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 [F] New York Times on the Web Forums  / Science  /

    Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.


Earliest Messages Previous Messages Recent Messages Outline (8913 previous messages)

lchic - 03:59am Feb 15, 2003 EST (# 8914 of 8916)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

violence

it looked like another incomprehensible example of the strife that has plagued mixed communities from Northern Ireland to Indonesia. But for Ashutosh Varshney, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, it backed up his theory that social organisations built on shared values - such as trade unions or political parties - are more likely to strengthen their communities against conflict. As he tells Michael Bond, it might form the basis of a new science

How did you come to be studying violence?

In the 1980s I trained in political economy, the central tenet of which is rationality - the idea that you can understand human behaviour through a cool calculation of costs and benefits. I found that idea valid for a lot of economics, but as a political scientist I found it very limiting. I wanted to work on a subject that involved more emotions than those generated by the question of prices. When I finished my PhD and started teaching at Harvard, Hindu-Muslim violence was once again breaking out in many parts of India. And research into this kind of violence left a lot to be desired. So in the summer of 1990 I went off to Kashmir, which was in the middle of a civil war, and I could see very clearly the role of emotion in politics.

How did it change your intellectual outlook?

The emotional intensity I encountered in the Kashmir valley not only overwhelmed me but also aroused deep intellectual curiosity. Until that time, my fieldwork had dealt with the politics of economic policy. Compared with that experience, the loss, pain and suffering I witnessed in the Kashmir valley appeared to belong to an entirely different realm of life, a realm not easily amenable to standard political-economic enquiry. I saw children who had lost their limbs, families that had lost their children, and yet people were willing to fight a war of insurgency. Their inner selves, they argued, were at stake, and they were prepared to suffer a lot of pain for dignity, identity and self-respect.

The intellectual challenge became obvious: can we create a science of pain, suffering, loss and death experienced in ethnic or communal conflict? In a way this subject is close to my heart. I want to come up with some practical ideas about peace. There is far too much violence in the world. I am also a bit of a rebel and I find it extremely hard to accept academic orthodoxy. Intellectually, if you give me an inch I will take a mile.

Are you saying that when it came to studying human behaviour, rationality was not a sufficient basis?

Let me put it this way: you cannot base your research into ethnic politics on a cool calculation of costs and benefits, which is the assumption a lot of people made through the 1990s. It is not irrelevant, but neither is it central. I am not saying that ethnic politics is entirely irrational, but emotions play a much greater role than people have assumed.

Have you ever witnessed violence yourself or been close to it?

Yes. When I was 13 there was a very big riot in the town of Aligarh, where we were living. It didn't affect me in a profound way at the time because I didn't see anyone killed in front of my eyes. I saw buses being burnt and the police everywhere. We couldn't go to school for two weeks, so we played cricket instead, which was great. There were people being killed but I was kept away from it.

The thing I remember about Aligarh was that it was a very segregated town. Before we moved there I had grown up with Muslims for much of my childhood, but in Aligarh I realised for the first time in my life that I had no Muslim friends and that the Muslim children were not part of my cricket team. I remember other things, such as seeing a Hindu nationalist being very enraged and driving off saying he had to teach Muslims a lesson. Things like that left a big impression on me. I didn't come to study violence because of something in my childhood, but whe

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