Ron Hassner is an American political scientist and international relations scholar. He is a Professor of Political Science at University of California, Berkeley. He holds a Chancellor's Chair in Political Science and is the Helen Diller Family Chair in Israel Studies at Berkeley.[1][2]
Ron Hassner | |
|---|---|
| Born | Ron E. Hassner 1971 |
| Alma mater | Stanford University (Ph.D.) Columbia University (M.A.) London School of Economics and Political Science (B.Sc.) |
| Institutions | University of California, Berkeley |
Main interests | Religious violence |
His scholarship focuses on religion and conflict, especially territorial disputes over sacred spaces. His research also encompasses religion in the military and the effectiveness of interrogational torture. He is a faculty director of the Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies at U.C. Berkeley.[3] Hassner is a recipient of Berkeley's campus-wide Distinguished Teaching Award.[4]
Education and career edit
Hassner holds a B.Sc. in International Relations from The London School of Economics (1995), a masters in International Affairs from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University (1997), a masters in Religious Studies from Stanford University (2000), and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University (2003). He was a post-doctoral scholar at Harvard University's Olin Center.
In 2004, Hassner joined the political science faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. Since then, he was visiting scholar at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya. In 2014, he received Berkeley's campus-wide Distinguished Teaching Award.[4]
In 2023, Hassner was recognized with a Distinguished Scholar Award from the "Religion and International Relations" section of the International Studies Association.[5] Later that year, he received the Susanne Hoeber Rudolph Outstanding Scholar in Religion and Politics Award from the American Political Science Association.[6]
Research edit
Hassner is a scholar of religion and international conflict. He has studied territorial disputes, including disputes over holy places, the role of religion in militaries and on the battlefield, and the history of torture under the Spanish Inquisition.
Religion as a Cause of War edit
In War on Sacred Grounds,[7] Hassner argued that conflicts over holy places are difficult to resolve because these sites pose an indivisibility problem: they cannot be shared or divided the way other pieces of land are often shared to resolve conflict.[8][9] The Temple Mount in Jerusalem and the Great Mosque of Mecca function as key case studies as do contested shrines in India.[10]
In this book and in related articles and book chapters he also explains the many motivations for conflicts at sacred sites, including the use of these structured as insurgent hideouts and as prominent targets in civil wars.[11]
Religion in the Military edit
His work subsequently shifted to analyzing religion as a factor during war, including such wars in which religion is not a motivator. In Religion in the Military Worldwide,[12] he commissioned essays on the many ways in which religion shapes military service around the world, including countries like Canada, Turkey, Japan, and Iran. In Religion on the Battlefield,[13] Hassner looks at the effects of religion on tactics and strategy. The focus here is on wars in which religion did not necessarily play a motivating role, to show that even in crucial military settings—such as World War I and World War II—religion enabled and constrained military decision making.[14][15]
These essays explore religious rituals, conflicts over religious freedom in the military, how religion affects promotion or unit formation, and how religion in the military affects religion in society more broadly. He shows how sacred time and space, rituals and authority structures, had an impact on soldiers, commanders, and units. Salient examples include the bombing of Rome in World War II, and the Yom Kippur War. In this book and related publications, Hassner attempts to shift the focus of the study of religion and war away from studying primarily Muslim terrorists and insurgents and onto the effects of religion on conventional armies, including Western secular armies.
Torture edit
Hassner's most recent scholarship is on torture. He argues that the "myth of the ticking time bomb scenario" as a dangerous yet influential metaphor that bears no relationship to reality.[16] He argues that much of the current debate on torture draws on flimsy and biased sources.[17] Though much current torture criticism relies on the claim that "torture doesn't work", Hassner shows that the evidence to support this claim is weak. Moreover, Americans find the claim to be unpersuasive: they believe that torture is quick and effective. In contrast, Americans find the claim that torture is cruel to be a far more persuasive argument against torture.[18]
In Anatomy of Torture,[19] he analyzes hundreds of trials from the archives of the Spanish Inquisition to uncover the causes, character, and consequences of torture. His book analyzes dozens of cases of torture from Spain and Mexico in the 16th and 17th centuries, relying on archival evidence from Europe and the Americas. These files demonstrate that "torture yielded information that was often reliable: witnesses in the torture chamber and witnesses that were not tortured provided corresponding information about collaborators, locations, events, and practices. Nonetheless, inquisitors treated the results of interrogations in the torture chamber with skepticism."[This quote needs a citation] The torture conducted by the Inquisition yielded corroborative evidence that the Inquisition found useful but it did so slowly and at tremendous social, political, and moral cost. Hassner urges caution in applying those findings to current torture debates.
See also edit
References edit
Citations edit
- ^ Pine 2019.
- ^ Akkaraju 2019.
- ^ Pine 2016.
- ^ a b Jeong 2014.
- ^ International Studies Association 2023.
- ^ American Political Science Association 2023.
- ^ Hassner 2012.
- ^ Emmett 2010, pp. 302–303.
- ^ Sachs 2010, pp. 1317–1321.
- ^ Rudoren 2014.
- ^ Hassner 2006, pp. 149–166.
- ^ Hassner 2014.
- ^ Hassner 2016.
- ^ Freedman 2017.
- ^ Brown 2018, pp. 698–701.
- ^ Hassner 2018, pp. 83–94.
- ^ Hassner 2020, pp. 4–42.
- ^ Hassner 2023.
- ^ Hassner 2022.
Works cited edit
- "2022-2023 Award Recipients". International Studies Association. 2023. Retrieved September 13, 2023.
- Akkaraju, Maya (May 6, 2019). "UC Berkeley creates endowed faculty chair in Israel studies". The Daily Californian. Berkeley, California.
- Brown, Davis (September 2018). "Religion on the Battlefield. By Ron E. Hassner. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016. 232 pp. Cloth". Politics and Religion: 698–701. doi:10.1017/S1755048318000378. S2CID 149790814. ProQuest 2210976092.
- Emmett, Chad F. (2010). "War on Sacred Grounds (review)". The Middle East Journal: 302–303. Project MUSE 380314.
- Freedman, Lawrence D. (April 14, 2017). "Religion on the Battlefield". Foreign Affairs. No. May/June 2017. New York: Council on Foreign Relations.
- Hassner, Ron E. (2022). Anatomy of Torture. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-1-5017-6203-1.
- ——————— (March 2006). "Fighting Insurgency on Sacred Ground". The Washington Quarterly. Washington, D.C.: 149–166. doi:10.1162/wash.2006.29.2.149. S2CID 110929395.
- ——————— (March 2023). "Persuasive and Unpersuasive Critiques of Torture". Perspectives on Politics. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press: 160–173. doi:10.1017/S1537592721004138. S2CID 257696291.
- ———————, ed. (2014). Religion in the Military Worldwide. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-03702-1 – via Internet Archive.
- ——————— (June 18, 2016). Religion on the Battlefield. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-8014-5107-2 – via Internet Archive.
- ——————— (January 2, 2018). "The Myth of the Ticking Bomb". The Washington Quarterly. Washington, D.C.: 83–94. doi:10.1080/0163660X.2018.1445367. S2CID 158065052.
- ——————— (December 2012). War on Sacred Grounds. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-8014-7880-2 – via Internet Archive.
- ——————— (January 2, 2020). "What Do We Know About Interrogational Torture?". International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence. Routledge: 4–42. doi:10.1080/08850607.2019.1660951. S2CID 213244706.
- Jeong, Heyun (March 17, 2014). "3 professors win 2014 Distinguished Teaching Award". The Daily Californian. Berkeley, California.
- Pine, Dan (May 3, 2019). "A $5 million gift will create UC Berkeley's first endowed Israel studies chair". J. The Jewish News of Northern California. San Francisco, California.
- Pine, Dan (December 16, 2016). "Making strides: Israel studies flourishing at Cal". J. The Jewish News of Northern California. San Francisco, California.
- Sachs, Natan B. (October 2010). "Book Review: Hassner, R. E. (2009). War on Sacred Grounds. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press". Comparative Political Studies: 1317–1321. doi:10.1177/0010414010371186. S2CID 154838221.
- "Susanne Hoeber Rudolph – Outstanding Scholar Award". American Political Science Association. 2023. Retrieved September 13, 2023.
- Rudoren, Jodi (November 22, 2014). "Mistrust Threatens Delicate Balance at a Sacred Site in Jerusalem". The New York Times. New York.