Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies

Dear Friends of the Human DHS

Please find below The 19 June 2007 e-newsletter from the Arab Reform Initiative www.arab-reform.net

Kind regards
Brian Ward

Reconciling the Reform Agenda and the Security Agenda

Bassma Kodmani
ARI’s Executive Director

While Palestine is bleeding and the Iraq haemorrhage goes on, national agendas for domestic reforms are being pursued everywhere in the Arab world as priorities around which elites, think tanks, social movements and political forces mobilize and devise strategies. So far however, few have articulated intellectually and operationally, the link between the reform agenda and the security concerns. Islamist movements have been theorizing over this linkage: while achievements at each national level will lead, according to their rationale, to an improvement of the overall posture of the Islamic nation in face of its enemies, resistance to occupation remains the key legitimizing factor for organizing and mobilizing society. History shows that ideologies progressed most decisively with military victories. Communist parties became key players in Western Europe not only because of the appeal of Marxist ideas but thanks to the progression of the Red Army across Eastern Europe in the 40s. Hezbollah’s performance in the war against Israel in summer 2006 brought it respect and popularity as a movement combining social, political and military action. Non Islamist political forces have yet to formulate their vision of this link in terms other than a conflict of priorities. History and inspiration from other regions can help nationalists, liberals, leftist and other non- ideological forces to do so. Re-defining the concept of security and analyzing the role of outside factors in internal developments are at the heart of the debate on democratic reform.

This month, read Oussama Ghazali Harb on the Role of the West in Internal Political Developments (also available in Arabic)
Events

ARI’s second Annual Conference - Amman, April 18-19, 2007- Setbacks in Democratic Reforms and How to Revive the Momentum

10 May 2007
The two-day conference will be organized in two parts. The first day will be devoted to a discussion of the issues as they have unfolded in the region over the last year since spring 2006. The (…)

ARI’s roundtable at the Seventh Doha Forum on Democracy, Development and Free Trade

9 May 2007
At the Seventh Doha Forum on Democracy, Development and Free Trade, held in Qatar on 24-25 April 2007the Arab Reform Initiative ran a round-table discussion on the impact of external intervention (…)

News

Independent Gulf media watchdog soon

15 June 2007
Pushing for more press freedom in the Gulf countries, participants of a conference on mass communications law here recently said they would establish a watchdog to monitor violence against (…)

France, Saudi Arabia, Iran mediate Lebanese logjam

8 June 2007
France has joined diplomatic efforts by Iran and Saudi Arabia to help Lebanon’s rival political camps form a national unity government to avoid a political vacuum in the months leading up (…)

Saudi religious police to hold review after deaths

7 June 2007
Saudi Arabia’s religious police said yesterday they would review procedures after coming under attack from human right activists and local media over the deaths of two detainees in under a (…)

The Appeals’ Court accepted a case to eliminate Abou Al-Fotouh 10 year jail sentence

7 June 2007
The Appeals’ Court accepted the law suit asking for eliminating the sentences on Hossam Abou Al-Fotouh, one of the most famous Egyptian businessmen and ex-owner of BMW car dealership

Full (…)

Qatar to create ‘democracy centre’ for Arab world

30 May 2007
Qatar, an absolute monarchy, said on Tuesday it was establishing a democracy centre for the Arab world, a region the United Nations says lacks basic human freedoms.

Full (…)
Analysis

Ballot Boxes? Yes. Actual Democracy? Tough Question.

Mickael Slackman,

7 June 2007
CAIRO, June 6 ­ This is election season in the Middle East. Syria just held presidential and parliamentary elections. Algeria held parliamentary elections. Egyptians will be asked to vote (…)

Europe and the Arab world: divided souls

Pierre Schori ,

23 May 2007
An intransigent western policy towards radicals in the Arab world, typified by the boycott and isolation of Hamas-led Palestine, is of benefit only to extremists. Europe must follow a better way, (…)

Egypt Is Experiencing the Biggest Strike Wave in 50 Years

Harry Kelber ,

12 May 2007
The longest and strongest wave of worker protest since the end of World War II is rolling through Egypt. In March, the liberal daily al-Masri Al-Yawm estimated that no fewer than 222 sit-in (…)
In Arabic

Visit our website in Arabic, read Analyses and News about the Arab world and informations about ongoing Events:

Democracy with a Parachute, by Khayri Mansour

What Remains of Egypt’s Symbols?, by Amr Shubaki

Article 49 of the Lebanese Constitution, by Bahij Tabbara

General Secretary of the Justice and Development Party’s: Our party is Open to all Moroccans Including Jews

Iraqi Journalists’ Assassinations: the Tragedy of a Nation, not of a Profession, by Salah Nasrawi

The Moroccan Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches en Sciences Sociales is organizing a Summer University

The Arab Reform Initiative is a consortium of fifteen key policy research centers from the Arab world with partners from Europe and the United States, working to mobilize the Arab research capacity to advance knowledge and promote a home grown program for democratic reform.
Email : contact@arab-reform.net - phone : +331 56 77 14 21 - fax: +331 56 77 14 15

Dear Friends of the Human DHS

Please click here to read about the 2007 find below an announcement of the 2007 Peacewriting Annual International Writing Awards sponsored by the PEACE AND JUSTICE STUDIES ASSOCIATION and the OMNI Center for Peace, Justice, and Ecology.

Kind regards
Brian Ward

Dear Friends of the Human DHS

Please find below details of three peace related job vacancies.

Kind regards
Brian Ward

Tenure Track Position in Social (Studies) Education (With a Specialization in Peace Education or Global Education) – Simon Fraser UniversityThe Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University seeks applications for a tenure-track position in Social (Studies) Education with a specialization in Peace Education or Global Education. The appointment will be at the rank of Assistant Professor and will begin January 1, 2008 (or at the earliest convenience of the successful candidate). Applicants must have an earned doctorate in Education with a demonstrated background in social (studies) education, and either peace education or global education, as well as a strong indication of scholarship (research and publications) in these areas. For more information visit: http://www.sfu.ca/vpacademic/Faculty_Openings/Education.html

Visiting Assistant Professor of Justice and Peace – Georgetown University
The Georgetown University Program on Justice and Peace is hiring a 3 year visiting assistant professor of justice and peace studies. Applicants must have a Ph.D. in a relevant department or interdisciplinary program, must be broadly acquainted with the field of peace studies and conflict resolution, and must show evidence of a promising research agenda and excellence in undergraduate teaching. The successful candidate will play a major role in further building the program and offer continuity in central courses of the curriculum. For more information visit: http://www3.georgetown.edu/departments/justice_peace/

Policy Analyst for Multilateral Affairs - Open Society Institute
The Open Society Institute’s work on responsible U.S. global leadership is intended to help foster coalitions and public understanding that will help move the United States government to work in a more collaborative and cooperative fashion with the international community on issues of common concern in the United Nations and other multilateral venues. OSI works to unite advocates who work on different issues, including rallying support for the United Nations, health promotion, arms control, human rights, and the environment. OSI strives to create a climate of opinion supporting cooperative approaches to the nation’s and the world’s problems – demonstrating in the process that the two are inextricably connected. To Apply: Send resume, cover letter, brief writing sample and salary requirements by May 25, 2007 to: Administrator, Open Society Washington Office, 1120 19th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20036 or osidcresume[@]osi-dc.org or by fax to 202-530-0128.

Dear HumanDHS Friends!

COMMENT by Brian Lynch: This is posted as an example of 1) a type of humiliation and 2) a obvious reminder of how far we have to go. Here a California school district has decided to humiliate elementry school children as a way to get their parents to pay their bill.

The start of the article:
A Badge of Shame, the Infamous Cheese Sandwich
by OneCrankyDom
Mon Jun 18, 2007 at 07:16:49 AM PDT

I would never of believe this could happen in Ca. but not only does it happen, it seems to be wide spread and growing. I’m not talking about a huge amount of money owed per family before the punishment kicks in, the amount is only $5.00. What is happening when a parent owes 5 bucks or more ? The child is subjected to public humilation, embarrassment, ridicule, and all the other cruel ways kids treat those they see has lesser than themselves. How many of us can remember how that feels, and what it can lead to ?

In a nutshell here is what is happening. Imagine yourself 7 or 8 yrs old, going thru the lunchline to get your pizza or hamburger for lunch like everyone else. You load up your tray just like your friends in front and back of you, only to have the line stopped, being told to empty your tray, and having plain cheese sandwich placed on your tray. No burger, no fries, no pizza, no fruit, just a brown cheese sandwich. A Scarlet Letter if you will, has been laid on your tray and everyone in line hears you being told that if you want the same lunch as everyone else, your parents need to pay their bills. In front of your peers, friends, and the bullys, it has just been announced that you are poor, you dad is a deadbeat, and you don’t deserve a decent meal.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/6/18/9233/73966

Brian Lynch Who We Are

brianlynchmd.com

Dear HumanDHS Friend!
Neil Ryan Walsh kindly draws our attention to the article you see further down.
Warmly!
Evelin

June 16, 2007
In the Classroom, a New Focus on Quieting the Mind
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN

OAKLAND, Calif., June 12 — The lesson began with the striking of a Tibetan singing bowl to induce mindful awareness.

With the sound of their new school bell, the fifth graders at Piedmont Avenue Elementary School here closed their eyes and focused on their breathing, as they tried to imagine “loving kindness” on the playground.

“I was losing at baseball and I was about to throw a bat,” Alex Menton, 11, reported to his classmates the next day. “The mindfulness really helped.”

As summer looms, students at dozens of schools across the country are trying hard to be in the present moment. This is what is known as mindfulness training, in which stress-reducing techniques drawn from Buddhist meditation are wedged between reading and spelling tests.

Mindfulness, while common in hospitals, corporations, professional sports and even prisons, is relatively new in the education of squirming children. But a small but growing number of schools in places like Oakland and Lancaster, Pa., are slowly embracing the concept — as they did yoga five years ago — and institutions, like the psychology department at Stanford University and the Mindfulness Awareness Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, are trying to measure the effects.

Please read the rest of this article at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/16/us/16mindful.html?ei=5070&en=981d7c4981c880cc&ex=1182830400&emc=eta1&pagewanted=print.

Dear Friends of the Human DHS

Please find below a note calling for papers for a Conference to be held in London in November 2007.

Kind regards
Brian Ward

Performance and Asylum: Ethics, Embodiment, Community

An International Conference supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of Britain, Diaspora and Migration Programme 3–5 November 2007

Royal Holloway, University of London

First Call for Papers

Within the current context of globalisation and its attendant anxieties about immigration and national security, performance by and about refugees and asylum seekers presents an exemplary medium through which to explore questions of identity, belonging, refuge, corporeality, surveillance and ethics. This international conference will examine the ways in which performance projects in various parts of the world engage with refugee communities and, more broadly, the complex and multifaceted topic of asylum.

Specifically, papers are invited that engage with the following issues:

1) Asylum and Human Rights: How do performance practices and perspectives engage with human rights issues in asylum contexts? Can performance help to address effects of human rights abuses? How do human rights articulate with arts praxis?

2) Asylum and the Ethics of Representation: What ethical issues arise in/through work with and about refugees and asylum seekers? How can researchers/practitioners work sensitively to explore dialogic performance practices? What are the responsibilities of researchers and practitioners working in such contexts?

3) Refugees and Embodiment: How do refugees and asylum seekers use embodied performance to fashion ‘diasporic selves’ and negotiate cultural identities? How are bodies inscribed corporeally in performances by and about asylum seekers and refugees? How do audiences respond in affective and interactive terms when witnessing narratives of bodily trauma?

4) The Spatialities of Asylum Management: How do performance practices and perspectives intervene in the spatial logics of enforced movement and detainment? In what ways do site-specific projects shape representations of asylum and of particular environments? How do border protection policies restrict international exchange in the performing arts?

Deadline for abstracts of no more than 250 words: 31 July 2007

Contact the Convenor: Professor Helen Gilbert

Email: helen.gilbert[@]rhul.ac.uk

Dear Friends of the Human DHS

Please find here a link to the June 2007 Nesletter from the Global Campaign for Peace Education.

Kind regards
Brian Ward

Dear Friends of the Human DHS

Please find below an article from David Kreiger regarding the recent Council meeting of the International Network of Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility (INES).

Kind regards
Brian Ward

ENGINEERS AND SCIENTISTS FOR GLOBAL RESPONSIBILITY
By David Krieger

I have just returned from Berlin and the annual Council meeting of the International Network of Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility (INES). This is an organization much needed in our world, one that supports the ethical uses of science and technology for disarmament and sustainable development. The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation has helped to foster the work of this international organization since the inception of INES more than 15 years ago.

The meeting included an important presentation by Professor Guillermo Lemarchand from the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina on the extent to which scientific efforts are driven by large military research and development budgets. Lemarchand presented information on the close relationship between research and development funding and the exponential growth of the lethality of weaponry. During the 20th century the lethality (maximum number of casualties per hour that a weapon can generate) grew from about 100 at the beginning of the century to about six billion at the end of the century. The lethality growth of weapons in the 20th century was 60 million, and now encompasses the population of the planet.

Scientists may not be concerned with or even know the reasons why their basic research is being funded by military sources. The driving of academic research and development by military budgets is becoming pervasive at universities throughout the world, leading to the variant of the famous statement in President Eisenhower’s Farewell Address that some now find appropriate – the military-industrial-academic complex.

The University of California is an excellent example of a university providing research and development for military purposes. It provides management and oversight to the US nuclear weapons laboratories. Its funds for doing this come through the US Department of Energy, but the work of the nuclear weapons laboratories is largely secret and military in nature. Currently the labs are working on the Reliable Replacement Warhead, a new hydrogen bomb that the Bush administration hopes will replace every nuclear weapon in the US arsenal.

The management of the nuclear weapons laboratories by the University of California is just the tip of the iceberg of military involvement with universities around the world. According to the report by Professor Lemarchand, a physicist, the US military assigns officers to practically all areas of the world to seek out scientific researchers who may be helpful in furthering US military purposes. Too often military funding is the only source of funding available for academic researchers.

This can create a dilemma for professors, who are often under pressure to bring in research funding. On the one hand, they can accept funding from the military, and find themselves contributing toward new means of weaponization – an outcome they may find unethical. On the other hand, they can turn down offers of funding from the military and not be able to continue their research into basic areas of science that they find important.

There are many issues that confront scientists and engineers in today’s world. These include weapons of mass destruction, genetic engineering, biotechnology, global warming and climate change, food supplies and agricultural production, energy use and alternative energy development, and pollution and health issues. How does one approach such issues from the perspective of global responsibility?

First, global responsibility means working for the betterment of humanity. Practically this means using one’s talents and skills for constructive rather than destructive purposes. Second, it means speaking out, individually or collectively, against dangerous and destructive uses of science and technology. Third, it means putting the welfare of humanity as a whole ahead of the considerations of any one nation.

The Council members of the International Network of Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility are a dedicated group that is making its voice heard on the ethical uses of science and technology. If you would like to find out more about their work and become involved in it, visit them online at www.inesglobal.com.

David Krieger is the President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (www.wagingpeace.org), and a leader in the global effort to abolish nuclear weapons.

Dear Friends of the Human DHS

Please find below the June 17 letter of SKETCHES

Kind regards

Brian Ward

SKETCHES ­ June 17, 2007, Volume 4 Number 3
The International Child Art Foundation Newsletter

Dear friend,

Children and their parents and teachers across the United States and around the world are making preparation rights now to travel to Washington, DC to participate in the World Children’s Festival.

The festival will take place June 23-25 on the National Mall across from the U.S. Capitol. The ICAF festival is the only event in the world that combines art, sports, science and technology for the development of creativity and empathy. The festival will showcase winning art selected from three million entries from children around the world on the theme My Favorite Sport. 100 winners from U.S. states, the District of Columbia and over 50 countries, including Armenia, Brazil, Israel, Korea, Oman, Suriname, Russia, UAE and Zambia will attend.

The three-day festival includes 25 performances each day by almost 200 children including dances, songs, ceremonies and collaborative art projects from Bolivia, India, Jordan, Serbia, Turkey and the Native Americans. And more than 75 workshops ranging from animation to art therapy, calligraphy to children’s literature, silk painting to making sculptures from trash taught by leading experts from Adler School of Professional Psychology, California State University Los Angeles, Columbia University, Georgetown University, The George Washington University, Nazareth College, NC State University, The Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center, US Forest Service and many other institutions and organizations.

We thank Adidas, Disney and LEGO for supporting the festival. We also thank the companies that have provided in-kind donations of materials and services. We are most grateful to individuals who sent us $1,000 checks in response to our appeal for donation in the previous issue of Sketches.

We need and deserve your support. You can help in the following ways:

1. Please consider arranging a fundraiser at your work so that your company or organization could sponsor lunch for 500 children, their teachers and parents on the National Mall on June 23, 24 or 25. Although we expect 10,000 attendees, we must provide lunch only to the Arts Olympiad finalists, youth performers and the families of both. One day cost for 500 lunchboxes @ $5 each is $2,500.

2. We still need host families, so if you live in the Greater Washington Area or know someone who does, and are interested, please email us at Olympiad[@]icaf.org

3. Finally, please try to join the children at their World Festival. The festival is open and free to the public and promises to be the largest-ever celebration of children’s creativity and imagination in history. www.icaf.org/worldfestival/ .

With your support, we can help the children build a more just, prosperous and nonviolent world.

Sincerely,

Ashfaq Ishaq, Ph.D.
Executive Director
1 202 530 1000

“Intellectuals solve problems; geniuses prevent them” - Albert Einstein

Dear Friends of the Human DHS

Please find below Scholarship Opprtunities from the Womens Institute

Kind regards
Brian Ward

Subject: Women’s Institute Scholarship Opportunities

Contact:jasmine.waddell[@]alumni.brown.edu
http://www.sapartners.org

Omega Scholarship Opportunities
Three Upcoming Events

• Women, Power and Peace, September 14 - 16, 2007

• Apology, Remorse and Forgiveness in the Aftermath of Trauma, August 24 -
26, 2007

• Bridging Differences, September 16 - 21, 2007

Omega Institute for Holistic Studies
150 Lake Drive Rhinebeck, New York

For applications, call 845-266-4444 ext. 337
Application Deadline: June 30

Please join Pumla Gobodo-Madikileza, an author, psychologist and activist
for reconciliation in post-apartheid South Africa, and other renowned
women for three upcoming events at the Omega Institute for Holistic
Studies.
Scholarship Criteria: Scholarships are offered to women who will bring a
diversity of color, nationality, age, and professional experience to the
event; to women who want to share the experience at home in their
workplace or community; to women who would not be able to afford to
attend the event without the scholarship; and to women who can commit to
attending the full event. The majority of women accepted will be between
the ages of 18 and 35. If you feel your income is sufficient for you to
attend on your own, but you wish to apply, please explain clearly why you
should still be eligible.
mailto:info[@]sapartners.org ]
phone: 617-443-1072