the Nuremberg trial. As Prosecutor, Moreno-Ocampo was involved in the twenty most serious crises of the last years, including Iraq, Korea, Afghanistan, and Palestine, and briefed the UN Security Council eighteen times. He conducted investigations of crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide allegedly committed by thirty leaders from seven different countries. The list includes Muammar Gaddafi for crimes against humanity committed in Libya; the President of the Sudan Omar Al Bashir for genocide in Darfur; the former President of Ivory Coast Laurent Gbagbo, who is in a Dutch prison awaiting his judicial appearance; and the former Vice President of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Jean Pierre Bemba, who is on trial.

Susan Neiman is Director of the Einstein Forum, Potsdam. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Neiman studied Philosophy at Harvard and the Freie Universität Berlin, receiving her Ph.D. from Harvard in 1986. Before becoming Director of the Einstein Forum in 2000, she was Associate Professor of Philosophy at Yale (1989-1996) and Tel Aviv University (1996-2000). Neiman’s work centers on moral and political philosophy and on the history of modern philosophy. She is also a political and cultural commentator whose essays have appeared in The New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and other journals. Her books are: Slow Fire: Jewish Notes from Berlin (1992); The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant (1994); Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (2002); Zum Glück (Co-ed., 2004); Fremde sehen anders. Zur Lage der Bundesrepublik (2005); and Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists (2008).

Linn Normand completed her BA degree in Social and Political Sciences at the University of Cambridge followed by a year as a Herchel Smith Scholar at Harvard University. She obtained her MPhil degree in International Relations at the University of Oxford, where she stayed on to pursue her doctorate. Her doctoral thesis investigates the phenomenon of demonization in international politics. Her case study is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2010-2011, she was awarded the Program on Negotiation graduate research fellowship at the Harvard Law School, where her research focused on the role that hostile perceptions of the opponent play in constraining diplomatic attempts at conflict resolution and negotiation. She recently defended her Ph.D. thesis in Oxford and now lives in Davis, California.

Elaine Pagels is best known for research and publication involving a cache of over fifty ancient Greek texts discovered translated into Coptic in Upper Egypt in 1945. After completing her doctorate at Harvard University she participated with an international team of scholars to edit, translate, and publish several of these texts. After publishing two monographs and several scholarly articles, she wrote The Gnostic Gospels, which won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Then, having received a MacArthur Prize Fellowship, she joined the faculty at Princeton University in 1982 as the Harrington Professor of History of Religion, where she now teaches and engages in research.  Besides continuing to write scholarly articles, she has published other books accessible to a wider audience, including Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (Random House, 1988), which explores how various Jewish and Christian readings of the Genesis accounts (c. 50-400 CE)  articulate a wide range of attitudes toward sexuality and politics; The Origin of Satan: How Christians Came to Demonize Jews, Pagans, and Heretics (Random House, 1995); Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (Random House, 2003) and most recently, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation (Viking Penguin, 2012).

Lee Ross, a professor of psychology at Stanford University since 1969, teaches courses in the application of social psychology to bargaining, negotiation, conflict resolution, and broader public policy issues. He is a co-founder of the Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation and the co-author (with Richard Nisbett) of the books Human Inference and The Person and Situation, as well as nearly 100 journal articles and book chapters. In 1994 Ross was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; in 2003 he was named the American Psychological Society William James Fellow; and he received the 2008 Distinguished Scientist Award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology. Ross’ research focuses on biases in human inference, judgment, and decision making, especially on the cognitive, perceptual and motivational biases that lead people to misinterpret each other’s behavior and that create particular barriers to dispute resolution and the implementation of peace agreements. He has also participated in “second-track” diplomacy and public peace processes in the Middle East, the Caucuses, and Northern Ireland, and done applied work relevant to global warming, health care, social security choices, and the academic challenges facing minority students and women in science.

Richard A. Shweder is a cultural anthropologist and the Harold Higgins Swift Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago.  He is author of Thinking Through Cultures: Expeditions in Cultural Psychology and Why Do Men Barbecue? Recipes for Cultural Psychology (Harvard University Press); and editor of many books in the areas of cultural psychology, psychological anthropology, and comparative human development.  His recent research examines the scopes and limits of pluralism and the multicultural challenge in Western liberal democracies.   He examines the norm conflicts that arise when peoples migrate to countries in the “North.”  They bring with them culturally endorsed practices (e.g., arranged marriage, animal sacrifice, genital surgeries for both girls and boys, ideas about discipline and parental authority) that mainstream populations in the United States or Western Europe sometimes find disturbing.  How much accommodation to cultural diversity occurs and ought to occur under such circumstances?   He has co-edited two books on this topic (with Martha Minow and Hazel Markus) entitled Engaging Cultural Differences: The Multicultural Challenge in Liberal Democracies and Just Schools: Pursuing Equality in Societies of Difference.  He is currently writing a book provisionally titled Customs Control: The Moral Challenge in Cultural Migration.

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