Scholars’ Circle – Refugees right to return in international law ; Effects of earth’s magnetism on birds, whales, bees and turtles – September 8, 2024

September 9, 2024 host

States have legal requirements to receive refugees and can return them after a conflict ends. But does this mean there is a right of return? What are the conditions of the right of return? Is it conditional on the provision of security for the state to which they are returning? [ dur: 40mins. ]

Susan Akram is Clinical Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law. She directs Boston University Laws International Human Rights Clinic. Her published works include International Law and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: a Rights-Based Approach to Middle East Peace, “A Comparative Perspective on Safe Third and First Country of Asylum Policies in the United Kingdom and North America: Legal Norms, Principles and Lessons Learned” and Palestinian Refugees.

How do birds, bees, whales and turtles use the earths magnetic field to guide their behavior? [ dur: 18mins. ]

Andres Vidal Gadea is Professor of Molecular Neuroethology at Illinois State University. He is the co-author of Magnetosensitive neurons mediate geomagnetic orientation in Caenorhabditis elegans and Factors that influence magnetic orientation in C. elegans. JCPA.

For a transcript of this interview, please visit: TheBigQ

This program is produced by Ankine Aghassian, Doug Becker and Sudd Dongre.

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Scholars' Circle Interviews

Scholars’ Circle – Right of Self-Determination ; Civil War politics examined- September 1, 2024

September 1, 2024 host

Kamala Harris declared that the Palestinians must live in dignity, security and self determination. But what is the right of self determination? How has it been practiced legally and practically throughout history? And does self determination mean independence? [dur: 30mins.]

Hurst Hannum is Professor of International Law Emeritus at Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He is the author of, Autonomy, Sovereignty, and Self-Determination: The Accommodation of Conflicting Rights, Rethinking self-determination and Rescuing Human Rights: A Radically Moderate Approach.

While the US Civil War ended slavery, it didn’t end the political issues that caused the war. What exactly happened in the immediate aftermath of the war?

Book Cover of Civil War by Other Means has an red X on the title of the book

The political divide in the US from the Civil War persists today. We discuss the history of the period and its impact on contemporary politics with Jeremi Suri author of the book Civil War by Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight For Democracy . [ dur: 28 mins. ]

Jeremi Suri is Professor in the Department of History and the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin. He holds the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin. He is the co-author of “Problems with President Records are Not Just About Trump” with Kenneth Osgood. He is also the author of The Impossible Presidency: The Rise and Fall of America’s Highest Office. He is the host of the podcast This is Democracy.

This program is produced by Ankine Aghassian, Doug Becker and Sudd Dongre.

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Scholars' Circle Interviews

Scholars’ Circle – Bangladesh students revolt that ousted its president – August 25, 2024

August 25, 2024 host

What led to the overthrow of Bangladesh’s leader Sheikh Hasina? Were they political, economic, or social reasons? Or the promises of what advocates are calling a “second wave of independence”?
What does the new Bangladeshi government need to build upon this political moment? What can the government do to successfully democratize and economically develop the nation? [ dur: 58mins. ]

Ali Riaz is Distinguished Professor at the Department of Politics and Government at Illinois State University. He is the author of Pathways of Autocratization – The tumultuous journey of Bangladesh politics.
Mathilde Maitrot Senior Lecturer, Department of Social & Policy Sciences Centre for Development Studies at the University of Bath. She is the co-author of an article Discipline, development and duress: the art of winning an election in Bangladesh.

This program is produced by Ankine Aghassian, Doug Becker and Sudd Dongre.

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Scholars' Circle Interviews

Scholars’ Circle – Reforming Supreme Court of United States ; How proxy wars are dominating international relations – August 18, 2024

August 18, 2024 host

With the upcoming election Democrats have proposal to reform Supreme Court with term limits, ethics oversight and many more. Our panel look at how and why people are concerned over the influence peddling related to recent decisions. Hosted by Maria Armoudian. [ dur: 35mins. ]

Erwin Chemerinsky is the Dean and Jesse H. Choper Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. His many publications include, most recently, Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights, and The Religion Clauses: The Case for Separating Church and State (with Howard Gillman).
Andrew Koppelman is John Paul Stevens Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Increasingly Dangerous Variants of the “Most-Favored-Nation” Theory of Religious Liberty and The Supreme Court and the new religious aristocracy in the Hill.

Why do states choose to use third parties to intervene in other nation’s civil wars and political conflicts? On today’s show we interview Andrew Mumford on the legality, efficacy, and implications of the waging of proxy warfare. Hosted by Doug Becker. [ dur: 21 mins. ].

This interview was recorded in February 2020.

Andrew Mumford is Associate Professor in Politics and International Relations at The University of Nottingham, UK. He is the author about Proxy Warfare Counterinsurgency Wars and the Anglo-American Alliance.

This program is produced by Ankine Aghassian, Doug Becker and Sudd Dongre.

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Scholars' Circle Interviews

Scholars’ Circle – President Biden chooses to step down and Kamala Harris ascendancy to lead the Democratic Party into November 2024 election – August 11, 2024

August 11, 2024 host

We explore the choice of Kamala Harris as the Democratic party’s candidate despite not running in primaries, the choice of President Biden to withdraw from the race, whether he should step down and what the decision means for age and service in the US, and some of the policy implications such as Supreme Court reform and foreign policy. [ dur: 58mins. ]

Jeremi Suri is Professor in the Department of History and the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of The Impossible Presidency: The Rise and Fall of America’s Highest Office and his latest book Civil War by Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight For Democracy. He hosts the podcast This is Democracy.
Peter F. Trumbore is Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Oakland University. He is the author of Brexit, the Border, and Political Conflict Narratives in Northern Ireland, with Andrew Owsiak. and Running on Foreign Policy? Examining the Role of Foreign Policy Issues in the 2000, 2002, and 2004 Congressional Campaigns.
Sanford Levinson is W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair in Law at the University of Texas Law School. He is the author of many publications including Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (and How We the People Can Correct It) and Framed: America’s 51 Constitutions and the Crisis of Governance and, with Cynthia Levinson, Fault Lines in the Constitution: The Framers, Their Fights, and the Flaws that Affect Us Today.

This program is produced by Ankine Aghassian, Doug Becker and Sudd Dongre.

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Scholars' Circle Interviews

Scholars’ Circle – Catastrophic consequences of Factory Farming – August 4, 2024

August 5, 2024 host

Farming around the world, and in particular in the US, has increasingly become centralized as large factory farming. What are the environmental, social, and philosophical implications of this mode of agricultural production? [ dur: 58mins. ]

Factory farming carry significant challenges on environmental protection, on pricing and the centralization of wealth, and on social issues such as animal welfare and animal rights. We discuss agricultural policies and the environmental impacts including carbon emission, climate change and pollution.

John Ikerd is author, speaker and leader in sustainability. He is Professor Emeritus of Agricultural Economics from the University of Missouri. He is the author of the books Sustainable Capitalism: A Matter of Common Sense, Small Farms are Real Farms: Sustaining People Through Agriculture, Crisis and Opportunity: Sustainability in American Agriculture, and The Essentials of Economic Sustainability. Other publications – Factory Farms–Things Everyone Should Know and Economic Realities of CAFOs.
Kendra Coulter is Professor of Management and Organizational Studies at Huron University College and Fellow at Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. She is the co-author of “Animal Protection: Organizational Constraints and Collaborative Opportunities,” author of Looking Forward to a Future Without Factory Farming, and Defending Animals: Inside the Front Lines of Animal Protection (forthcoming MIT Press, 2023)
Gary L. Francione is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of Law at Rutgers University and Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Lincoln (UK). He is the author of Why Veganism Matters: The Moral Value of Animals, The Animal Rights Debate: Abolition or Regulation? and Animals as Persons: Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation.

This show was recorded Aug, 2022.

This program is produced by Ankine Aghassian, Doug Becker, Mihika Chechi, Melissa Chiprin, and Sudd Dongre.

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Scholars' Circle Interviews

Scholars’ Circle – A book author interview: History of California as a Slave State – July 28, 2024

July 28, 2024 host

We interview the author of a new book CALIFORNIA, A SLAVE STATE (Yale University Press; June 27, 2023). Professor Jean Pfaelzer shows that, since the very first colonizers crossed the border, the Golden State was and still is powered by slavery – a piece of American history that many still try to bury. [ dur: 58mins. ]

Jean Pfaelzer is a public historian, commentator, and professor of American studies at the University of Delaware. Her books include Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans, (Random House; University of California Press) as well Parlor Radical: Rebecca Harding Davis and the Origins of American Social Realism and The Utopian Novel in America. She lives in Washington, DC.

This interview was recorded July 2023.

This program is produced by Ankine Aghassian, Doug Becker, Melissa Chiprin and Sudd Dongre.

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Scholars' Circle Interviews

Scholars’ Circle – Book Author interview : Informers Up Close, case-study of Communist Czechoslovakia (1945-1989) – July 21, 2024

July 21, 2024 host

Autocratic regimes often use people throughout the population to serve as informants. Why do people choose to become an informant and collaborate with autocracies? And what constitutes justice against these informants once the state democratizes? We discuss a new book on the topic Informers Up Close with its authors Mark Drumbl and Barbora Hola. [ dur: 58mins. ]

photo of a windows on a multi-tenenat building with tile of the book Informers up close , stories from Communist Prague.

Mark Drumbl is Professor at Washington and Lee University, School of Law, and Director of the University’s Transnational Law Institute. He is the author of Atrocity, Punishment, and International Law , Reimagining Child Soldiers in International Law and Policy and he is the co-editor of Sights, Sounds and Sensibilities of Atrocity Prosecution with Caroline Fournet.
Barbora Hola, Senior Researcher, NSCR & Professor Department of Criminal Law & Criminology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She is a Senior Researcher at the NSCR. She has an interdisciplinary focus and studies transitional justice after atrocities, in particular (international) criminal trials, sentencing of international crimes, rehabilitation of war criminals and life after trial at international criminal tribunals. She is co-editor of Punishment in International Society: Norms, Justice, and Punitive Practices.

This program is produced by Doug Becker, Ankine Aghassian, Maria Armoudian and Sudd Dongre.

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Scholars' Circle Interviews

Scholars’ Circle – Private Military Corporations and State responsibilities – July 14, 2024

July 14, 2024 host

Private Military Corporations have become a growing element of the warfighting landscape. States have historically had a monopoly on the use of military force. But private corporations challenge this monopoly. How much do they increase the lethality and likelihood of war? How much can private corporations be regulated? And what are the challenges to regulation? We explore the political, military, legal, and socioeconomic implications of private military corporations. [ dur: 58mins. ]

Ori Swed is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work at Texas Tech University. He is the editor of The Sociology of Privatized Security with Thomas Crosby. He is the author of “The Afghanistan War’s Legacy: The Reimagining of the Outsourcing of War and Security” and “No Accounting for Bad Contracting: Private Military and Security Contracts and Ineffective Regulation in Conflict Areas“
Sorcha MacLeod is an Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen and member of the United Nations Working Group on the use of Mercenaries. She is the author of Certifying Private Security Companies: Effectively Ensuring the Corporate Responsibility to Respect Human Rights?, Defining private security accountability and Regulating human rights in the context of outsourcing military logistics and armed security.
Christopher Kinsey is Lecturer in the Defence Studies Department at King’s College London. He is the author of International Law and the Control of Mercenaries and Private Military Companies, Turning war into business: Private security companies and commercial opportunism and the book Corporate Soldiers and International Security: The Rise of Private Military Companies
Anna Leander is Professor and Chair of the International Relations and Political Science Department at the Geneva Graduate Institute. She is the author of The Power to Construct International Security: On the Significance of Private Military Companies and Militarization matters: rhetorical resonances and market militarism. She is co-editor of Handbook of Private Military-Security Companies with Rita Abrahamsen.

This interview was recorded in July 2023.

This program is produced by Doug Becker, Ankine Aghassian, Maria Armoudian and Sudd Dongre.

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Scholars' Circle Interviews

Scholars’ Circle – When democracies prosecute corruptions of its former political leaders – July 7, 2024

July 7, 2024 host

The criminal indictments of former President Trump have created a political crisis in their unprecedented nature. Historically, U.S. presidents have not faced criminal charges, even in cases where there is a high likelihood of guilt, in large part due to respect for the office. Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon embodies this norm.

What can the U.S. learn from other countries that have prosecuted former presidents? And what can we learn from American history about the prosecutions of political figures? Is the prosecution of former heads of state simply the weaponization of justice mechanisms? And how common is this political charge? [ dur: 58mins. ]

Jeremi Suri is Professor in the Department of History and the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of The Impossible Presidency: The Rise and Fall of America’s Highest Office and his latest book Civil War by Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight For Democracy. He hosts the podcast This is Democracy.
Tom Ginsburg is Leo Spitz Professor of International Law and Ludwig and Hilde Wolf Research Scholar at the University of Chicago Law School. He is the author of the books The Endurance of National Constitutions, Constitutions in Authoritarian Regimes,and co-author of the paper The Comparative Constitutional Law of Presidential Impeachment.
Ezequiel González Ocantos is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations, and a Professorial Fellow of Nuffield College, at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Shifting Legal Visions: Judicial Change and Human Rights Trials in Latin America, The Politics of Transitional Justice in Latin America: Power, Norms and Capability Building, and co-author of Prosecutors, Voters, and the Criminalisation of Corruption in Latin America(w/ Paula Muñoz, Nara Pavao & Viviana Baraybar).

This interview was recorded August, 2023.

This program is produced by Doug Becker, Ankine Aghassian, Maria Armoudian and Sudd Dongre.

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The Scholars' Circle Interviews

Scholars’ Circle – Refugees right to return in international law ; Effects of earth’s magnetism on birds, whales, bees and turtles – September 8, 2024

Scholars’ Circle – Right of Self-Determination ; Civil War politics examined- September 1, 2024

Scholars’ Circle – Bangladesh students revolt that ousted its president – August 25, 2024

Scholars’ Circle – Reforming Supreme Court of United States ; How proxy wars are dominating international relations – August 18, 2024

Scholars’ Circle – President Biden chooses to step down and Kamala Harris ascendancy to lead the Democratic Party into November 2024 election – August 11, 2024

Scholars’ Circle – Catastrophic consequences of Factory Farming – August 4, 2024

Scholars’ Circle – A book author interview: History of California as a Slave State – July 28, 2024

Scholars’ Circle – Book Author interview : Informers Up Close, case-study of Communist Czechoslovakia (1945-1989) – July 21, 2024

Scholars’ Circle – When democracies prosecute corruptions of its former political leaders – July 7, 2024

By Maria Armoudian