Chibli Mallat, LAPA Fellow

Candidate for the Presidency of Lebanon

In addition to being a visiting professor at Princeton and a LAPA fellow for 2006-2007, Chibli Mallat is also a candidate for the presidency of Lebanon. He was featured in a 2006 Newsweek profile as an inspiring contender for that post and was interviewed by the BBC program Hardtalk. He is a commentator with the influential international Project Syndicate.

Since the Israeli-Hezbollah war of summer 2006, he has been interviewed frequently about the current situation in Lebanon and was a featured expert in the New York Times op-ed treatment of the subject. He is also a frequent commentator for the Daily Star (Lebanon).

Mallat has also been a commentator on trial of Saddam Hussein, including commentaries on Saddam's legal appeal and on his execution. As a strong believer in the rule of law, Mallat had been a long-time anti-Saddam activist.

Deborah Pearlstein, LAPA Visiting Scholar

On Counterterrorism

In February 2007, Deborah Pearlstein joined LAPA as a full-time visiting scholar, coming from her position as the Director of the US Law and Security Program at Human Rights First.

On December 8, 2006, a federal judge in Washington, D.C. heard oral arguments in a case against former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld brought on behalf of Iraqi and Afghan victims of torture in U.S. detention facilities. Pearlstein presented the plaintiffs' Geneva Convention claims in court. Listen to NPR's coverage.

Early last December, Pearlstein joined former White House Associate Counsel Bradford Berenson, Duke University Professor Scott Silliman, and Georgetown University Law Center Professor Neal Katyal, in a round table discussion on detaining and prosecuting terrorist suspects. The discussion was part of American Bar Association's Annual Review of the Field of National Security Law. Watch the CSPAN video.

In January 2007, Pearlstein lectured on issues of executive power in U.S. counterterrorism efforts at the 20th annual winter course International School on Disarmament and Research on Conflicts (ISODARCO) in Andalo, Italy. ISODARCO has organized residential courses on global security since 1966; the courses are intended for those who would like to play a more active and technically competent role in the field of international conflicts.

In addition, Deborah recently participated as a "guest respondent" in an extended blog discussion with a group of international law scholars when John Bellinger guest blogged for a week at Opinio Juris during the week of January 15. Opinio Juris is "A weblog dedicated to reports, commentary, and debate on current developments and scholarship in the fields of international law and politics." And Belliger is, in the words of Opinio Juris "the State Department Legal Adviser, the top lawyer at the Department of State. In that capacity he is the principal adviser on all domestic and international law matters to the Department of State, the Foreign Service, and the diplomatic and consular posts abroad." The exchange was about, among other things, issues of the treatment of detainees in U.S. operations since September 11.

Christine Stansell, LAPA Faculty Associate

On Justice in Rwanda

Christine Stansell, Edwards Professor of American History at Princeton, is studying post-genocidal justice in Rwanda as part of her larger project on post-catastrophic Rwanda and Cambodia. In the Spring 2007 issue of Dissent Magazine, Professor Stansell offers an account of the reconciliation process that the present government of Rwanda instituted in 2001. "Gacaca," as the process is called, marries a truth-finding aim not unlike that of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) with a legal process for convicting and punishing individuals accused of participating in the genocide. In fact, it is the first and only effort to mete out justice to "ordinary men" (and women) involved in a genocide.

On its face, Gacaca seems like a clear, innovative mechanism for holding perpetrators of genocide accountable in a process grounded in both the rule of law and community justice. It is an effort that seems all the more admirable because it was instituted and is administered by a government mostly composed of the very minority that was targeted in the genocide. As Professor Stansell shows, however, its purpose and its effect are widely contested both within Rwanda and in the human rights community. Essentially, struggles and critiques revolve around the painful stories that get told and the ones that are excluded, whether prisoners get a fair hearing through Gacaca in the absence of legal counsel and appeal procedures, possible future consequences for regional stability stemming from the creation of a large population of convicts stripped of rights, whether Gacaca serves anyone at all since attendance is typically low, and whether Gacaca is a "show trial" staged by the present government of Rwanda in order to attract international capital.

Professor Stansell concludes that Gacaca is deeply flawed in significant ways. In the absence of a better alternative, though, Gacaca is better than nothing. It permits some (though certainly not all) truths to surface. In a nation that is populated mostly by bystanders and perpetrators of the genocide, these painful truths are subject to serious forgetting.

Paul Starr, LAPA Faculty Associate

Interpreting Liberal Ideas in Everyday Life

In addition to being the Stuart Professor of Communications and Public Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School, a Professor of Sociology and a LAPA faculty associate, Paul Starr is a founding editor of the journal The American Prospect. In conjunction with the forthcoming publication of his new book called Freedom's Power, he has started a blog to discuss the issues raised by the book.