The story features Andrew Bacevich, professor of international relations; Thomas Robbins, BU’s chief of police and executive director of public safety; Neta Crawford, professor of political science; Kecia Ali, professor of religion; Jack Beermann, professor of law; Hillel  Levine, professor of religion; Richard Cornell, professor of music and composition; Shahla Haeri, associate professor of anthropology; Joseph Wippl, professor of international relations; and Margaret Ross, director of behavioral medicine at Student Health Services.

Read BU Today’s complete 9/11 coverage here.

“I wrote the sections about civilian killings, and what I wanted to do is describe how it is that people not only die when they’re bombed, but they die because infrastructure is destroyed or because they can’t get health care or vaccinations as a result of that destruction. In political science we call this structural violence. There’s been some effort to quantify this, but you need much more detailed work on conditions prior to war, especially in Afghanistan and Pakistan. One of the things I was trying to get across was that when the fighting stops, the dying continues, and the dying is this indirect debt. Also, when you kill innocent civilians, it creates resistance and promotes insurgency, fueling a semicovert war.”

Contact Neta Crawford 617-353-4040, crawfor@bu.edu