Background:

Brien Hallett teaches peace studies courses and is the principal undergraduate advisor. He coordinates the Hiroshima and Peace program with Hiroshima City University and has served as a member of Steering Committee, Cultures and Conflicts at Sokendai (Center for Advanced Studies Research) Hayama, Japan. 2005- 2010. Before joining the Institute, he taught English composition and language in the English Department, University of Hawai'i, and in Taiwan, Japan, and France. After graduating from college, he served four years as a Lieutenant of Marines.

Teaching:

Brien Hallett teaches PACE-310, Survey of Peace and Conflict Studies, each semester. He also teaches PACE-412, Gandhi, King and Nonviolence, PACE-489, Hiroshima and Peace, and is principle instructor for PACE-495, Practicum.

Course Syllabi:

Fall 2011PACE 412 - Gandhi-King View Syllabus

• PACE 310 - Survey Peace & Conflict View Syllabus
  

Research:

Brien Hallett's primary research interest is centered on the power to declare war. In constitutional terms, his principal conclusion is that the Congress cannot discharge its Article I, section 8 responsibility "to declare war." This congressional incapacity has created a functional vacuum, which the president has filled. In filling this functional vacuum, the president's actions have been misconstrued as leading to an imperial presidency, when, in point of fact, the president is only trying to make a dysfunctional constitutional system work. The reasons for the congressional dysfunction, as demonstrated in his recent book, "Declaring War: Congress, the President and What the Constitution Does Not Say" (Cambridge University Press, 2012), are two: First, the Congress is beset with overwhelming organizational issues. Due to its exceptional collective action problems, the Congress simple lacks the initiative and means "to declare war," as two hundred years of American history prove. Second, the Congress is a legislative body. As such, it legislates domestic laws to regulate relations between and among the citizens of the nation. The declaring of war, however, is not a domestic law and it does not regulate relations between and among American citizens. The declaring of war serves entirely different functions. It is a question of foreign affairs, and it regulates relations between and among nations. To fill the vacuum created by this congressional incapacity, Hallett has proposed two solutions in "Declaring War": First, a constitutional amendment to establish a fourth branch of government dedicated to the declaring of war and the treating of peace; and, second, a major reform of the Congress to establish a Joint Drafting Committee dedicated to the drafting of declarations of war modeled on the 1776 Declaration of Independence. The book may be purchased at Amazon.com or at

http://www.cambridge.org/us/knowledge/isbn/item6834874/Declaring%20War/?site_locale=en_US

Hallett's secondary research interest is centered on a conceptual understanding of methods pioneered by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. He is especially intrigued, first, by the close parallels between war and the campaigns led by Gandhi and King and, second, by their emphasis on the necessity of the coherence of ends and means. As Gandhi phrased the thought, the relationship of ends to means is as the tree is to the seed. For, is not the tree already found within the seed?

Interest(s):

Political theory,speech act theory, theories of war and democracy, congressional war powers, sovereignty, human rights, and other issues in international law.

Publications:

Title: Conflict Resolution Day Book Launch (PDF) (2012)
Publication Information: Conflict Resolution Day was 18 October this year. To mark the day, the Institute held a launch for my book, Declaring War: Congress, the President, and What the Constitution Does Not Say. In addition to signing book, I gave a 14 minute talk. Since the talk is the best summary of my book so far, I decided to post it here. The next item posted here is a PowerPoint presentation that I gave over at the History Department. It gives a more detailed view of the books arguments.

Title: Shattering the Constitution: History Workshop 2011 (PDF) (2011)
Publication Information: The meaning and application of the 1973 War Powers Resolution is in the news again. This time the provocation is a semantic dispute over whether the Libya operation constitutes "hostilities" under the Resolution. Although it is impolite to say so, the entire controversy could easily be resolved if only Congress exercised its clear constitutional power "to declare war." But this is unimaginable. No one can imagine Congress doing what the Constitution plainly says it should do. Why and how did this state of affairs come about? What can be done to correct this constitutional failure? This glaring defect in our democracy? This PowerPoint presentation attempts to answer these questions.

Title: Armed and Unarmed War (PDF) (2010)
Publication Information: http://warhistorian.org/wordpress/ This is the link to a five part working paper that appears in Mark Grimsley's blog, Blog Them Out Of The Stone Age. Mark is a military historian at Ohio State University. He published a very original article, "Why the Civil Rights Movement was an Insurgency" in The Quarterly Journal of Military History. In his piece he argued that the Civil Rights Movement was a "non-violent" insurgency. My pieces is a response in which I try to take his thesis a step further by arguing that the Civil Rights movement was, not just an insurgency, but an unarmed war.

Title: Bush, the Congress, and War: The Importance of "Literacy" (PDF) (2009)
Publication Information: I first identify the sufficient and necessary conditions for declaring war, emphasizing the necessary conditions that deal with questions of "literacy," specifically, who drafts the declaration and which of the five formal compositional elements are addressed in the draft. I, then, demonstrate how congressional "literacy" or "illiteracy" determines the relationship between it the president: Whenever the Congress allows the executive branch to write the declaration, it creates a disempowering relationship of presidential initiative and decision and congressional "oversight and authorization." In contrast, whenever the Congress writes the declaration, it creates an empowering relationship of congressional initiative and decision, with the president now acting as the executive agent for congressional decisions. The formal declaration of war of 1898 against Spain is analyzed as a positive example and contrasted with the informal congressional declarations of 1998 and 2002 against Iraq as a negative example.

Title: War Power Games: Repeal the War Powers Resolution (PDF) (2011)
Publication Information: This is an opinion piece that I wrote up during mid-June 2011 when the Congress was calling upon President Obama to comply with the War Powers Resolution of 1973. In the piece, I argue that he had already had complied, thereby showing how poorly drafted the law was. This leads to the conclusion that it should be repealed

Title: Constituting War: Six Distinctions without a Difference: The Laws of War, Laws of Armed Conflict, and International Humanitarian Law War, Armed Conflict, and Humanitarian Intervention (PDF) (2009)
Publication Information: The argument I should like to make is that civil-military relations are divisive only in terms of personalities and turf wars. In terms of the enterprise itself, no gap should exist due to the force of a unifying goal, which, Carl von Clausewitz reminds us, determines the conduct of an activity "down to the smallest operational detail" (1976, p. 579). To argue this case, I should like to ask why we have six names for two things?

Title: Critique of Obama's Afghanistan Policy (PDF) (2009)
Publication Information: This is a short critique of the 1 December 2009 speech President Obama gave at West Point Military Academy announcing his increase in the number of US Troops in Afghanistan