Friday, 9/25, 1 - 6PM + Saturday. 9/26, 11AM - 7PM

The conference addresses two major subjects:

The multiple meanings of the new urban wars: asymmetric armed conflict, US Army training for the "urban enemy," forms of economic violence that kill, cities and urban space as a technology for war, reapropriating the city of fear, civil war refugees and their flight from and to cities, measuring human rights violations during war.

The limits of power and of war: the role of the civic, of war and of law in shaping a growing global web of interdependencies that can contest the most powerful states and that can undermine the idea of victory in war. Conditions under which powerlessness becomes complex and transcends mere victimhood.

SPEAKERS
Arjun Appadurai, Elazar Barkan, Ted Byfield, Partha Chatterjee, Tony Conrad, Susan Crile, Claire Cutler, Ashley Dawson, James Der Derian, Environmentalists Against War (Gar Smith), Yasmine Ergas, Stephen Graham, Karen Jacobsen, Fiona Jeffries, Danny Kaplan, Jennifer S. Light, Peter Marcuse, Suketu Mehta, Rosalind C. Morris, Les Roberts, Saskia Sassen, Jane Schneider, Richard Sennett, Jessica Stern, Ida Susser, Gediminas Urbonas, Sudhir Venkatesh, Eyal Weizman
and
The Dictionary of War Project (Florian Schneider and Susanne Lang) in their first US presentation.

Organized by The Committee on Global Thought and Saskia Sassen.

Co-sponsors: GSAPP, Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life, Mailman School of Public Health, New York Theological Seminary, Center for the Study of Human Rights, Department of Sociology, ISERP.

Visit cgt.columbia.edu for more information

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Friday, September 25, 2009
1:00pm - 6:45 pm
Wood Auditorium, Avery Hall

1:00 - 1:30 Introduction

Saskia Sassen
Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology and Member, Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University.

1:30 - 3 Geographies of Terror

Chair: Saskia Sassen

Arjun Appadurai
Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University

Stephen Graham
Professor of Human Geography and Deputy Director of the Centre for the Study of Cities and Regions, University of Durham.

Jessica Stern
Professor of Law and Affiliate, the Belfer Center's International Security Program, Harvard University.

3-4 War and Displacement

Chair: Elazar Barkan, Center for the Study of Human Rights, Columbia University.

Les Roberts
Associate Clinical Professor of Population and Family Health, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, and former Director of Health Policy at the International Rescue Committee.

Karen Jacobsen
Associate Professor at the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy, and Academic Director of the Feinstein International Center, Tufts University

4 - 4:15 Break

4:15 - 5:15 Economic Violence

Chair: Yasmine Ergas, Center for the Study of Human Rights, Columbia University

Sudhir Venkatesh
William B. Ransford Professor of Sociology and Director, Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, Columbia University.

Claire Cutler
Professor of International Law and Relations, University of Victoria, Canada.

5:15 - 6:45 Urban Spaces as a Technology of War

Chair: Claire Cutler, Law and International Relations, Victoria U.

Eyal Weizman
Architect, Profesor and Director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College. Member, architectural collective "Decolonizing Architecture" in Beit Sahour/Palestine.

Peter Marcuse
Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Presevation at Columbia University.

Partha Chatterjee
Professor of Anthropology and Member, Committee on Global thought at Columbia University and, Professor of Political Science at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences in Calcutta, India.

6:45 - 7:30 Reception

Saturday, September 26, 2009
11:00am - 7 pm

The Dictionary of War Project

The concepts will be presented in 20-minutes time slots, in alphabetical order and without a break; they are recorded in a television studio setup, encoded in real-time and published on the internet.

11:00 Cold war planning - Jennifer S. Light (Northwestrn University)
11:30 Information - Ted Byfield (Parsons, The New School for Design)
12:00 Not-not- war - Rosalind C. Morris (Columbia University)
13:00 Pigeon - Gediminas Urbonas (MIT, Visual Arts Program)
13:30 Re-appropriating the city of fear - Fiona Jeffries (CUNY, Graduate Center)
14:00 Marketing War - Danny Kaplan (Tel Aviv University, Israel)
14:30 Annexpression - Tony Conrad (University of Buffalo, New York)
15:00 The Wall - Richard Sennett (New York University and London School of Economics)
15:30 Urban Warfare - Gar Smith (Environmentalists Against War)
16:00 Virtuous War - James Der Derian (Brown University)
16.30 War Games - Ashley Dawson (CUNY Graduate School)
17:00 Explosion Implosion: war in our time - Susan Crile (Artist, New York)
17.30 When a riot becomes a war - Suketu Mehta (New York University)
18:00 Wounded Cities - Ida Susser and Jan Schneider (CUNY Graduate Center)

(Dictionaryofwar.org is a collaborative platform for creating concepts on the topic of "war". This is their first US presentation. Previous events have been held in Frankfurt, Munich, Graz, Berlin, Novi Sad, Gwangju, Bolzano and Taipei. Fifteen speakers will each present a concept that plays a crucial role in the contemporary discourse on war and urban space. Such a concept might be a term that needs to be newly created, one that has been neglected so far, or one that needs to be re-invented.)