Why Do Experts Keep Leading Us into Forever Wars?

Schedule

Thu Oct 01 2026 at 05:00 pm to 07:00 pm

UTC-07:00
Location

SFU Harbour Centre - Room 1400 Joseph & Rosalie Segal Centre | Vancouver, BC

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We're thrilled to host political anthropologist Dr. Negar Razavi in this year's iteration of SFU's Andrew Mack Lecture.
About this Event

Why Do Experts Keep Leading Us into Forever Wars?: Iran and the Making of Endless Conflict

The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran marked the latest U.S. intervention in a bloody twenty-five year history of nearly continual military interventions in the Middle East and North Africa. Rather than securing peace, however, these Forever Wars have only exacerbated conflicts in the region and made communities around the world less secure. To better understand how and why the U.S. continues to engage in these misguided wars, Dr. Razavi looks to the role of an elite community of experts, based at Washington think tanks, who have helped sustain the logics of war-making in the region for the past two decades. In particular, she examines how they collectively laid the ideological groundwork for the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, paying specific attention to the ways these experts have coopted discourses around human rights and human security to ensure this war.


Speaker biography

Dr. Negar Razavi is a political anthropologist and public scholar whose work sits at the intersections of critical security studies, anthropology, gender studies, and global Middle East studies. Her forthcoming book, The Geopolitics of Expertise examines the role of policy experts in shaping U.S. security policies toward the Middle East generally and Iran specifically. In addition, Razavi has published her research in Social Text, Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR), Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and Critical Studies on Security. She has also been a Senior Researcher at Security in Context, which connects critical security researchers around the world. Razavi is currently teaching at American University in Washington DC and has held positions at Princeton University, Northwestern University, the College of William and Mary, and the University of Pennsylvania.

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Where is it happening?

SFU Harbour Centre - Room 1400 Joseph & Rosalie Segal Centre, 515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, Canada

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SFU School for International Studies
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