Posts by: Bridget Conley
Perhaps the most famous incident of sports and truce comes from Christmas Eve, 1914, British and German soldiers called a truce to the battles of World War I. Meeting in no man’s land, they exchange gifts, repaired some of their defenses, and played a football game.
Sports harbor the potential for violence and political [...]
Continue Reading →The Olympic countdown clock informs us that in 8 days and an ever-decreasing number of hours, minutes, and seconds the 2012 Olympic Games will begin. For those of us based in the U.S., this means television coverage only of sports where Americans are expected to either 1) win medals or 2) [...]
Continue Reading →The fact that civilians are suffering from violence in Syria is undisputed. Beyond that, it is hard to know what is fact, and what is constructed from a familiar narrative of a “responsibility to protect” civilians faced with the threat of atrocity.
The “R2P” narrative follows a familiar plotline: bad government continues offensives designed to [...]
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The WPF sponsors an annual competition for Fletcher School students to conceptualize and organize a research seminar on the topic of their choosing, which is then paid for by the WPF. The first competition was held in the 2011-2012 academic year, and resulted in a number of very strong proposals. The winning group, composed [...]
Continue Reading →This is why human rights need memorial practices. Human rights memorials and memorial museums, of necessity and of design, split memory in half: honoring the painful experiences of those who suffered abuse and rekindling the aspirations of a society to reject acceptance of such suffering. Memorials assert that the schism cannot be made whole again; it must be lived with or else suffered anew.
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Faced with the prospect of renewed full-scale war between the armies of Sudan and South Sudan, both the Africa Union and United Nations have issued strongly worded and well-matched resolutions, indicating a significant degree of international consensus on the way forward.
On April 24, 2012, a ministerial level meeting of the African [...]
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