From the film’s website: ‘Human Terrain’ is two stories in one. The first exposes a new Pentagon effort to enlist the best and the brightest in a struggle for hearts and minds. Facing long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military initiates ‘Human Terrain Systems’, a controversial program that seeks to make cultural awareness the centerpiece of the new counterinsurgency strategy. Designed to embed social scientists with combat troops, the program swiftly comes under attack as a misguided and unethical effort to gather intelligence and target enemies. Gaining rare access to wargames in the Mojave Desert and training exercises at Quantico and Fort Leavenworth, ‘Human Terrain’ takes the viewer into the heart of the war machine and a shadowy collaboration between American academics and the military.

The other story is about a brilliant young scholar who leaves the university to join a Human Terrain team. After working as a humanitarian activist in the Western Sahara, Balkans, East Timor and elsewhere, and winning a Marshall Scholarship to study at Oxford, Michael Bhatia returns to Brown University to take up a visiting fellowship. In the course of conducting research on military cultural awareness, he is recruited by the Human Terrain program and eventually embeds with the 82nd Airborne in eastern Afghanistan. On the way to mediate an intertribal dispute, Bhatia is killed when his humvee hits a roadside bomb.

War becomes academic, academics go to war, and the personal tragically merges with the political, raising new questions about the ethics, effectiveness, and high costs of counterinsurgency.

Following the screening, James Der Derian (the film's Co-Director and Executive Producer) will discuss the film with the audience.

For more information about the film, please visit the Human Terrain website. 

Japan's experience with China's rise thus far suggests an increasingly tumultuous Northeast Asia. For a decade or more, the Sino-Japanese relationship has been punctuated with a series of political crises, and while the two governments in Beijing and Tokyo have sought to define a new forward looking agenda for their nations, it is the management of these crises that have shaped Japanese attitudes towards a rising China. Sheila Smith will present her analysis of Japan's domestic response to China's rise, and how it has affected the constellations of interests that shape Japan's policy response. She argues that these various moments of contention in Japan's relations with China, from Koizumi's Yasukuni Shrine visits, to resource development in the East China Sea, to the Gyoza "war," and the Senkaku "shock," could have provided the opportunity for building cooperative more effective conflict resolution mechanisms in the Sino-Japanese relationship. Yet within Japan, these various issues of contention have hardened Japanese attitudes rather than produced support for greater diplomatic compromise. As Chinese influence grows, Japan's postwar institutions and policy preferences are being sorely tested not only in the diplomatic realm, but from deeply within Japan's own society. Postwar beliefs about Japan's past, its security and its ability to cope with an increasingly volatile Northeast Asia are all being challenged.

Sheila A. Smith, an expert on Japanese politics and foreign policy, is senior fellow for Japan studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Smith directed the Council on Foreign Relation’s New Regional Security Architecture for Asia Program and currently leads a project on China and India as Emerging Powers: Challenge or Opportunity for the United States and Japan? She joined CFR from the East-West Center in 2007, where she directed a multinational research team in a cross-national study of the domestic politics of the U.S. military presence in Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. Smith was on the faculty of the Department of International Relations at Boston University (1994–2000), and on the staff of the Social Science Research Council (1992–1993). She has been a visiting researcher at two leading Japanese foreign and security policy think tanks, the Japan Institute of International Affairs and the Research Institute for Peace and Security, and at the University of Tokyo and the University of the Ryukyus. Smith earned her PhD and MA degrees from the Department of Political Science at Columbia University. She regularly contributes to CFR’s Asia Unbound blog.

About the topic: When democracy returned to Pakistan, Americans and Pakistanis had high expectations of an improved partnership. Those expectations have not been met: The events of 2011 were hard on both sides, and pushed the relationship to a series of dangerous crises. What can we expect in 2012 and beyond, not only in bilateral ties, but in the plans both countries have for regional stability in South Asia?

About the Speaker: Cameron Munter was sworn in as U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan on October 6, 2010. Prior to his nomination, Ambassador Munter completed his tour of duty at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. He served there first as Political-Military Minister-Counselor in 2009, then as Deputy Chief of Mission for the first half of 2010. He served as Ambassador in Belgrade from 2007 to 2009.

In 2006, he led the first Provincial Reconstruction Team in Mosul, Iraq. He was Deputy Chief of Mission in Prague from 2005 to 2007 and in Warsaw from 2002 to 2005. Before these assignments, in Washington, he was Director for Central Europe at the National Security Council (1999-2001), Executive Assistant to the Counselor of the Department of State (1998-1999), Director of the Northern European Initiative (1998), and Chief of Staff in the NATO Enlargement Ratification Office (1997-1998). His other domestic assignments include: Country Director for Czechoslovakia at the Department of State (1989-1991), and Dean Rusk Fellow at Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy (1991).

Aziz Huq earned his BA summa cum laude in International Studies and French from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1996 and his law degree from Columbia Law School in 2001, where he was awarded the John Ordronaux Prize. He clerked for Judge Robert D. Sack of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (2001–02) and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court of the United States (2003–04). After clerking he worked as Associate Counsel and then Director of the Liberty and National Security Project of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. He has also been a Senior Consultant Analyst for the International Crisis Group.

His research and teaching interests include constitutional law, national security and counterterrorism, federal jurisdiction, legislation, human rights, and comparative constitutional law.

Abstract

What forum should be employed to adjudicate the status of persons suspected of involvement in terrorism? Recent clashes between Congress and the President as to whether the status of terrorism suspects should be determined via Article III criminal process or military commissions have revived debate on this venue question. The problem is typically framed as a simple matter of law on the assumption that existing statutory and doctrinal rules already furnish dispositive guidance for sorting suspects between civilian and military venues. This article takes issue with that assumption. It argues that the choice of forum question can more profitably be understood as a problem of institutional design rather than a choice of law puzzle. A key institutional design decision that to date has been ignored is whether or when to create jurisdictional redundancy: When, that is, should overlapping jurisdictions vest the government with a choice of forums or an option to retry a suspect acquitted in an initial process? Such redundancy is currently pervasive. But conventional wisdom suggests that it both risks abuse and is needlessly costly. This Article demonstrates that jurisdictional redundancy has complex direct and indirect effects on the accuracy and cost of terrorism-related adjudication. It presents a comprehensive framework for analyzing jurisdictional redundancy by exploring how the latter influences error rates, system maintenance costs, externalities, information production, and incentives. Applying that framework, I suggest the current status quo of pervasive redundancy has surprising merit in contrast to two leading reform proposals.