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Ron Hassner

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Ron Hassner
Born
Ron E. Hassner

1971
Alma materStanford University (Ph.D.)
Columbia University (M.A.)
LSE (B.Sc.)
InstitutionsUniversity of California, Berkeley
Main interests
Religious violence

Ron Hassner is a Professor of Political Science at University of California, Berkeley. He holds a Chancellor's Chair in Political Science and is the Helen Diller Family Chair in Israel Studies at Berkeley.[1][2] His research focuses on religion and conflict, especially conflicts over sacred places, religion in the military, as well as on territorial disputes and interrogational torture. He is a faculty director of the Helen Diller Institute for Jewish Law and Israel Studies at U.C. Berkeley.[3] Hassner is a recipient of Berkeley's campus-wide “Distinguished Teaching Award”.[4]

Hassner holds a B.Sc. in International Relations from The London School of Economics (1995), a masters in International Affairs from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University (1997), a masters in Religious Studies from Stanford University (2000), and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University (2003). He was a post-doctoral scholar at Harvard University’s Olin Center. He joined the political science faculty at the University of California, Berkeley in 2004. Since then, he was visiting scholar at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya.


Research

Hassner is a scholar of religion and international conflict. He has studied territorial disputes, including disputes over holy places, the role of religion in militaries and on the battlefield, and the history of torture under the Spanish Inquisition.

Religion as a Cause of War

In War on Sacred Grounds [5] he argued that conflicts over holy places are difficult to resolve because these sites pose an indivisibility problem: they cannot be shared or divided the way other pieces of land are often shared to resolve conflict.[6][7] The Temple Mount in Jerusalem and the Great Mosque of Mecca function as key case studies as do contested shrines in India.[8]

In this book and in related articles and book chapters he also explains the many motivations for conflicts at sacred sites, including the use of these structured as insurgent hideouts and as prominent targets in civil wars.[9]

Religion in the Military

His work subsequently shifted to analyzing religion as a factor during war, including such wars in which religion is not a motivator. In Religion in the Military Worldwide[10] he commissioned essays on the many ways in which religion shapes military service around the world, including countries like Canada, Turkey, Japan, and Iran. In Religion on the Battlefield[11] Hassner looks at the effects of religion on tactics and strategy. The focus here is on wars in which religion did not necessarily play a motivating role, to show that even in crucial military settings (such as World War I and World War II) religion enabled and constrained military decision making[12][13]

These essays explore religious rituals, conflicts over religious freedom in the military, how religion affects promotion or unit formation, and how religion in the military affects religion in society more broadly. He shows how sacred time and space, rituals and authority structures, had an impact on soldiers, commanders, and units. Salient examples include the bombing of Rome in World War II, and the Yom Kippur War. In this book and related publications he tries to shift the focus of the study of religion and war away from studying (primarily Muslim) terrorists and insurgents and onto the effects of religion on conventional armies, including Western secular armies.

Torture

Hassner's most recent work is on torture. He has dispelled the "myth of the ticking time bomb scenario" as a dangerous yet influential metaphor that bears no relationship to reality. [14] He argues that much of the current debate on torture draws on flimsy and biased sources. [15] Though much current torture criticism relies on the claim that "torture doesn't work", he shows that the evidence to back that claim is weak. Moreover, Americans find the claim to be unpersuasive: they believe that torture is quick and effective. In contrast, Americans find the claim that torture is cruel to be a far more persuasive argument against torture. [16]

In Anatomy of Torture [17] he analyzes hundreds of trials from the archives of the Spanish Inquisition to uncover the causes, character, and consequences of torture. His book analyzes dozens of cases of torture from Spain and Mexico in the 16th and 17th centuries, relying on archival evidence from Europe and the Americas. These files demonstrate that “torture yielded information that was often reliable: witnesses in the torture chamber and witnesses that were not tortured provided corresponding information about collaborators, locations, events, and practices. Nonetheless, inquisitors treated the results of interrogations in the torture chamber with skepticism.” The torture conducted by the Inquisition yielded corroborative evidence that the Inquisition found useful but it did so slowly and at tremendous social, political, and moral cost. Hassner urges caution in applying those findings to current torture debates.

See also

References

  1. ^ Pine, Dan (May 3, 2019). "A $5 million gift will create UC Berkeley's first endowed Israel studies chair".
  2. ^ Staff, Maya Akkaraju | Senior (May 6, 2019). "UC Berkeley creates endowed faculty chair in Israel studies". The Daily Californian.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  3. ^ Pine, Dan (December 16, 2016). "Making strides: Israel studies flourishing at Cal".
  4. ^ Jeong, Heyun (March 17, 2014). "3 professors win 2014 Distinguished Teaching Award". The Daily Californian.
  5. ^ Hassner, Ron E. (December 2012). War on Sacred Grounds. ISBN 978-0801478802.
  6. ^ Emmett, Chad F. (May 16, 2010). "War on Sacred Grounds (review)". The Middle East Journal. 64 (2): 302–303 – via Project MUSE.
  7. ^ Sachs, Natan B. (2010). "Book Review: Hassner, R. E. (2009). War on Sacred Grounds. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press". Comparative Political Studies. 43 (10): 1317–1321. doi:10.1177/0010414010371186. S2CID 154838221.
  8. ^ Rudoren, Jodi (November 22, 2014). "Mistrust Threatens Delicate Balance at a Sacred Site in Jerusalem (Published 2014)". The New York Times.
  9. ^ Hassner, Ron E. (March 1, 2006). "Fighting insurgency on sacred ground". The Washington Quarterly. 29 (2): 149–166. doi:10.1162/wash.2006.29.2.149. S2CID 110929395.
  10. ^ Hassner, Ron E. (2014). Religion in the Military Worldwide. ISBN 978-1107037021.
  11. ^ Hassner, Ron E. (18 June 2016). Religion on the Battlefield. ISBN 978-0801451072.
  12. ^ "Religion on the Battlefield". April 14, 2017 – via www.foreignaffairs.com. {{cite magazine}}: Cite magazine requires |magazine= (help)
  13. ^ "Book Review: Religion on the Battlefield - ProQuest". search.proquest.com.
  14. ^ Hassner, Ron E. (January 2, 2018). "The Myth of the Ticking Bomb". The Washington Quarterly. 41 (1): 83–94. doi:10.1080/0163660X.2018.1445367. S2CID 158065052.
  15. ^ Hassner, Ron E. (January 2, 2020). "What Do We Know about Interrogational Torture?". International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence. 33 (1): 4–42. doi:10.1080/08850607.2019.1660951. S2CID 213244706.
  16. ^ Hassner, Ron E. (2022). "Persuasive and Unpersuasive Critiques of Torture". Perspectives on Politics: 1–14. doi:10.1017/S1537592721004138.
  17. ^ Hassner, Ron E. (2022). Anatomy of Torture. ISBN 978-1501762031.
  • Personal homepage [1]
  • Faculty page at U.C. Berkeley [2]
  • Google scholar [3]
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