Review of The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy

Rory J. Conces reviews The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy. Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber, with a new Foreword by Stefan Collini. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017, ISBN: 978-1-4875-2185-1.

A Physcialist Theory of Managing Impediments to Democracy and Peace Building in the Balkans

The post-conflict societies of Bosnia and Kosovo continue to be plagued by the deleterious effects of ethno-nationalism and ethnic enclaves. Unfortunately, this mix impedes both democracy and peace building within these Balkan countries. One way to promote such building is for these enclaves to collapse, thereby allowing multiethnic societies to develop. This essay proposes that enclaves be dealt with physically by ridding them of those evocative objects that help to create and maintain enclaves. By getting physical in this way, how¬ever, we find ourselves in a dilemma, caught on the horns of legality and expediency. Yet there is a promising path between the horns that involves civic design. This essay offers a physicalist theory of managing these impediments to democracy and peace building, beginning with four hypotheses, followed by an abstraction and mathematization in the form of a matrix, a dilemma arising from these hypotheses, and possible solutions

Normative Ambiguity Facing Those Who Flee Death during Times of War and Pandemic and Who Eventually Return Home

We dwell in a world of physical things. When it comes to the environments that we live in, we usually become oriented to the place, and eventually feel at home in it. Facing death during war and pandemic are times of extreme disorientation, and we sometimes exhibit an impulse to flee. It is no wonder that in those desperate times, some with means and ability consider fleeing to a safer place. But are we morally obliged to act in ways that would ask us to sacrifice our deepest personal commitments and projects for others to meet their commitments and projects? It is argued here that fleeing Bosnia and Herzegovina during wartime, like what happened in the 90s, and fleeing a city during a pandemic may be morally decent actions. However, it is also an issue of political decency and fractured friendships. In cases or war and pandemic, returning home to contribute to the well-being of those they left behind may be morally and politically decent, but the fractured friendships may contribute to normative ambiguity. Why would anyone trust them again and regard them as a loyal friend? Perhaps reestablishing those trusting friendships may require those who remained behind to do what is supererogatory, i.e., doing more than can reasonably be asked of them, which in this case amounts to forgiving those who fled and giving them a second chance by welcoming them back home

A Physcialist Theory of Managing Impediments to Democracy and Peace Building in the Balkans

The post-conflict societies of Bosnia and Kosovo continue to be plagued by the deleterious effects of ethno-nationalism and ethnic enclaves. Unfortunately, this mix impedes both democracy and peace building within these Balkan countries. One way to promote such building is for these enclaves to collapse, thereby allowing multiethnic societies to develop. This essay proposes that enclaves be dealt with physically by ridding them of those evocative objects that help to create and maintain enclaves. By getting physical in this way, however, we find ourselves in a dilemma, caught on the horns of legality and expediency. Yet there is a promising path between the horns that involves civic design. This essay offers a physicalist theory of managing these impediments to democracy and peace building, beginning with four hypotheses, followed by an abstraction and mathematization in the form of a matrix, a dilemma arising from these hypotheses, and possible solutions

Book Review: \u3ci\u3eThe Man Who Tried to Save the World: The Dangerous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Fred Cuny by Scott Anderson\u3c/i\u3e

Occasionally a biography is written about an individual who is cut from a different piece of cloth than the of the rest of us. The Man Who Tried to Save the World: The Dangerous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Fred Cuny is such a biography. Scott Anderson. a war correspondent who has covered numerous connects around the world, tells the story of this most extraordinary humanitarian relief expert. Fred Cuny considered the interests of strangers to be more important than those of his own and eventually gave his life in the pursuit of rendering assistance to those who most needed it. Some readers may have difficulty calling Cuny a hero because he left his son with his parents so that he could satisfy his higher calling, but Cuny was an extraordinary man who faced an extraordinary moral dilemma: Do I stay to watch my son\u27s basketball game, or do I go back out there where people arc counting on me. where if I don\u27t go another five, six. one thousand-pick a number-people are going to die? Although The Man Who Tried to Save the World is not a case of hero worship nor a treatise on social justice, it docs portray a man who felt deeply about the injustices perpetrated against the poorer peoples of the world and who worked on their behalf. Unlike the writings on justice by theoreticians like John Rawls and Robert Nozick and the conduct by activists like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., Anderson\u27s book portrays Fred Cuny as a practitioner- a man of immense practical ability and drive, who possessed a vision of just.ice and how it should work in the world

Rethinking Realism (or Whatever) and the War on Terrorism in a Place Like the Balkans

Political realism remains a powerful theoretical framework for thinking about international relations, including the war on terrorism. For Morgenthau and other realists, foreign policy is a matter of national interest defined in terms of power. Some writers view this tenet as weakening, if not severing, realism\u27s link with morality. I take up the contrary view that morality is embedded in realist thought, as well as the possibility of realism being thinly and thickly moralised depending on the moral psychology of the agents. I argue that a prima facie case can be made within a thinly moralised realism for a relatively weak ally like Bosnia to enter the war on terrorism. An inflationary model of morality, however, explains how the moral horror of genocide in an ally\u27s past may lead to a thickened moralised realism such that allied policy-makers question their country\u27s entry into the war

Notes from the Editor

Introduction to volume 11. Notes from International Dialogue\u27s Editor-in-Chief, Rory J. Conce

Book Review: \u3ci\u3eReading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi\u3c/i\u3e

Azar Nafisi, now the Director of the Dialogue Project at John Hopkins University, does a fine job in this book of piecing together her life as an academic, especially the last two years of her residence in Tehran when she embarked on an adventure to supplement the education of a select group of university students. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a multilayered memoir about teaching Western literature in revolutionary Iran in the late 1990s