This recent panel at Duke Law School features Duke Professors Curtis Bradley, Charles Dunlap and Neil Siegel, and me.
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Monday, September 5, 2011
When we say that 9/11 changed something, what are we saying?
We are beginning a week of reflection on the events of September 11, 2001. Some 10th anniversary events will be memorials, remembering those who perished that day. Other events will seek to make sense of what 9/11 did – to New York, to the United States, to the world. So often remembered as a day that “changed everything,” academic panels will be held and op-eds written about just what 9/11 changed, and what it didn’t.
But what does it mean to say that 9/11 changed something? There is often a slipperiness in the causality. It is sometimes assumed that the terrorist attacks set certain historical events into motion. But if we see 9/11 as causing the politics, culture and military actions that followed, then we are giving the airplanes that slammed into buildings a powerful determinism. We are assuming that al Qaeda did not just slaughter thousands, but drove American politics for the next decade.
The post-9/11 era has sometimes been compared with the Cold War era to understand the way security concerns can impact rights. The Cold War era shares another feature with the post-9/11 years: a murkiness about causality. Although library shelves are filled with studies about what the Cold War did, just how the Cold War acted in history is sometimes left to the imagination. The Cold War is sometimes evoked as if it were a climate system – as in the “Cold War climate,” but this climate somehow nebulously drove politics and culture. Sometimes the Cold War is treated like a “hot” war, but without attention to its different military characteristics. Sometimes it is simply a time-span, but nevertheless retains its causal character.
Diplomatic historians devote themselves to running down the details and understanding how the domestic and global puzzle pieces fit together. But legal scholars often employ the Cold War as a category without this precision.
Similarly, 9/11 is seen as setting into play a series of events, without attention to whether we need a causal stopping point. This builds in an assumption that there was a direct and inevitable line from the terrorist attacks to the Global War on Terror, and to the way American domestic and military policies were formulated. This accords Osama bin Laden more power that he actually had.
The assumption that 9/11 directly caused post-9/11 American policy also obscures one of the experiences of September 11 itself: the profound confusion. When the second plane hit the South Tower of the World Trade Center, the terrible shock was coupled with fear and anxiety, and the question of what on earth was going on. President George W. Bush provided an answer: the nation was at war. The wartime frame provided the president with a powerful way to rally the nation. Americans came to see 9/11 as the opening of a wartime, but this displaced competing arguments at the time about what 9/11 was, and how the nation should respond.
On this 10th anniversary, we should see 9/11 as a crisis that enabled a political moment. In the face of this crisis, American leaders made choices. The most important choice of all was how to frame the terrorist attacks – to call the crisis a war.
Al Qaeda succeeded in a devastating attack on September 11. What the terrorists did not and could not do was to determine American policy and politics for the next decade. Even if 9/11 changed the way Americans thought about the world, it could not determine the actions we would take in its aftermath. It did not deprive American leaders of choices.
Cross-posted from Balkinization.
But what does it mean to say that 9/11 changed something? There is often a slipperiness in the causality. It is sometimes assumed that the terrorist attacks set certain historical events into motion. But if we see 9/11 as causing the politics, culture and military actions that followed, then we are giving the airplanes that slammed into buildings a powerful determinism. We are assuming that al Qaeda did not just slaughter thousands, but drove American politics for the next decade.
The post-9/11 era has sometimes been compared with the Cold War era to understand the way security concerns can impact rights. The Cold War era shares another feature with the post-9/11 years: a murkiness about causality. Although library shelves are filled with studies about what the Cold War did, just how the Cold War acted in history is sometimes left to the imagination. The Cold War is sometimes evoked as if it were a climate system – as in the “Cold War climate,” but this climate somehow nebulously drove politics and culture. Sometimes the Cold War is treated like a “hot” war, but without attention to its different military characteristics. Sometimes it is simply a time-span, but nevertheless retains its causal character.
Diplomatic historians devote themselves to running down the details and understanding how the domestic and global puzzle pieces fit together. But legal scholars often employ the Cold War as a category without this precision.
Similarly, 9/11 is seen as setting into play a series of events, without attention to whether we need a causal stopping point. This builds in an assumption that there was a direct and inevitable line from the terrorist attacks to the Global War on Terror, and to the way American domestic and military policies were formulated. This accords Osama bin Laden more power that he actually had.
The assumption that 9/11 directly caused post-9/11 American policy also obscures one of the experiences of September 11 itself: the profound confusion. When the second plane hit the South Tower of the World Trade Center, the terrible shock was coupled with fear and anxiety, and the question of what on earth was going on. President George W. Bush provided an answer: the nation was at war. The wartime frame provided the president with a powerful way to rally the nation. Americans came to see 9/11 as the opening of a wartime, but this displaced competing arguments at the time about what 9/11 was, and how the nation should respond.
On this 10th anniversary, we should see 9/11 as a crisis that enabled a political moment. In the face of this crisis, American leaders made choices. The most important choice of all was how to frame the terrorist attacks – to call the crisis a war.
Al Qaeda succeeded in a devastating attack on September 11. What the terrorists did not and could not do was to determine American policy and politics for the next decade. Even if 9/11 changed the way Americans thought about the world, it could not determine the actions we would take in its aftermath. It did not deprive American leaders of choices.
Cross-posted from Balkinization.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Exporting American Dreams -- Out in Paperback
My book Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood Marshall's African Journey, has just been released in a new paperback edition, with a new afterword, by Princeton University Press. Here's the book description:
And excerpts from a couple of reviews:Mary Dudziak's Exporting American Dreams tells the little-known story of Thurgood Marshall's work with Kenyan leaders as they fought with the British for independence in the early 1960s. Not long after he led the legal team in Brown v. Board of Education, Marshall aided Kenya's constitutional negotiations, as adversaries battled over rights and land--not with weapons, but with legal arguments. Set in the context of Marshall's civil rights work in the United States, this transnational history sheds light on legal reform and social change in the midst of violent upheavals in Africa and America. While the struggle for rights on both continents played out on a global stage, it was a deeply personal journey for Marshall. Even as his belief in the equalizing power of law was challenged during his career as a Supreme Court justice, and in Kenya the new government sacrificed the rights he cherished, Kenya's founding moment remained for him a time and place when all things had seemed possible.
[A] work for the ages. Dudziak's Exporting American Dreams creatively juxtaposes the African American struggle for equality in law with the Kenyan struggle for political independence from white British colonial rule. . . . Dudziak casts Marshall as a bridge between two epochal quests for human dignity, drawing painful parallels. -- Makau Mutua, Human Rights Quarterly
[A] thought provoking and painstakingly researched journey through a crucial transformational moment in two nations' histories. . . . [W]e are invited to reflect on the potentials and core limits on liberalism, democracy, and law as paths to transformation and justice. -- Julie Novkov, Law and Politics Book Review
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Cold War Civil Rights 2.0
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Available for Spring Course Adoptions
The official release date for War Time is February 6, 2012, but books should ship early enough for spring course adoptions. (Books usually start to ship about a month before the pub. date.)
I've received queries about this, so I asked the press about what to tell teachers who want to assign the book for spring 2012 courses. OUP advises that you place pre-orders with OUP. That way copies will ship to you as soon as copies are available. I'll post updates about this on the blog closer to the release date.
In the meantime, if you need more information about the book, please take a look at this site, which will be updated as more book information is available. Also, you might find it helpful to read the essay that led to the book, which can be downloaded for free from this site. The book goes well beyond the essay, of course, and is written in a way that will (I hope) appeal to a broader readership than the law review essay.
If you need more information, please contact me.
I've received queries about this, so I asked the press about what to tell teachers who want to assign the book for spring 2012 courses. OUP advises that you place pre-orders with OUP. That way copies will ship to you as soon as copies are available. I'll post updates about this on the blog closer to the release date.
In the meantime, if you need more information about the book, please take a look at this site, which will be updated as more book information is available. Also, you might find it helpful to read the essay that led to the book, which can be downloaded for free from this site. The book goes well beyond the essay, of course, and is written in a way that will (I hope) appeal to a broader readership than the law review essay.
If you need more information, please contact me.
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Teaching 9/11
As the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks nears, and as teachers and scholars try again to make sense of it all, it might be helpful to look back at what happened in classrooms across the country ten years ago. Here is a snippet from my Forward to a new issue of the Organization of American Historians Magazine of History, September 11: Ten Years After, which has just been published. For this excerpt, I relied on materials at the September 11 Digital Archive. I draw from the same sources in chapter 4 of War Time.
In classrooms across the country on September 11, 2001, lesson plans were abruptly abandoned. Students and teachers gathered around televisions, sharing the sense that “history” was being made before their eyes. Patricia Latessa, a Cincinnati high school teacher, turned on the cafeteria television “and watched history unfold.” She reflected as she watched about how the scenes of airplanes flying into buildings would impact her students. “The world they knew was bifurcated, cut in half, a time before and a time after”. An unsettling day seemed to require upsetting usual practices. The British Literature teacher at the Academy of the Sacred Heart, in Omaha, Nebraska, burst into a French class during an exam, and turned on the television. At another high school, the principal ordered that the televisions be turned off at midday. Colin Riebel later recalled: “We, the students, revolted. We argued this was a huge part of our history and we had a right to know what was happening to our country. The school complied and let us watch the news again”.Continue reading here. Cross-posted from the Legal History Blog.
Monday, July 4, 2011
Forthcoming February 2012
War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in February 2012. You can pre-order the book from OUP or Amazon.com.
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