Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 2, No. 1 | Scholarship for Social Change (low bandwidth)

The support of research and scholarship has been a fundamental theme of Carnegie Corporation of New York’s work over the years. Its Scholars Program helps men and women of vision examine some of the most significant and critical questions facing today’s global society.

What’s the best way to fight terrorism and maintain our freedom? Should the free market be restrained from auctioning off democracy’s public goods, ranging from environmental rights to schoolchildren’s curricula? Is there a school voucher program that might actually win over voucher opponents? Can we promote women’s education in Muslim countries by celebrating Islam’s own history of women’s scholarship and social activism? These are the questions being examined by four Carnegie Scholars, who are profiled below. These scholars—Laura Donohue, Michael Sandel, Beverly Mack and Caroline Hoxby—are among 39 researchers who receive support in Carnegie Corporation of New York’s three-year-old fellowship program, which was instituted, says Corporation president Vartan Gregorian, because “We believe individual scholarship is an important asset in our democratic process where new policy solutions must be supported by credible research and analysis.”

Laura K. Donohue
Encounters with Northern Ireland’s barbed wire, soldiers with machine guns and militant teenagers stunned Laura Donohue. She was 20, an Irish-American student on a holiday planned with green hills and thatched cottages in mind. The 1989 trip rearranged her priorities, calling her to the work of helping states respond to terrorism. “I talked with people my own age who were engaged in violence because violence had been done to their own families and people they loved—and I realized they were acting out of a strong moral conviction,” recalls Donohue, now 32 and teaching a course called “Security, Civil Liberties and Terrorism” at Stanford University. “It could have been me there, faced with the same circumstances and having to make the same moral decisions. What’s the difference between them and me? What is it that drives some people to violence? How do states make things worse? Those are the questions I had then and they still animate my research.”

Donohue began her career at Dartmouth College, where she earned a BA with honors in philosophy as well as a citation for her work in war and peace studies, which she began after visiting Northern Ireland. After Dartmouth, Donohue returned to the province. At the University of Ulster, she earned a postgraduate diploma in a war and peace studies program—and her classmates included Loyalists, who favored ties to England, and Republicans, including former members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army who had just completed prison sentences for terrorism. “The irony was that we discussed general theories of peace studies, but never discussed politics in class—it was too controversial!” Donohue said. As a result, much of her education took place outside of the classroom. “I learned Irish history by going to the pub—actually, I was on a pub team that won the All Northern Ireland Pub Quiz about Irish history, politics and music. The four of us won 96 cans of Bass Ale.”

Donohue stayed at Ulster another year and earned an MA with distinction in 1993. “It was a reality-based education, and very sobering. I came to appreciate the complexities of the conflict and to become more concerned about state measures that exacerbated tension on both sides of the religious divide.”

Reflecting this concern about state reactions to terrorism, her subsequent research concentrated on counter-terrorism. Between 1994 and 1998, she was at the University of Cambridge earning a Ph.D. in history. Her doctoral dissertation examined the impact of “temporary” counter-terrorism laws that had been enacted over many decades in Great Britain and Northern Ireland. In 1999, while a visiting scholar at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, Donohue used her dissertation as the basis for a book, published by the Irish Academic Press and entitled Emergency Powers and Counter-terrorist Law in the United Kingdom 1922-2000. Donohue introduced the book with a December 2000 speech at the House of Commons, an honor that recognized its importance as the first comprehensive analysis of counter-terrorist legislation in the U.K.

In Donohue’s analysis, a small percentage of terrorist acts should be considered attacks against the state, while most others could be treated as crimes. The two approaches have enormous ramifications for democracies. If a terrorist act is deemed a crime, it is addressed with existing criminal laws designed to deter crime while protecting the rights of citizens and non-citizens. But if an act of terrorism is considered an attack on the state and its ability to protect the lives and property of its citizens, deterrence is no longer seen as an option—states must try to prevent further acts of terrorism. And prevention invariably affects civil liberties.

Donohue believes that states often over react because terrorism creates enormous public pressure on every branch of government to do something. “When an open society has been taken advantage of in this manner the immediate response is to close it,” she says. “To feel safe, people are willing to live with more restrictions and more government mistakes.” Northern Ireland’s counter-terrorism laws, which began accumulating as temporary measures in the 18th century, increased police powers for entry, search and seizure; expanded detention without charges or hearings; instituted censorship of newspapers, books, films and records; restricted meetings, assemblies and the singing of nationalist songs; closed Republican organizations, and banned the wearing of Easter lilies, an inflammatory symbol of an Irish uprising against the British during Easter Week, 1916.

Next page: “When an open society has been taken advantage of by terro rism, the immediate response is to close it.”—Laura K. Donohue

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