Ian Lustick

Professor of Political Science, Bess W. Heyman Chair (Emeritus)

Phone: 610-608-5554
ilustick@sas.upenn.edu

School: Arts & Sciences, Middle East Center, Jewish Studies Program
General Topic Areas: Middle East politics, Arab-Israeli, Palestinian-Israeli politics/conflict/relations; history and political science; US foreign policy; Computer simulation for geopolitical forecasting and analysis; Evolutionary theory, complexity theory, and politics

Sample Talk Topics or Titles:

• Israel and the Palestinians: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality
  The decades old consensus that a negotiated peace between Israel and the Palestinians is attainable by Israeli withdrawal from most of the West Bank and Gaza and the creation of a non-belligerent Palestinian state has disappeared. Israel has, after half a century, permanently incorporated those territories.  The result is not pretty and not satisfying for anyone, not a one state “solution” but a messy, oppressive, and, in the long run, unstable “one-state reality.” 
• BDS: What is the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement
  When Irish Catholic workers were systematically discriminated against in Northern Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s an international movement arose, based largely in the United States, to boycott British industries operating in Northern Ireland.  State legislatures across the United States voted to join this boycott until such time as the discrimination ended.  The BDS movement is the Palestinian version of that kind of struggle, but because of politics in the United States, the reaction of state legislatures has been quite different.
• Where did Zionism come from and where is it going?
  Zionism was different things to different groups of Jews. It arose in Europe in the mid to late nineteenth century as one of many responses to the crisis of Jewish life there.  One side of that crisis was the Enlightenment, which raised the specter of the withering away of traditional orthodox Judaism as Jews chose opportunities for secular education and advancement. But the threats of exclusion, expulsion, forced conversion, and annihilation, especially in Eastern Europe, amplified the danger.  Zionists were the minority who criticized those Jews who sought to emigrate to the US or Britain, to join socialist movements to change the world, to hunker down and pray with the rabbis, or seek Yiddish speaking zones of cultural autonomy in Europe.  Zionists were condemned as dangerous messianists who threatened the authority of the Rabbis and whose belligerence against the Arabs would eventually result in war and the wrath of the gentiles.  Zionism was, in its own eyes, a successful national liberation movement, but the state that some Zionists saw as necessary became the central objective of the movement and evolved in directions that neither secular moderates nor religious Jews have seen as satisfying.  Outside Israel, except for Israel boosters, Zionism and Zionist have become very negative terms, largely because of the association of the movement with the oppression of Palestinians and aggressive behavior in general toward Arabs.  A renewed interest in the moderate, binational forms of Zionism runs against the general withering away of interest in state-centric Zionist ideas.
• Why is rationality so often the problem rather than the solution?
  Rationality is the systematic attempt to match means to ends, to choose what to do in order to achieve something that is desirable.  But in complex situations and dynamic task environments, the unintended consequences of the strategies implemented to achieve an end can often, if not usually, either create new problems or either make the goal that motivated those strategies either unattainable or unprofitable to it having been attained.
• What is a “paradigm” and how does it “shift?” What is “critical theory” and is it dangerous?
  A paradigm is a set of beliefs about the world that are taken as true without any corollaries attached as to the conditions under which those beliefs could be changed.  These are basic ideas about any field of inquiry that one cannot imagine not being true.  Such ideas act as a setting within which work can be done to analyze the world without having to ask whether one’s instruments are telling the truth or whether one’s concepts are entirely mistaken.  A paradigm allows a community of scholars or scientists to communicate with one another by making questions of interest to them discussable even while forbidding or making impossible the discussion of other questions—questions that could only make sense if the beliefs comprising the paradigm were questioned. Critical theory seeks to identify the paradigmatic, presumptive assumptions that analysts are using to see if, by asking questions that cannot be asked under prevailing paradigmatic assumptions, new insights of value can be made available.  Critical theory is as necessary for the advancement of science and scholarship as it is dangerous to existing paradigms and the communities attached to them.