Contact Us

Staff

Political evil under the microscope

By Tim Stoddard

By the time President Bush had singled out Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as the axis of evil in January, the word evil was already a popular American adjective for fundamentalist regimes. While many nations continue to criticize Bush for his speech, a panel of American and European scholars will convene at Boston University on March 25 to discuss the nature of evil in politics. Sponsored by BU's Institute for Human Sciences, Evil in Politics: Overstated or Underestimated? is an opportunity for academics and journalists from both sides of the Atlantic to discuss the events and ideology that produce dangerous regimes.

Professor Ira Katznelson, a political historian at Columbia University, will open the discussion by summarizing his article "Evil and Politics," from the latest issue of the journal Daedalus. In the article, Katznelson challenges the idea that democracy, liberalism, and tolerance are the best safeguards against evil acts emerging from radical fundamentalism. "A rote defense of Western liberalism could very well authorize a new brand of colonialism," he writes, "once again making many non-Western peoples ineligible for its core values of rights, toleration, participation, and consent."

Among the panelists responding to Katznelson will be Fareed Zakaria, editor-in-chief of Newsweek International and a regular columnist on world affairs for the magazine. He is the author of "Thank Goodness for a Villain," a provocative piece discussing why the United States needs Saddam Hussein to sustain American policy in the Mideast. A regular contributor to the Washington Post and the New York Times, Zakaria also wrote "The Politics of Rage," Newsweek's response to the question of why terrorists hate the United States.

Two European political theorists will balance Zakaria's American perspective. Lilia Shevtsova, a senior associate at the Carnergie Endowment for International Peace, is a noted expert on Russian politics and the author of six books, including Yeltsin's Russia: Myths and Reality (1999). She divides her time between Washington and Moscow, where she is a political advisor for Russian television and sits on the editorial boards of several political journals. The fourth panelist will be Aleksander Smolar, president of the Stefan Batory Foundation in Warsaw and a political scientist at the Centre National de la Recherché Scientifique in Paris.

Launched last November, the Institute for Human Sciences at BU is developing a number of policy-oriented research projects with an American-European scope. It is intimately linked with its Austrian namesake, the Institut fur die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (IWM) in Vienna, founded by CAS Philosophy Professor Krzysztof Michalski in 1982 as a venue for Eastern and Western European scholars to discuss the political, social, and intellectual problems of the region.

Like the IWM, which is politically and governmentally neutral, the institute is not affiliated with any one department at BU, but is currently planning a number of collaborative projects with the departments of philosophy, political science, and international relations.

Evil in Politics will be the first in a series of public lectures sponsored by the institute. Kirsten Wever, executive director of the institute, is also coordinating three upcoming conferences that will bring together European and American academics and professionals. The first, scheduled for June 14 to 16 at the IWM in Vienna, will focus on the future of labor unions. Other conferences still in development include a workshop on gender/racial inequality in the workplace and an interdisciplinary forum on death that will gather experts in philosophy, medical ethics, theology, and biology to discuss how cultures on either side of the Atlantic think about the concept of death in light of timely issues such as stem cell therapy and the fashion industry's portrayal of eternal youth.

The institute is also developing several new fellowships for students to study at the IWM in Vienna. The IWM currently recruits talented BU students in the humanities and social sciences to participate in its Junior Visiting Fellows program. One of the new fellowships, still in the planning stages, would send American journalists to Vienna for two to six months. There, Wever says, they would "work on in-depth projects of their own and be able to spend some time with the very vibrant intellectual community that resides at, and flows through, the institute in Vienna."

Evil in Politics: Overstated or Underestimated? takes place on Monday, March 25, 2002, at 6 p.m. at SMG's Executive Leadership Conference Room on the fourth floor. Admission is free and open to the public. For more information, call 353-2778.

A free, downloadable PDF version of Katznelson's article is available at http://www.daedalus.amacad.org/issues/winter2002/Katznelson.pdf. For further information on the Institute for Human Sciences, please visit www.iwm.at.

22 March 2002
Boston University
Office of University Relations