Mark Danner
Monday 7:30-9:50p
Carnegie Council (New York campus)
In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001, officials of the US government put in place what one high White House official called a “new paradigm” in fighting wars. George W. Bush’s “War on Terror” would be an entirely different kind of conflict, one that would rely to an unprecedented degree on intelligence, surveillance and interrogation. As such it would require new tools and new methods, most prominent among them warrantless surveillance, to track terrorist suspects; “extraordinary rendition,” to seize those suspects and secretly transport them to friendly countries; and “enhanced interrogation,” to persuade them to give up the information they had. Together these techniques, and the alterations in or circumventions of the law that came with them, constituted what might be called “a state of exception” - a kind of improvised and undeclared State of Emergency or martial law. In this seminar, we will study Bush’s “state of exception,” identifying and analyzing its major components. We will trace their history and debate their effectiveness. We will compare the United States’ efforts to deal with terrorism with those of other democracies, including the United Kingdom and India. Finally we will closely follow the new Administration’s ongoing efforts to revise the “state of exception” – and to help the country emerge from it.

Requirements. This is a discussion course about democracy, terrorism and war. Its method is simple: track these issues closely in the daily and weekly press, print and electronic; read the class assignments, usually about a book a week, sometimes two; come to class prepared to talk about them. Or, in schematic form: