We’re going to start our classes this week with reading quizzes on Canvas. There shouldn’t be any “gotcha” questions in them. As long as you read and pay an appropriate amount of attention to significant details, they should be a piece of cake.
We’ll start with a look at a slideshow of Col. Gaddafi’s fashion over the years, which will be an indirect way of reviewing some of the big historical brackets in the 42 years of his rule. The main theme that I want us to discuss in looking at the chapter “Bayou and Laila” is dystopia. Dystopia is typically a genre of fiction, and there’s a lot of room for error in using fictional genres to interpret history (and vice versa); however, the topics that Mohamed Mesrati addresses in his diary entry warrant the discussion. I’d like to talk about what you all understand to be mainstays of dystopian stories and then we’ll list instances of those mainstays in Mohamed’s diary.
On Thursday this week we’ll be reading “Military Intervention and Human Rights: Is Foreign Military Intervention Justified by Widespread Human Rights Abuses?” in Controversies in Globalization. I’ll help you understand Just War Principles and we’ll talk about the political realist vs. political liberalist perspectives on military intervention for human rights.