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In the movie Team America, a five-strong, world police, special forces unit takes on the task of foiling various terrorist enemies of the United State, international peace & security. This paper argues that Team America, made with puppet characters, offers a vehicle for understanding & interpreting today's dominant global security issues. In the movie, the special forces units are seemingly unaware of the devastation caused by their mission or the trauma it brings to the local population, like when the special forces unit destroys the Sphinx & the Pyramids. The central message of Team America is that the giant may not always be gentle, but that the meek need the giant to protect them from the big, bad wolves. In this way, the movie reflects a constructivist realist interpretation of international relations where security issues are defined by the intersubjective interaction of interests, ideas, & values, created in the face of necessity. R. Prince

When I reflect upon Peter Bachrach's political theorizing from the perspective of the heated primary battles of 2008, I am struck by the unusual character of his political insights and commitments—and of how relevant and compelling they are in the current political climate. Peter might be appropriately considered a radical liberal democrat—who focused very sharply on the tensions between radicalism and liberalism as political ideologies, but sought to maintain a close and continually flowing circuit between radicalism and liberalism as bodies of philosophical understanding that could mutually nurture and sustain each other. Under his hermeneutical gaze, Hobbes was not only the father of modern philosophical liberalism but the theorist who instigated the formation of participatory democracy. By clarifying for us the extent to which we lacked foursquare rational props to support our judgments across a whole spectrum of human experience from everyday practical affairs to science, religion, and metaphysics, he cleared a tremendous space for human beings to actively participate in structuring their own lives and shaping their own destinies. In addition to his explicit statements concerning human equality (whose political payoffs would be mostly unusable by a contemporary democrat), there was implicit in Hobbesian theorizing a massive re-inflection of human limitation and possibility that could make participation seem like a plausible complement to his theorizing.

Peter Bachrach had a remarkable impact on those who encountered him in person and on generations of readers. Judith Baer vividly captures, among other things, his inspiring, emboldening influence on his students and the sheer fun it was to be with him. My recollections are of exciting, forward moving, intense, and probing arguments, in private and public settings, with an infectiously warm, buoyant, generous friend.

I am pleased to be part of this symposium to celebrate the life and work of Peter Bachrach. Although my focus is the relevance of Peter's ideas of power to law, I want to begin with some personal comments as well as raise some final thoughts, drawing on others' contributions. Like so many of Peter's other students, I adored him. Peter's joy in ideas, his passion for participatory democracy, his love of teaching, and his extraordinary capacity to listen to students were infectious. As others have said, he lit up every room that he was in. He inspired me to become a civil rights lawyer and law professor and to teach, write, and advocate about issues that he cared about.

My subject is the way Peter Bachrach addressed the question of poverty. But given that I was his student and research assistant and that I am a political scientist largely because of him, it is impossible to resist a few words about the experience of being in his classrooms. Peter was an inspiring teacher of politics. The substantive content of his courses was legendary, and he possessed an extraordinary capacity to elicit participation from classes of pre-feminists at our well-bred women's college. I know this cost him. Peter had an extra shirt in his Bryn Mawr office so that he could change out of the one he had sweated through during the considerable exertions of getting us to talk, let alone think.

For the APSA panel commemorating Peter Bachrach, I was asked to speak to the "notions of inequality and inequity" in his work. For a while the topic stumped me. Then I realized why. Talking about inequality in Peter Bachrach's work, I decided, is much like talking about just distribution in Marx. It misses the point.

A while ago we lost Peter Bachrach, one of the pre-eminent academic figures of the twentieth century. After he died on December 14, 2007, a group of his former students and colleagues gathered at the APSA annual meeting in Boston to celebrate his life and career. The audience included family members, "academic grandchildren," and admirers of his work. The speakers' themes included power, poverty, activism, legal theory, and equality, and this symposium grew out of the panel. This range and variety of topics indicate the scope and depth of his impact. His 1962 APSR article, "Two Faces of Power," co-authored with Morton Baratz, is the most frequently cited article in the history of the political science profession. Although I suspect this distinction would have amused Peter, terms like faces of power, nondecision, and deciding not to decide are familiar even to those who don't know Bachrach and Baratz's work on power (Bachrach and Baratz 1962, 1963). These writings taught scholars to listen for what is not said and look for what is not shown. That was a crucial lesson for feminist legal scholars like my classmate and fellow panelist, Elizabeth Schneider, and me.