At his May 14, 2013, lecture at the American Academy as the Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Visitor, Michael G. Ignatieff, Professor of Practice at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and chief architect of the Responsibility to Protect doctine, recounted important changes that have occurred in the two-decade-old debate over when to intervene in sovereign states and what this dispute reveals about the international will to intervene and the varied understandings of the idea of sovereignty worldwide. (Q&A period included.) 

Sinan Antoon argues that much of the discourse on Iraqi violence has tended to essentialize it by attributing it either to the resilience of trans-historical, ethno-sectarian conflicts and identities, which are taken to be side effects of an inherently violent and monolithic Islam, or the failure of Iraq as a state cobbled together by British colonialism in 1917. In response to this, most Iraqi intellectuals revert to a hyper-nationalist discourse of an imagined Iraq. Sargon Boulus (1944-2008), however, Antoon argues, stands out in the way he resists these ideological traps in his late poems by coming to terms with this history of violence. How does one mourn and grieve the death and destruction visited upon his homeland without clinging to nationalist myths or denying the nation’s own congenital violence?