Panel discussion featuring the following presenters and topics:

Pamela Ballinger (University of Michigan): Opening Remarks
Hugh Gusterson (George Washington University): “Robotic War”
Anna Weichselbraun (Stanford University): “Temporal Grammars of Nuclear Expertise: Forestalling the Future of Disarmament”

This symposium explores possible future directions in the realms of war and peace, focusing on the inextricably entangled nature of these two spheres. Technologies of war and violence, such as drones and nuclear weapons/energy, for instance, also possess many peacetime functions. Humanitarianism similarly blurs the lines between war and peace, given that humanitarian initiatives may not only respond to situations of war but may aim to forestall it–sometimes through preemptive military actions. With the rise of unconventional and robotic warfare, too, the "front" becomes a hybrid of fighting and governance, raising pointed questions as to the future boundaries between civilian and soldier. The three panels comprising this symposium explore these and many other timely issues.

Pamela Ballinger is Fred Cuny Professor of the History of Human Rights and associate professor of history at the University of Michigan. She is the author of History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans (Princeton University Press, 2003). She has published on topics such as refugees, displacement, ethnic cleansing, and human rights in journals that include Comparative Studies in Society and History, Contemporary European History, Current Anthropology, History and Memory, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, New Global Studies, and Past and Present.

Hugh Gusterson is professor of anthropology and international affairs at George Washington University. Gusterson is the author of Nuclear Rites (University of California Press, 1996), People of the Bomb (University of Minnesota Press, 2004), and Drone (MIT Press, 2016). He is co-editor of Cultures of Insecurity (University of Minnesota Press, 1999), The Insecure American (University of California Press, 2009), and Why America’s Top Pundits Are Wrong (University of California Press, 2005). He has a regular column for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and for the new public anthropology website, Sapiens. He has also published in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Science, Nature, New Scientist, American Scientist, and The Sciences. From 2009-2012 Gusterson served on the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association, in which capacity he co-chaired the final phase of approval of the Association’s new ethics code. He is president of the American Ethnological Society, and was a member of the American Anthropological Association’s Task Force on Engagement with Israel/Palestine.

Anna Weichselbraun is a Stanton Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at CISAC. She received her PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago in August 2016. Her book manuscript, based on twenty-four months of ethnographic fieldwork and multi-archival research, investigates how nuclear safeguards inspectors, bureaucrats, and diplomats at the IAEA negotiate the international and institutional boundaries of politics and technology in their working lives. She asks how organizational products such as bureaucratic procedures, technical inspection reports, policy papers, and official diplomatic statements contribute to the logical ordering of technocratic expertise within the IAEA. She is especially interested in how individuals at international organizations communicate across different epistemic paradigms, and how particular types of speaking become recognized as authoritative and legitimate. To that end she has begun research on recent nuclear disarmament efforts—which include the newly agreed international treaty to ban nuclear weapons—interrogating how shifts in discursive paradigms and logics have succeeded in breaking the decades-long gridlock on hegemonic nuclear norms.

This LSA Bicentennial Theme Semester event is presented with support from the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts and the University of Michigan Bicentennial Office. Additional support provided by the Department of History and the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies.