Violence and Middle East

speaker Madiha Tahir

Talk: Telling a True War Story: politics, publics, victims

Affiliation: Journalist & director of Wounds of Waziristan; Founder, Tanqeed Magazine; PhD candidate, Columbia University.

Event details: Tuesday, February 21, 2017

7:00 PM - 9:00 PM, LANG 301 - Gallery Theatre

Since the drone attacks began in Pakistan in 2004, much of the focus has been on the technology. And, although the borderlands between Pakistan and Afghanistan are endlessly debated and declared upon by journalists and pundits, the ordinary people who actually live there are rarely heard from. Tahir records the voices of those who have been either labeled “militants,” or summarily dismissed as “collateral damage.” She simply asks: Just what does it take to be considered human?

In addition to your listed reading for next week Tuesday, please watch theDemocracy Now! piece on her work, Wounds of  Waziristan:

(see Moodle/email for the link) 

Serial Killers!

Raya and Sekina

The Maadi Killer

(Mohamed Mostafa Mahmoud El Sayed)

Assault: Physical attack against the body of another

Intentional Homicide

Rape by region

Robberies and Burglaries

Crime in the Middle East, Statistics and Reality

• In the region, obtaining statistics on crime difficult
• definition of terms vary 
• The culture of crime reporting
• concerns about the police

An then there's how people feel about crime

What is security?

and

How can security be achieved?

• Protect the boundaries, regime and body-politic of a state through military action
• utilization of police and special forces within the interior

Security Approaches by states

Law-preserving

Law-preserving and Law making

“the right of all people to live in freedom and dignity, free from poverty and despair”, and recognized that “all individuals, in particular vulnerable people, are entitled to freedom from fear and freedom from want, with an equal opportunity to enjoy all their rights and fully develop their human potential”

Broadening the umbrella of security

• Economic
• Health
• Environmental 
• Personal
• community
• Political

"Human Security is not intended to displace state security, instead their relation is complementary"

Problems within the Human Security Paradigm

• too broad, lacks conceptual boundaries
• focus on institutional problem-solving
• Does not fully recognize that states can and often are the biggest threats to their own people

Critical Security Studies

The idea of 'Emancipation'

freeing the constrainsts that stop individuals from ' carrying out what they freely choose to do. 

• makes direct links between structural systems and individual suffering
• sees security as processual

Ken Booth

Text

Sense of order and crime after the removal of Hosni Mubarak