Interventions Activists and Academics Respond to Violence

Interventions: Activists and Academics Respond to Violencebrings together top scholars to discuss the significance of violence from a global perspective and the intersections between the global structures of violence and more localized and intimate forms of violence. The contributors toInterventionsexamine many hard questions including: Are there situations in which violence should be politically supported? Are non-violent or anti-war movements in the US able to respond effectively to violence? Do we need to rethink our understanding of both "religion" and "secularism" in light of the current world situation? Have new paradigms been developed in response to violence? The essays in this collection offer incisive analysis of particular situations and creative alternatives to the omnipresence of violence.

Elizabeth A. Castelli is Associate Professor of Religion at Barnard College at Columbia University. She has held several other teaching and research positions, most recently serving as the Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Religion and Media at New York University during its inaugural year (2003-2004). She is a specialist in the academic study of religion, author most recently of Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making.

Janet R. Jakobsen is the Director of the Center for Research on Women at Barnard College at Columbia University. She is the author of Working Alliances and the Politics of Difference: Diversity and Feminist Ethics and co-author, with Ann Pellegrini, of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance. She is engaged in research on the idea of secularism in modern and postmodern contexts, especially as it relates to public policy debates over the role of religion in social life and politics.