Harvard University Press Blog

Transpatialization: A New Look at the Old Question of How the Modern World Was Formed

Greater Syria—the region known in Arabic as Bilad al-Sham—is roughly coterminous with the modern nation states of Israel/Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. In The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World, historian Cyrus Schayegh offers a new history of the region from 1850 to 1950 that emphasizes the multiple layers of spatial identity embraced by the region’s inhabitants, presenting in the process a much-needed challenge to the predominant ways in which we talk about the formation of the modern world. Below, Schayegh decribes the experiences of the denizens of Bilad al-Sham, and outlines the notion of “transpatialization.”

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Each age comes with its own dominant historiographic lens. When nation states crystallized in the nineteenth century, many historians—especially European ones—made them history’s quasi-metaphysical objective and central subject. When a globalization wave built up from the 1970s, historians reacted, too. “All local, national, or regional histories must be global history, too,” the late Christopher Bayly famously stated in his landmark The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914.

Logically, the reverse is true as well. Global history must also be local, national, and regional. It is for this reason that quite a few global—and, related, transnational—histories materialize in specific locales. And it is for the same reason that some scholars define globalization not as uniformly tightening interdependence but as uneven interplays between border transgressions and reassertions; and that writing global history is not simply about topics but involves a global optic on past events and trends, as Sebastian Conrad has recently underlined in What Is Global History? Despite these historiographic insights, however, a “real challenge” persists, he has noted: To “shift between, and articulate, different scales of analysis… In many case historians have opted for novel geographies, but in the end have tended to then treat these spaces as given.”

A related challenge has to do with how we conceptualize the socio-spatial making of the modern world. That development cannot be reduced to nation-state formation or globalization or urbanization, to mention three usual suspects. Certainly, accelerated interdependence across space, states’ unprecedented ability to penetrate their territory, and record urban growth all have been instrumental in creating the modern world, distinguishing it from premodern times. But none has been clearly dominant. This is not the least because they are intertwined—because “all local, national, or regional histories must be global,” too, to quote Bayly again.

Enter transpatialization: what we may call modern cities, regions, states—nation-states and others—and global circuits reconstituting and transforming each other more thoroughly and at a faster rhythm than before. This, I argue in The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World, is the primary distinguishing feature of the modern world’s socio-spatial making. Transpatialization does not denote one single process, and it is not an empirical unit. (Neither are globalization, state formation, or urbanization, for that matter!) It refers to a set of processes; it is a heuristic umbrella that does not assign artificial primacy to any one presumably unitary process such as “nation-state formation” or “urbanization” or to any one seemingly distinct scale like “the global” or “the local.”

The Problem with Privatization

“I’m going to get good contractors and push the hell out of them,” said Donald Trump. Though the sentiment jibes with any number of declarations made on the campaign trail and since taking office, the exact quote actually dates from 1986, when Trump was making a push to take charge of work to revive a moribund Central Park skating rink. Placed alongside words from James Madison and James Landis, FDR’s SEC chairman, that Trump quote now rounds out an absurdist trio of epigraphs employed by legal scholar Jon D. Michaels in a new book on the pitfalls of privatizing government.

While the book, Constitutional Coup: Privatization’s Threat to the American Republic, considers the full range of governmental functions susceptible to privatization, in an L.A. Times piece earlier this summer Michaels warned of the particular dangers of privatizing the American military. In response to reports that Jared Kushner and the now-banished Steve Bannon had turned to contractors including Blackwater founder Erik Prince for help with Afghanistan, Michaels recounted the “fiscal, operational, and diplomatic headaches” that the likes of Prince have wrought, asking how Kushner and Bannon could’ve “forgotten all the ways in which an outsourced war is a perniciously unaccountable one, divorced from our democratic military and its long-inculcated values and commitments?” Whenever the book on the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is finally written, he continued, “one deeply unsettling chapter will tell the sorry tale of America’s injudicious revival of the private military industry.”

Then last week, as if on cue, Prince took to the op-ed page of the New York Times to publicly make the case for his company’s enduring value to America’s longest war:

My proposal is for a sustainable footprint of 2,000 American Special Operations and support personnel, as well as a contractor force of less than 6,000 (far less than the 26,000 in country now). This team would provide a support structure for the Afghans, allowing the United States’ conventional forces to return home.

This plan would use former Special Operations veterans as contractors who would live, train and patrol alongside their Afghan counterparts at the lowest company and battalion levels—where it matters most. American veterans, whose extraordinary knowledge and experience could be vital to Afghan success on the ground, would serve as adjuncts to the Afghan Army and would perform in strict conformity with Afghan rules of engagement, eliminating the stigma of a foreign occupying force. Supplemental Afghan air power, flown with Afghan markings, would include a contractor safety pilot, but only the onboard Afghan officer would make weapons decisions. All contracted personnel would be subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, just as active-duty American troops are now.

If the president pursues this third path, I, too, would vigorously compete to implement a plan that saves American lives, costs less than 20 percent of current spending and saves American taxpayers more than $40 billion a year. Just as no one criticizes Elon Musk because his company SpaceX helps supply American astronauts, no one should criticize a private company—mine or anyone else’s—for helping us end this ugly multigenerational war.

In the face of Prince’s proposal, we turn back to Michaels and Constitutional Coup, in which he argues that the State cannot be separated from its people, practices, and infrastructure without doing considerable violence to our constitutional order. From the book:

How Muslim Women Dress

Can a modest and religious woman also be fashionable and stylish? One’s immediate response to such a question can reveal quite a bit about their position in and perspective on the world. As Elizabeth Bucar shows in Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress, there’s no inherent incompatibility between modesty and beauty, and modest fashion represents much more than social control or religious orthodoxy. Bucar’s ethnographic work in the stores and streets of Tehran, Yogyakarta, and Istanbul reveals the locally-determined moral and aesthetic values exemplified by Islamic dress, and the comparative design of the project serves to deepen our understanding of Islamic politics. Ramin Raza, a Northeastern University student who interned with us at HUP this summer, spoke with Bucar about the book and its conclusions; their conversation is below.

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Q: For many non-Muslims living in the West, the major source of exposure to Islam and to Muslim dress is through media outlets that depict women’s attire from a Western or even Orientalist perspective. From your time in three Muslim countries, how did your experience of “pious fashion” challenge these notions and highlight the varying expressions of piety through dress?

It’s a good question to begin with since I suspect many non-Muslims and Muslims alike view pious fashion—and a headscarf—as a sign of Muslim women’s oppression, that they don’t make their own decisions, that they are controlled by patriarchy in some way that is radically different from other women. That is just too simplistic a view. All women feel the effects of gender ideologies and this affects how we present ourselves in public—including our dress. But within these pressures and constraints we still have some degree of choice. Even in Tehran, where hijab is required, a woman has to decide every morning what to wear to abide by those regulations—and the options are endless.

Q: In Pious Fashion, you illustrate how a nation’s cultural and sociopolitical ideology materializes in women’s fashion, and consequently, falls on the woman’s body to reflect and uphold. Briefly, how do Muslim women in Tehran, Yogyakarta, and Istanbul navigate these structural forces and assert agency through pious fashion?

The three locations studied in my book are case studies to explore the specifics of how women’s dress can be seen as a response to and even critique of these ideologies. But I don’t think I can summarize each location in a pithy sentence. In fact that is part of the reason I wrote this book. Clothing everywhere can be read, and in our own culture we do it all the time. I might note how my student’s T-shirt, my colleague’s suit, or the height of my friend’s boots convey social privilege, gender norms, or power. But when we try to read clothing in other cultures, we often make mistakes because we base our interpretations on our own aesthetic and moral assumptions. So it is only by thinking about a particular trend or clothing item within a web of moral and aesthetic values that we can see how Muslim women can use pious fashion to express their individual taste, identity, cosmopolitanism, and even politics.

Q: You explain in the book that piety and fashion do not challenge each other, but rather inform one another to bring nuance and broader meaning to Muslim women’s dress. How, then, does pious fashion communicate in a way that is both Islamic and secular?  

We think there is a hard line between what is religious and what is secular. But in everyday life, that line is blurred. The same scarf I might buy in a hijab store in Tehran—which I must wear by law in that country as part of a governmental effort to make the public space more Islamic—I might buy in Urban Outfitters in Boston as part of my own effort to add some hipster vibe to my casual weekend outfit. The actual material items are not as invested with special meaning as we might think. And this winter we saw Shepard Fairey’s image of a woman in an American flag headscarf adopted as one of the most prominent symbols of the Women’s March in DC. Influence goes both ways. Secular trends effect pious fashion, but religious clothing makes piety fashionable in mainstream culture as well.

The Idea of the Muslim World

President Trump’s weekend address in Saudi Arabia, a centerpiece of his first foreign trip since taking office, was billed as an address to the “Muslim world,” much in the same way as President Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo. Though Trump’s focus on the threat of Iran undercut the notion of Muslim singularity, the speech was both presented and received in the context of an imagined global Muslim unity. In The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History, Cemil Aydin asks how, despite “the obvious naïveté of categorizing one and a half billion people” as a single community, this idea’s become so entrenched. “How did we arrive at this point,” writes Aydin, “where a fantastical entity could be so present, so prevalent in political thinking? Why do so many Muslim and non-Muslim political leaders, intellectuals, and religious figures comfortably base many of their arguments and decisions on the idea of the Muslim world without reflecting on the accuracy of the generalization that this term signifies?” In the excerpt below, Aydin begins to trace the emergence of this imagined global unity during the peak of European hegemony in the late nineteenth century, when poor colonial conditions, European discourses of Muslim racial inferiority, and Muslims’ theories of their own apparent decline nurtured the first arguments for pan-Islamic solidarity.

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The idea of the Muslim world is inseparable from the claim that Muslims constitute a race. The distinction of the Muslim world and the Christian West began taking shape most forcefully in the 1880s, when the majority of Muslims and Christians resided in the same empires. The rendering of Muslims as racially distinct—a process that called on both “Semitic” ethnicity and religious difference—and inferior aimed to disable and deny their demands for rights within European empires. Muslim intellectuals could not reject the assumptions of irreducible difference but responded that they were equal to Christians, deserving of rights and fair treatment. The same conception of Muslim unity and difference justified appeals to Muslims as a global community during World War I and World War II. Racial assumptions also ensured that later subaltern and nationalist claims for rights would be framed in the idioms of Muslim solidarity and an enduring clash between Islam and the West, giving rise to the Islamism and Islamophobia of the 1980s and beyond.

It is thanks to this elaboration of both Muslim difference and Muslim unity that contemporary writing, scholarly and otherwise, tends to emphasize Muslim exceptionalism. The assumption is that Muslims, due to their piety and the nature of their faith, naturally resist the liberal international order of independent, pluralistic nation-states. Muslims’ attitudes toward politics are presumed different from those of Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, and Christians, whose societies need not be explained by reference to faith tradition or civilizational identity. However, this theory of Muslim exceptionalism is unsupported and unsubstantiated. The Ottoman Empire, Republican Turkey, British-ruled Indian Muslims, Afghanistan, the Saudi Kingdom, Pakistan, postcolonial Egypt, and Iran under the shah ardently supported the imperial and later nationalist world orders. The seeming importance of Islam in the contemporary politics of Muslim-majority societies derives not from theological requirements or a uniquely high level of Muslim piety but from the legacy of imperial racialization of Muslim-ness and from the particular intellectual and political strategies of Muslim resistance to this racialized identity.

The geography and technology of empire were essential to these processes of racialization and resistance in the second half of the nineteenth century. New transportation and communication technologies such as steamships and the telegraph fostered unprecedented levels of connection among Muslims, naturalizing the geopolitical concept of the Muslim world in Europe and its colonies. The networks enabled by these technologies were the medium of pan-Islamic thought born of confrontation with imperial racism.

Imperial racism, but not empire itself. Muslim leaders and thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were not, for the most part, anti-imperialists. Instead they sought fair treatment from the four major European empires: British, Dutch, French, and Russian. These were cosmopolitan arrangements, home to wide-ranging ethnic and religious groups. But racialized legal categorizations shared across European empires, the empowerment strategies of colonized Muslim subjects, and tactics employed in imperial rivalries confirmed rather than challenged Muslim difference, ensuring that Muslims would be a separate class within the imperial whole. The British ruled almost half of the world’s Muslims and therefore played an especially important role in guiding the development of pan-Islamic thought. British fears of rebellion and policies of oppression engendered specifically Muslim responses. At the same time, Muslims understood that their vast numbers and the reality of their overwhelming loyalty to the empire all owed them real clout.

Rights, Action, and Social Responsibility

Earlier this month, De Gruyter and a number of its partner presses—of which we’re one—launched a portal to provide educational institutions with free access to a collection of books and articles across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Dubbed “Rights, Action, and Social Responsibility,” the initiative is intended to help combat false news sources, to support reflection on the nature of truth and ethics, and to encourage understanding of the struggles facing all members of society.

“Public debates surrounding immigration policy, climate change, international relations, and constitutional and human rights are currently at the forefront of the national discourse, especially, but not only, in the United States. Together, De Gruyter and its partners are keen to support a thoughtful and informed debate on these sensitive and serious issues,” said Steve Fallon, Director of De Gruyter’s Publishing Partner Program.

The collection groups resources into eight topical areas:

• Constitutional History
• Dissent, Truth & Ethics
• Environmental Studies
• Gender Studies
• Geopolitics
• Human Rights
• Immigration & Urbanism
• Islamic Studies

The content includes more than 500 books and selected journal articles from HUP, Columbia University Press, Cornell University Press, Princeton University Press, University of Pennsylvania Press, Transcript-Verlag, and De Gruyter. HUP titles on offer include Jeremy Waldron’s The Harm in Hate Speech, Lila Abu-Lughod’s Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, Spencer Weart’s The Discovery of Global Warming, and Robert Wald Sussman’s The Myth of Race, among dozens more.

Register with De Gruyter to provide access for your library.

Creative Insurgency in the Arab World

In The Naked Blogger of Cairo, Marwan Kraidy builds on his decades of experience researching and writing about Arab media, culture, and politics to consider the ways in which people create rebellious art, attract public attention, and conjure new political imaginaries. At the heart of these processes Kraidy finds the human body, employed as tool, medium, symbol, and metaphor, tying the revolutionary activism we associate with the Arab uprisings of recent years to those of a longer past.

The book develops the notion of “creative insurgency” to explore the mixture of activism and artistry characteristic of revolutionary expression, turning to the work of dozens of sloganeers, graffiti artists, puppeteers, videographers, cartoonists, satirists, and bloggers to explore a series of cross-disciplinary questions about practices of rebellion:

How does creative insurgency emerge and thrive? What kinds of artistic practices does it spur? What debates does it foment? How has creative insurgency evolved in different periods and places? What do self-immolations in 1963 Saigon and 1969 Prague reveal about Bouazizi’s in 2010 Sidi Bouzid? How does Mubarak’s switching off the Internet in 2011 resonate with the British ban on theater in 1919 Cairo? What historical perspective can we gain by revisiting the French Revolution? Can the aesthetic sensibility of Delacroix’s La liberté guidant le peuple help us grasp the Naked Blogger of Cairo? What can we learn about political street art in 2010 Arab capitals from civil war–era stencil graffiti in 1970s Beirut? How do loaf-brandishing revolutionaries and the superhero Captain Khobza in 2010 Tunis echo past bread riots? How does Top Goon—Diaries of a Little Dictator recast ancient puppetry traditions for the digital era? Is revolutionary graffiti mere political messaging or is it art? How has creative insurgency evolved in different periods and places?

Kraidy gives a more complete sense of his project in the video below.

 

Insecurity in Saudi Arabia

After Saudi Arabia executed the Shiite cleric and political dissident Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, Iranian protesters burned the Saudi Embassy in Tehran, and the diplomatic fallout between the two nations sent ripples across the region, the immediate and facile take attributed the events to sectarian enmity. Historian Toby Craig Jones, author of Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia, has been attempting to complicate that framing. In a New York Times op-ed and in a conversation with NPR’s All Things Considered, Jones has helped to foster an understanding of this latest surge in tension as something more and different than a Sunni-Shia rift.

To begin with, Jones shows the importance of understanding that even when conflict can be mapped onto sects it’s often a modern political dispute merely passing for a centuries-old religious one, sometimes having been manipulatively positioned as such. As Jones explains in Desert Kingdom, the Saudi royal family’s claim to power has always been buttressed by a social and political contract with Sunni leaders:

Since early in the twentieth century, when Saudi Arabia’s founding monarch, Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud, stormed Riyadh with a small band of warriors, wrestled power away from his family’s rivals, and launched his quest for suzerainty, the legitimacy of his rule has been based on a grand bargain. In exchange for their blessing of his right to worldly power, Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud granted central Arabia’s conservative clergy, the legatees of the eighteenth-century founder of Wahhabism, the power to oversee and police the social and cultural life of those the new polity came to rule. Islam and its Wahhabi interpreters played a key role in sanctioning the legitimacy of the new regime and have done so ever since.

Now, with the depositions of the Arab Spring in recent memory, the Saudis have as much reason as ever to fear challenges to their rule. Here’s Jones in his NYT piece:

Why did Saudi Arabia want this now? Because the kingdom is under pressure: Oil prices, on which the economy depends almost entirely, are plummeting; a thaw in Iranian-American relations threatens to diminish Riyadh’s special place in regional politics; the Saudi military is failing in its war in Yemen. In this context, a row with Iran is not a problem so much as an opportunity.

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The Saudi authorities have good reason to be concerned about new calls for reform. About a week before Sheikh Nimr’s execution, the kingdom announced that it was facing an almost $100 billion deficit for its 2016 national budget. Declining oil revenues may soon force the kingdom to slash spending on social welfare programs, subsidized water, gasoline and jobs — the very social contract that informally binds ruler and ruled in Saudi Arabia. The killing of a prominent member of a loathed religious minority deflects attention from impending economic pressure.

But, as he discussed with NPR, the most prominent reformers from among that “loathed religious minority” would likely characterize their agitation as a push for democracy, human rights, and inclusion, rather than for sectarian concern. The Sunni Saudi Arabia versus Shiite Iran narrative, he says, is merely the way the Saudis and their allies in the Arab world have framed the conflict, choosing Shiites as a scapegoat in their efforts to address the threats they see from below and from across the region.

Saudi Arabian aggression is of course a particularly awkward challenge for the United States, which has always allowed oil to outweigh the anti-democratic actions of Saudi rulers. But even against that backdrop, with surging domestic energy production seemingly threatening American dependence on Saudi Arabian crude, Saudi leaders may see threats to their global political standing. As Jones writes, the prospect of an insecure Saudi leadership should be frightening but also clarifying, dispelling the notion that Saudi Arabia is “a force for stability in the Middle East.”

Islam and the Future of Tolerance

At a dinner following a 2010 Intelligence Squared U.S. debate on the topic “Islam is a Religion of Peace,” neuroscientist and prominent atheist Sam Harris, who had attended the debate, accused debater Maajid Nawaz, who had argued in favor of the motion, of having spoken in bad faith. “The problem is that Islam isn’t a religion of peace, and the so-called ‘extremists’ are seeking to implement what is arguably the most honest reading of the faith’s actual doctrine,” Harris said to Nawaz, as 75 guests looked on.

Nawaz, a former Islamist, author of Radical, and the chairman of Quilliam, a globally active think tank focusing on religious freedom, extremism, and citizenship, both bristled at the implication that he’d been less than honest and worried that a debate with Harris then and there was unlikely to be productive. That night, their dispute remained unresolved.

From this inauspicious start, though, eventually emerged a thoughtful and generous exchange of ideas, Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue. An extended conversation between Harris and Nawaz, the book engages some of the thorniest questions surrounding Islam’s place in the world, including the nature of Islamism and of jihad, the causes of and possible solutions to radicalization, the relationship between scripture and practice, and the role of history in shaping today’s political landscape.

In responding to one another’s ideas with respect and curiosity, Harris and Nawaz model the kinds of exchange that might be possible around even the most polarizing issues. This week they demonstrated the value of such conversations in a John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum discussion at Harvard’s Institute of Politics. Footage of that discussion, which was moderated by Juliette Kayyem, Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, is below.

 

Read more from Harris and Nawaz at The Daily Beast.

German History and the Armenian Genocide

In last year’s Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination, historian Stefan Ihrig demonstrated the extent to which the formation of modern Turkey inspired the Germany imagined by Adolf Hitler, for whom Atatürk was a “star in the darkness.” Now, in the forthcoming Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler, Ihrig turns specifically to the undeniably influential though historically neglected role of the Armenian Genocide in German discourse on “the total annihilation of a people.” That neglect persists even now, as much of the world marks the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. Caught between acceptance and denialism, the Armenian Genocide remains “a piece of history that is not allowed to be history.”

As Ihrig explains in the introduction to Justifying Genocide—a portion of which is excerpted below—he considers it of the utmost importance that his book be part of an open, respectful, and continued dialogue with all interested readers. Even still, he concedes an inability to circumvent usage of the word “genocide,” a term even the American government still resists. The book is about German reactions to and discussions of what happened, and, as Ihrig shows, German actors left little doubt that they understood the Ottoman Empire’s actions to be aimed at the “murder of a nation.”

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To humans in future centuries learning about the 20th century, the story of this century must seem unbelievable if not implausible. One devastating war after the other, hot and cold, and mostly global. And genocide, and lots of it. Millions of children, elderly people, women and men killed for no apparent reason. The organized eradication of whole peoples solely on the pretext of their alleged otherness, again and again. These were humanity’s darkest hours, these were the times when we needed to invent and reinvent words to describe the unspeakable, the unimaginable: Holocaust, Shoah, genocide, and “ethnic cleansing.” To the readers, history students, and historians in the future—and the further into our future, the more so—it must appear also incredible and implausible to assume that one major genocide was not in some way connected to the next. These genocides were something new in the known history of humanity, and certainly new in their own time. And indeed the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust were connected—particularly through actual people, individuals and bodies of people (nations, networks, intellectuals, politicians, readers, etc.).

Questions of guilt have long since distracted from the larger picture—either Germans wanting to deflect guilt or co-responsibility for the events of 1915/16 or, in this context more prevalent and at the time of writing still much more pressing, and pressing onto historical scholarship, that of Turkish guilt. Will the deflections of guilt regarding whether or not this really was genocide matter in the long run? Will there be sympathy in a hopefully more enlightened future for those who were denied the legitimacy of feeling as victims, of persecution, of injustice, of slaughter? Does it matter how many children’s heads were split by axes, how many women raped before they were killed, how many fathers and mothers had seen their sons, wives, daughters, parents and neighbours killed after being humiliated?

Justifying Genocide is a German story and a Jewish story. It is only on a secondary level a “Turkish” or an Armenian story. It is much less about what actually happened between Armenians and Turks (and other Muslim inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire) during World War I and before. It is about what all this meant for Germany, a society which in just under twenty years would give birth to a regime that would carry out the largest genocide in (known) human history.

Nuclear Iran

As has been noted, the fierce debate over a potential nuclear agreement with Iran—which reached a fever pitch this week with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the United States Congress—amounts to an argument over nuclear fission being deliberated in an arena dominated by politics, not by knowledge of physics. Such knowledge is essential, though, both for assessing Iran’s current nuclear capacity to the extent we can, and for gauging the likelihood that Iran’s actual intentions align with those stated.

Theoretical physicist Jeremy Bernstein, known for his accessible science writing in the New Yorker and elsewhere, wrote Nuclear Iran last year to fill the need for a brief but complete discussion of the Iranian nuclear program from its inception to the present. The book offers lay readers a history of the sort of centrifuges used to produce the weapons-grade uranium needed for bombs, a discussion of the completely different technology required to produce plutonium and to use it in a nuclear weapon, and a blending of the technical and human aspects along the way. The piece below, adapted from the postscript to Nuclear Iran, compacts that science into a concise presentation of the state of Iran’s nuclear program and the potential for any agreement to contain it.

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The negotiations with Iran about its nuclear program are in process as I write this. The outcome is uncertain. But I would like to try to make the issues clear. To do this I will consider two limiting cases, neither one of which has any chance of being adopted but which serve as a useful foil for the discussion.

• Case 1: Iran agrees to give up its entire nuclear program. 
• Case 2: Iran does not agree to give up any of its program but does agree to enhanced inspections.

To discuss Case 1 we need to specify what Iran’s nuclear program is. I begin with reactors. To characterize a reactor, it is useful to specify three elements:

1. The power output
2. The fuel
3. The moderator

I begin with the power output. This is usually measured in watts—a unit of energy produced per second. The practical units for reactors are millions of watts (megawatts) and billions of watts (gigawatts). If the reactor is used to produce electricity, then two kinds of power produced are distinguished—thermal power and electrical power. The thermal power is the actual power that is produced in the fission process. This is generally converted into heat, which may boil water, making steam, which in turn runs the turbines that produce electricity. About two-thirds of the thermal energy is lost for various reasons in this process, hence the watts electric are about a third of the watts thermal.