The Reflection Cafe December 2005

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Islam, Islam-the West Relations III, The Reflection Cafe
Great Power Stakes in Central Asia, Robert Legvold
The Flight from Reality in the Human Sciences, Ian Shapiro
WildCam Africa, National Geographic
Some Ideas on Turkey's Bid for EU Membership (II), The Reflection Cafe
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Islam, Islam-the West Relations III

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Islam in Europe and the United States
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Islam and Modernity: Muslims in Europe and the United States, Iftikhar H. Malik
Special Issue on Debating Moderate Islam, AJISS
Islam and Europe's Future, Paul Marshall
Western Muslims: Isolation or Integration?, Tariq Ramadan
Karen Hughes and American Muslims: Alliance against Extremism , Muqtedar Khan
Future Islam: American Muslims and the Rising Tide of Exclusivism , Louay Safi
Resilient Islam: Muslim Controversies in Europe, Paul Statham
The Crescent and the Union: Islam Returns to Western Europe, John D. Snethen
Is There a Muslim Diaspora? Promises and Challenges of Islam in Europe, Africa and North America , Cornell University
Organizing Islam for Politics in Western Europe, Carolyn M. Warner & Manfred W. Wenner

Islam in Europe and the United States, CSIS-Shireen Hunter

Islamic Modernism, Nationalism, and Fundamentalism, Mansoor Moaddel
Islam: Vienna Conference Ends With Appeals For Understanding, Tolerance , RFE-RL
Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, L.P., Harvey

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Islam in Turkey

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Islam in Turkish Politics: Turkey's Quest for Democracy without Islam , Mustafa Erdogan
Islam and Kemalism in Turkey, Bekim Agai
Islamic Calvinists: Change And Conservatism In Central Anatolia, ESI
Fethullah Gülen: A Modern Turkish-Islamic Reformist? , Bekim Agai
Globalization and Diversification of Islamic Movements: Three Turkish Cases, Ahmet T. Kuru-PSQ
Islamists and Democracy: Transition and Globalization in a Muslim State, Yildiz Atasoy
Clinton: Promoting Dialogue is up to Turkey, Ali Cimen
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Various Ideas & Studies on Islam, Islam-the West Relations
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Political Islam: Image and Reality , Mohammed Ayoob
Authority, Continuity and Change in Islamic Law, Wael B. Hallaq
Islamic Spirituality in the Modern World, Kamran Mofid
Islam Dot Com, Injy El-Kashef
Dealing with the Muslim World: Five Western Mistakes, Kishore Mahbubani
Civilizations of the East and West: Conflict or Dialogue?, Al-Sayyed Yassin
Muslims and Anti-Semitism, Tariq Ramadan
The Globalisation of Islamic Relief, Ehsan Masood
Acceptance of the Other: Liberal Interpretations of Islam and Judaism in Egypt and Israel, Shimon Shamir
Islam and Secular State Religions in Azerbaijan and Central Asian Countries, Nariman Gasimzada
Fighting the War of Ideas, Zeyno Baran
How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West, Perez Zagorin
Ijtihad: Reinterpreting Islamic Principles for the Twenty-first Century, USIP Special Report
Islamic Perspectives on Peace and Violence, USIP-Abdul Aziz Said, Muqtedar Khan, Sulayman Nyang, Mohammed Abu-Nimer
Islam and Democracy, USIP-Laith Kubba, Muqtedar Khan, Mahmood Monshipouri, Neil Hicks
Islamists at the Ballot Box: Findings from Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, and Turkey, USIP-Judy Barsalou
Islamist Politics in Iraq after Saddam Hussein, USIP-Graham E. Fuller
Islam and Process of Democratization in Southeast Asia, Hassan Wirajuda
Islam and Democracy: Malaysian vs Indonesian Way , Endy M. Bayuni
Democracy and Development: Challenges for the Islamic World , CSID 2005 Conference Report
Democracy and Development: Challenges for the Islamic World , CSID 2005 Conference Abstracts & Final Papers
Dialogue vs. Conflict: Islam in a Globalized World (The Second International Conference on Islam) , Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison
The International Centre for Islam and Pluralism
Muslim World Journal of Human Rights
Muslim Public Affairs Journal, MPAC
Muslim Democrat Newsletter , CSID
Future Islam Journal
Ijtihad: Muqtedar Khan's Column on Islam and Global Affairs
Muslim Futures Network, WNRF
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Islam, Islam-the West Relations II, The Reflection Cafe
Islam, Islam-the West Relations I, The Reflection Cafe

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Great Power Stakes in Central Asia

Robert Legvold, Columbia University

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More than a decade after the fall, the great powers, including Russia, remain adrift when dealing with the immense space that was the Soviet Union. For much of this time, their confusion and indifference went largely unnoticed. If they miscast or obscured the challenges raised by the large floating chunks of a now defunct empire, the oversight seemed less blameworthy, given the remoteness, self-absorption, and weakness of so many of these unexpected new states. Then came September 11, 2001, and, in the mobilization that followed, these distant parts overnight became a key theater in the “twenty-first century’s first global war.” Central Asia, in particular, ceased to be a collection of forgettable “-stans,” and emerged as an integral piece in the war on Al Qaeda and the Taliban. In its wake the United States and other NATO members were suddenly a military presence in three of the five Central Asian states, and everyone, beginning with Moscow and Beijing, understood that the world had changed.

China, Japan, Europe, Russia, and the United States had from the start known that the post-Soviet space would be a more complicated— albeit less intimidating—affair than the Soviet Union, a single, united superpower...

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Full-text available, click here.

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Thinking Strategically: The Major Powers, Kazakhstan, and the Central Asian Nexus, Edited by Robert Legvold (For Russian version, click here)

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The Flight from Reality in the Human Sciences

Ian Shapiro, Yale University

Princeton University Press, 2005

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Introduction [HTML]

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In this captivating yet troubling book, Ian Shapiro offers a searing indictment of many influential practices in the social sciences and humanities today. Perhaps best known for his critique of rational choice theory, Shapiro expands his purview here. In discipline after discipline, he argues, scholars have fallen prey to inward-looking myopia that results from--and perpetuates--a flight from reality.

In the method-driven academic culture we inhabit, argues Shapiro, researchers too often make display and refinement of their techniques the principal scholarly activity. The result is that they lose sight of the objects of their study. Pet theories and methodological blinders lead unwelcome facts to be ignored, sometimes not even perceived. The targets of Shapiro's critique include the law and economics movement, overzealous formal and statistical modeling, various reductive theories of human behavior, misguided conceptual analysis in political theory, and the Cambridge school of intellectual history.

As an alternative to all of these, Shapiro makes a compelling case for problem-driven social research, rooted in a realist philosophy of science and an antireductionist view of social explanation. In the lucid--if biting--prose for which Shapiro is renowned, he explains why this requires greater critical attention to how problems are specified than is usually undertaken. He illustrates what is at stake for the study of power, democracy, law, and ideology, as well as in normative debates over rights, justice, freedom, virtue, and community. Shapiro answers many critics of his views along the way, securing his position as one of the distinctive social and political theorists of our time.

Ian Shapiro is Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale University, where he also serves as Henry R. Luce Director of the Yale Center for International and Area Studies. Among his many books are The State of Democratic Theory and, with Michael J. Graetz, Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Fight over Taxing Inherited Wealth (Princeton); and The Moral Foundations of Politics.

Endorsements:
"Ian Shapiro's work has inspired a generation of both scholars and practitioners of politics--for the simple reason that he meets the standards of the former and the needs of the latter. In this book, he helps rescue the study of politics and society from moralists, who believe individuals have more control over their fates than history or economics would support, and from those scientists who view human behavior as mechanistic. He is a theoretician with solid grounding in the real world, a master-observer of the human capacity that is at the heart of the best and worst in political and social life--and everything in between: choice. He writes with a clarity that is refreshing as well as redolent of the confidence he rightly feels in his own judgments."--Strobe Talbott, President of the Brookings Institution

"With his characteristic boldness and insight, Ian Shapiro surveys the reigning theories in the social sciences and finds them wanting. A superb collection of essays from a trenchant critic."--Joyce Appleby, Professor Emerita of History, University of California, Los Angeles, author of Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination

"Informed by normative political theory and the philosophy of science, and grounded in a deep knowledge of empirical studies in political science, Ian Shapiro's essays raise fundamental questions for those in all the disciplines--including law--who seek to understand and explain social behavior in the construction of decent public institutions."--Mark Tushnet, Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Constitutional Law, Georgetown University

"It is always a pleasure to read Ian Shapiro's reflections on political theory, the methodology of political science, and on the state of the discipline. He is sceptical but not cynical, he is critical without malice, and he laces his insights with a dry wit that makes some sometimes quite tough argumentation unusually digestible. It is good to have these pieces so conveniently assembled in one place."--Alan Ryan, New College, Oxford

"This is an important book for two main reasons. First, its central argument is, undoubtedly, correct. Recent methodological advances in the social sciences, combined with pressures from increased professionalization, have rendered epidemic the 'pathologies' that are the book's subject. Second, Shapiro is one of only a handful of scholars who have drawn social scientists' attention to these problems. The tightly argued essays that comprise the book are written in a clear, jargon-free prose that will make them accessible to scholars across a range of fields and disciplines."--Clarissa Rile Hayward, Ohio State University, author of De-Facing Power

"This lucid, brilliant, and beautifully written volume of essays contributes substantially to our understanding of the philosophy and practice of research in the human sciences. Anyone undertaking such research, or interested in its results, will want to read it."--Elisabeth Ellis, Texas A&M University, author of Kant's Politics: Provisional Theory for an Uncertain World

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments ix
INTRODUCTION: Fear of Not Flying 1

CHAPTER ONE: The Difference That Realism Makes: Social Science and the Politics of Consent by Ian Shapiro and Alexander Wendt 19

CHAPTER TWO: Revisiting the Pathologies of Rational Choice by Donald Green and Ian Shapiro 51CHAPTER THREE: Richard Posner's Praxis 100

CHAPTER FOUR: Gross Concepts in Political Argument 152

CHAPTER FIVE: Problems, Methods, and Theories in the Study of Politics: Or, What's Wrong with Political Science and What to Do about It 178

CHAPTER SIX: The Political Science Discipline: A Comment on David Laitin 204
Index 213

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http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/8083.html

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WildCam Africa

National Geographic

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To view WildCam Africa on either a Mac or a PC, you will need the latest version of the free RealPlayer plugin. Visit Real.com and look for the link to download the free RealPlayer. This live video stream is being hosted by RealNetworks, Inc.If you encounter an error message, then we have run into a technical problem with the live transmission. Please check back shortly.

Video Highlights

Embark on a quiet adventure and watch wildlife gather at Pete's Pond. Baby baboons scurry in the dust. Wildebeests push and shove to make room at the watering hole. Warthogs wallow in the mud. Catch these moments and more in these video clips.

How We Did It
It took the technical ingenuity of Cameron Murie, a little tinkering with satellite coordinates, some switching and routing of video data, and no small share of critterproofing to get live WildCam broadcasts from Pete's Pond to your computer screen. Enjoy the show!

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Some Ideas on Turkey's Bid for EU Membership (II)

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European Review-Special Issue on Turkey
Several Articles on Turkey-EU Relations , Perceptions Journal
Turkey and the European Tent , YaleGlobal
Democratization and Challenges to the Turkish State in the Presence of a Powerful EU Anchor: The Post-Helsinki Era, Ziya Onis & Fuat Keyman
The New Turkey: The Quiet Revolution at the Edge of Europe, Chris Morris
EU and Turkey Facing the Same Terror-Security-Liberty Trade-Off, Senem Aydin
The Impact of Turkey's Membership on EU Voting, Richard Baldwin & Mika Widgrén
Turkey and the European Union, H.Kramer, S.Larrabee, S.Ozel
Turkey in the European Union: Euthanasia or the Rejuvenation of Europe? , Miroslav N. Jovanovic
Is Turkey "Enlightened" Enough to Join the EU?, Jean-Pierre Lehmann
Shift Europe's Boundary, Jack Straw
Turkey's Impulse for Reform , Tulin Daloglu
Turkey's Journey Into Europe , Dimitris Keridis
Europe is Going to Need Turkey , Giles Merritt
Turkey's Accession to EU: Exorcising "Clash of Civilisations" Ghost , The New Nation
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Some Ideas on Turkey's Bid for EU Membership (I), The Reflection Cafe
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