Sir Lawrence Freedman, Professor of War Studies at King's College London, will present on his new book, Strategy: A History (Oxford University Press, 2013).

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Sir Lawrence Freedman is Professor of War Studies at King's College London. Professor Freedman has held his appointment since 1982, and he has served as Vice-Principal at King's College since 2003. Prior to his time at King's College, Professor Freedman held research appointments at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Nuffield College Oxford, and the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1995, awarded the Commander of the British Empire in 1996, and the Knight Commander of St. Michael and St. George in 2003. Most recently, Professor Freedman was elected in 2009 as a member of the official inquiry into Britain and the 2003 Iraq War.

ABOUT THE TOPIC: Further details about this event will be posted shortly.

Haifa, the so-called "mixed city" of Jews and Arabs during the British Mandate period, also called the city of "co-existence" in the minds of its Jewish residents today, this city real and imagined will be the focus of this lecture, which suggests an archeology of memory of a conflict which is over and a conflict which still lingers.

Yfaat Weiss is professor in the department of the History of the Jewish People and Head of the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of various studies on German and Central European History, as well as on Jewish and Israeli History.

Barry Weingast will present findings from a paper he co-authored with Douglass C. North from Washington University and Gary W. Cox from Stanford University. "The Violence Trap: A Political-Economic Approach to the Problems of Development" examines the problems of development – with a billion people mired in poverty and governments resistant to economic reform – economists and political scientists have proposed a wide range of development or poverty traps:  self-reinforcing mechanisms that prevent developing countries from embarking on the path of steady development. 

Please see attached paper. 

Speaker Bio:

Barry R. Weingast is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution as well as the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University; he served as chair of that department from 1996 to 2001. Weingast is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He has written extensively on problems of political economy of development, federalism, legal institutions and the rule of law, and democracy. He is co-author of Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (with Douglass North and John Wallis, 2009, Cambridge University Press); editor (with Donald Wittman) The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy (Oxford University Press, 2006); and author (with Douglass North) of "Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutions Governing Public Choice in 17th Century England" Journal of Economic History (1989). He has won numerous awards, including the William Riker Prize for scholarly achievement in political science; the James L. Barr Memorial Prize in Public Economics;  the Distinguished Scholar Award in Public Policy, Martin School of Public Policy, University of Kentucky, and the Franklin L. Burdette Pi Sigma Alpha Award (with Kenneth Schultz: the American Political Science Association’s prize for the best paper at the annual meetings).