Events
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Academic Year 2020-2021
April 19, 2021
Prosecuting Starvation Crimes in Yemen’s Civil War
Hosted by Case Western Reserve University School of Law
Monday, April 19, 2021 4:00 – 5:30pm EST
The Yemen Accountability Project’s release of its white paper “Prosecuting Starvation Crimes in Yemen’s Civil War” examines the use of deliberate attacks on food, water, and objects indispensable to survival as part of the Saudi-led Coalition’s attacks on Houthi rebels in Yemen. The white paper outlines the evidence of these crimes and makes the case for bringing charges against perpetrators of starvation crimes in Yemen. The panelists will explore the challenges of bringing charges against perpetrators and the potential avenues of accountability.
See full participant bios.
April 20, 2021
Starving Tigray
Mass atrocity and humanitarian emergency in Ethiopia
Tuesday, April 20, 2021
5:00-6:30pm
The war in the Tigray region of Ethiopia has unleashed a major humanitarian emergency. With most of Tigray off-limits to humanitarian agencies and journalists, the true dimensions of the crisis are hard to determine precisely. The World Peace Foundation report, ‘Starving Tigray’ documents what is known about the causes of the food crisis, its scale, and its possible trajectory.
The evidence points to a campaign of widespread and systematic pillage and forced starvation, threatening deepening hunger and possibly famine in the coming months, and impoverishment and aid-dependency in the longer term. In this session, World Peace Foundation researchers will outline their findings and debate what can be done.
Join World Peace Foundation’s Executive Director and Fletcher School Professor, Alex de Waal, Fletcher Assistant Professor Tom Dannenbaum and WPF researchers as they discuss war and famine in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, with The Fletcher School Dean, Rachel Kyte.
Past Events
April 7, 2021
Defining an Unimaginable Crime: The Story of Raphael Lemkin
Hosted by United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Facebook Live event with a researcher and Museum historian to learn about Lemkin’s contributions towards helping survivors achieve a measure of justice.
Wednesday, April 7, 2021 at 11:00 AM EDT
Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer, escaped the Nazis but lost 49 members of his family in the Holocaust. He coined the word genocide in 1944 to describe the deliberate attempt to wipe out a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. Lemkin devoted the last 15 years of his life to lobbying governments to recognize genocide as an international crime and changed the legal landscape. Despite his impact, he died alone and penniless in 1959.
Speaker: Dr. Bridget Conley, Research Director, World Peace Foundation, and Associate Research Professor, The Fletcher School, Tufts University
Moderator:
Dr. Edna Friedberg, Historian, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
March 30, 2021
Tree and Tupit Speaker Series
How Mass Atrocities End: Military Interventions and Withdrawals
Conversation with Professor Bridget Conley, Research Director, World Peace Foundation
March 30, 2021 5pm EST
Join TREE and Tufts University Prison Initiative at Tisch College (TUPIT) in speaking with Dr. Bridget Conley, Research Director of the World Peace Foundation about what incarceration looks like in the time of COVID-19 and the pandemic’s effects of incarcerated populations
March 15, 2021
Understanding Violence and Political Markets in Africa and the Middle East:
Conclusions from the Conflict Research Programme
Hosted by the Conflict Research Programme at LSE IDEAS
Monday, March 15, 2021
11:00 AM-12:30 PM EST / 4:00-5:30 PM GMT
After four years of researching violence, conflict and across Africa and the Middle East, what have we learned? Join us for the concluding event of the Conflict Research Programme.
The Conflict Research Programme has been investigating the logics of war and peace across five countries in the Middle East and Africa over the last four years. Findings cover the link between extremist identity politics and political marketplaces, the countervailing role of civicness, and ‘what works’ external interventions in such areas as security, humanitarian need or localised conflict resolution. Producing high-quality research published in academic journals alongside policy analysis to the UK government, the programme boasts a range of outputs that has the potential to shape academic debate and the development landscape.
In this event, CRP researchers will present some of the highlights from the programme including examples of impact, as well as evidence to support a new way of thinking about public authority and conflict as a social condition.
March 3, 2021
Arms Sales to Conflict Zones
Business as Usual: How major weapons exporters arm the world’s conflicts
Hosted by the Forum on the Arms Trade and sponsored by the World Peace Foundation, Center for Responsive Politics, and Program on Civil-Military Relations in Arab States at the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center.
Video of the Event
Wednesday, March 3, 2021
11:00 AM-12:30 PM EST / 4:00-5:30 PM GMT
Join in a discussion for the launch of “Business as Usual: How major weapons exporters arm the world’s conflicts” — the initial report at the midpoint of a two-year project examining defense industries, foreign policy and armed conflict.
Over the past decades, international efforts have increasingly sought to control arms exports to countries where conflicts are taking place, especially where such conflicts involve human rights abuses and violations of international humanitarian law (IHL). This first report looks at the top 11 arms exporters, examining whether export control measures – including international treaties, national legislation and policy, and the EU Common Position – correspond to actual, empirical, changes in practice on the part of arms suppliers.
This report is part of the WPF research program, “Defense industries, Foreign Policy, and Armed Conflict,” support for which was provided in part by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York.
February 20, 2021
The Effects of Military Interventions: Taking Stock
How Mass Atrocities End: Military Interventions and Withdrawals
Hosted by the Royal Holloway University of London
1: 20GMT Dr. Bridget Conley
This conference will bring together scholars from multidisciplinary backgrounds to take stock of theoretical and empirical knowledge on social, political, economic and strategic effects of military interventions. Click below to view the conference website and to register.
De-colonizing “Objects”
October 29, 2020 on Zoom 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. EST
07:00 -9:00 MST | 14:00-16:00 GMT | 15:00-17:00 CET | 16:00-18:00 SAST
This is Session One of a Five Part AY-long series in collaboration with the Jonathon M. Tisch College of Civic Life, In Their Presence: Debates on the dignity, display and ownership of human remains. It will open with an introduction by series organizers, Diane O’Donoghue, Director of the Program for Public Humanities and Senior Fellow for the Humanities at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life, and Bridget Conley, Research Director of the World Peace Foundation (WPF) and Associate Research Professor at The Fletcher School.
Presenters:
Ciraj Rassool is Professor of History at the University of the Western Cape and directs its African Programme in Museum and Heritage Studies.
Vernelda Grant, is the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer of the San Carlos Apache Tribe in Arizona.
Humanitarian Crisis and Response in the Context of the Political Marketplace Framework
Wednesday, October 21, 2020
9:00 AM – 11:00 AM EDT (GMT-4)
This webinar will present findings from recent research on understanding humanitarian crises and responses through the lens of the political marketplace. This research is based several countries across Africa and the Middle East: DRC, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. The webinar is hosted by the Conflict Research Programme at the London School of Economics with the World Peace Foundation at The Fletcher School and Feinstein International Center, Tufts University,
Moderated by World Peace Foundation Executive Director, Alex de Waal.
Panelists:
Daniel Maxwell, Henry J. Leir Professor in Food Security at the Friedman School of Nutrition and The Fletcher School at Tufts University. He is also a research director at the Feinstein International Center
Merry Fitzpatrick, Feinstein International Center, Senior Researcher at Tufts University
Chris Newton, Food and Nutrition Policy and Programmes MS, Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University.
Aditya Sarkar, independent researcher
War crimes & catastrophe in today’s global crisis: Is anyone responsible?
A Symposium On Law, Rights, and Humanitarianism
American University
Thursday Sept. 24, 2020, 1:00 pm
Keynote Address “Starvation Crimes: Prospects for Political Action in the Current Crises”, WPF Executive Director, Alex de Waal
This event is sponsored by the Historical and International Studies Faculty Research Cluster, the Farsi Chair of Islamic Peace; AU programs in Ethics, Peace and Human Rights and Environmental Sustainability and Global Health and Islamic and Middle East Studies, and additional support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Click here for more information and to register.
The Norris and Margery Bendetson EPIIC International Symposium
Preventing Genocide and Mass Atrocities
Institute for Global Leadership, Tufts University
The international symposium is an annual public forum designed and enacted by EPIIC students. It features international practitioners, academics, public intellectuals, activists and journalists who come to Tufts each year for three days of discussion and debate in panels and small-group discussions determined by students in the EPIIC course. Students who conduct research projects also have the opportunity to present alongside the invited experts.
October 9-10, 2020
October 10, 2020 11:00am: Memory, Survival and Genocide, Bridget Conley
Events 2019-2020
CANCELED
Forged in Fire? Rohingya’s Impossible Identity Amidst Mass Violence and Deterritorialization
Wednesday, March 25, 2020
12:00-1:30pm
The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University
160 Packard Avenue
Medford, MA 02155
Crowe Room
Elliott Prasse-Freeman is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology/Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. He received his doctorate in anthropology from Yale University. He is working on a book focusing on Burmese subaltern political thought as adduced from an extended ethnography of activism and contentious politics in the country’s semi-authoritarian setting. Dr Prasse-Freeman is also currently studying Rohingya political subjectivity amidst dislocation and mass violence.
This lecture examines the physical and symbolic violence waged by the Myanmar state on the Rohingya people, exploring in particular the effects of that violence on the (re)production of Rohingya identity. It analyzes the violence as foregrounding the ethnic identity and use of the ethnonym Rohingya, increasing the intensity of some people’s affiliations to it while driving away others, even as the name’s importance makes its content and contours an object of contention and cooptation. I identify internal cleavages in Rohingya identification emerging along four specific axes: First, elites appealing to the narrow, racialized demands of the exclusionary Myanmar state are engaging in a project of strategic essentialism that, when combined with average Rohingyas’ nostalgic imaginaries of life before the military-state’s assaults, constructs a reified Rohingya that does not reflect the various modes of differentiation – particularly along lines of geographic origin, class, and religiosity – that have long existed for Rohingya in Myanmar. Second, the narrowing of Rohingya-ness is absorbed and reproduced by humanitarian institutions’ knowledge machines. Third, variations in Rohingya expression have been accentuated by repeated dispossessions endured by groups of Rohingya over the past four decades, leading to further differentiation in the identity. Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, both those expelled from Myanmar and those under assault within the country have faced the challenges of securing their individual/family survival while also preserving their collective ethno-cultural identity; identification with the Rohingya ethnonym varies to the extent that individuals have different perceptions regarding how such identification may either protect or imperil them. Taken together, Rohingya identity hence often becomes an impossible object as the very same violent crucible in which Rohingya have been forged is also that which extrudes them. They are simultaneously interpellated as Rohingya by the violence that denies that name and even compels them to reject it. Through multi-sited ethnography in Cox’s Bazaar, Mae Sot and Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, and Yangon, as well as on various Rohingya social media spaces, to inquire into the consequences for the Rohingya identity, the political movements around it, and for various individuals – often in radically different class and spatial positions – who may, under certain circumstances, call themselves Rohingya.
Rehumanizing the Dead of Anthropology: Museums and Societies after Colonialism, with Ciraj Rassool
March 25, 2020
6-7:30pm
Tufts University
Barnum Hall, Room LL008
Packard Ave, Medford, MA 02155
Human Remains from African Societies are found in a number of museum collections in Europe and South Africa. Ciraj Rassool, Professor of History at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, will address what it means for all these societies to do the work of human remains restitution and reburial, and how this contributes to rethinking the museum after colonialism. A leading voice in museum and heritage studies, and memory politics and visual history, his publications include, Skeletons in the Cupboard: South African Museums and the Trade in Human Remains, 1907-1917 and The Politics of Heritage in Africa: Economies, Histories and Infrastructures.
Click here for additional information.
The Norris and Margery Bendetson EPIIC International Symposium, presented by The Institute of Global Leadership
The international symposium is an annual public forum designed and enacted by EPIIC students. It features international practitioners, academics, public intellectuals, activists and journalists who come to Tufts each year for three days of discussion and debate in panels and small-group discussions determined by students in the EPIIC course. Students who conduct research projects also have the opportunity to present alongside the invited experts.
Preventing Genocide and Mass Atrocities
March 26-28, 2020
March 17, 7:00pm : “Memory, Survival and Genocide”, WPF Research Director, Bridget Conley
Full program details available here.
Past Events 2019-2020
European Conference 2020, hosted by the Harvard Kennedy School
March 6-8, 2020
The Conference will take place at both the Harvard Kennedy School of Government (6 & 7 March) and Harvard Graduate School of Design (8 March).
The European Conference is an annual conference on European and Transatlantic Affairs convened by students from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Harvard Business School, MIT Sloan School of Management and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
March 7, 2020
11:30-12:45pm
WPF’s Executive Director, Alex de Waal will join Carmen Csernelhazi, Julien Serre and Raymond Gilpin for the panel “Fostering a Sustainable Africa: The EU-Africa relationship”
Click here for for the full program.
Laying the past to rest: Challenges of the TPLF/EPRDF state building project
Monday, March 9, 2020
5:30-7:00pm
Cabot Room 702
The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University
160 Packard Avenue
Medford, MA 02155
Mulugeta Gebrehiwot Berhe, Senior Fellow at the World Peace Foundation will discuss his recently released book, ‘Laying the past to rest: Challenges of the TPLF/EPRDF state building project’, Hurst publishers, London.
The Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), founded as a small guerrilla movement in 1974, became the leading party in the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). After decades of civil war, the EPRDF defeated the government in 1991, and has been the dominant party in Ethiopia ever since. Its political agenda of federalism, revolutionary democracy and a developmental state has been unique and controversial.
Drawing on his own experience as a senior member of the TPLF/EPRDF leadership, and his unparalleled access to internal documentation, Mulugeta Gebrehiwot Berhe identifies the organisational, political and sociocultural factors that contributed to victory in the revolutionary war, particularly the Front’s capacity for intellectual leadership. Charting its challenges and limitations, he analyses how the EPRDF managed the complex transition from a liberation movement into an established government. Finally, he evaluates the fate of the organisation’s revolutionary goals over its subsequent quarter-century in power, assessing the strengths and weaknesses the party has bequeathed to the country.
Laying the Past to Rest is a comprehensive and balanced analysis of the genesis, successes and failings of the EPRDF’s state-building project in contemporary Ethiopia, from a uniquely authoritative observer.
Transnational Conflict
Monday, March 2, 2020
12:00-1:30pm
The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University
160 Packard Avenue, Cabot Room 702
Medford, MA 02155
Speakers:
Noel Twagiramungu, World Peace Foundation Fellow
Alex de Waal, Executive Director, World Peace Foundation
Mulugeta Gebrehiwot Berhe, Senior Fellow at the World Peace Foundation
The panel will examine new data that show that most conflict in Africa is internationalized and not solely internal. This establishes a new paradigm that places the inter-state and transnational elements of African conflict firmly at the center of explanations. The paradigm shift has far-reaching implications for how we study African conflicts, and the kinds of interventions necessary to reduce them.
Read the occasional paper, “Introducing the Transnational Conflict in Africa Dataset”.
This research was conducted as part of the World Peace Foundation project on African peace missions, funded by the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and as part of the Conflict Research Programme at the London School of Economics, funded by the UK Department for International Development. Their support is gratefully acknowledged.
OxFID 2020: Beyond Pledges in partnership with UNDP & NYT
Hosted by Oxford Forum for International Development
February 8-9, 2020
Blavatnik School of Government
Radcliffe Observatory Quarter OX2 6GG
Executive Director Alex de Waal will be speaking on the panel, “Global Responses to Genocide”.
The need to protect people from acts of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing is a global responsibility. This panel will look at what can be done before such atrocities are carried out so that states can focus on prevention rather than response, examining international inactivity, proactivity and reactivity in response to atrocities. Where the principle of ‘responsibility to protect’ confers no legal obligation, it has succeeded in creating an emerging norm that acknowledges a political commitment to a collective approach to preventing atrocities.
The effectiveness of the ‘responsibility to protect’ principle risks being undermined by apathy and the controversy of its perception as effectively enabling state intervention ‘by the back door’. Could an alternative approach, focused on and wider stakeholder engagement, garner international support and re-energize a failing norm? How can world powers be proactive, rather than reactive, in the fight against ethnic cleansing? How can we balance a proactive approach alongside state autonomy?
Program details available here.
Starvation as a Crime in Armed Conflict
Utrecht University
Hosted by the Center for Conflict Studies
February 13, 2020
Drift 21, Room 0.32, Utrecht University
12:45 to 5:00pm
Starvation is a time-tested method of war and genocide throughout history. The current scale of suffering and death as a result of the use of starvation is unprecedented in modern history, with a number of present conflicts embroiled in acute food insecurity that has threatened famine. Yet recognition of the deliberate nature of famine, attribution of fault and accountability has remained, until recently, elusive.
Keynote speech by Prof. Alex De Waal, Famine: How it can still be Eliminated through Political Action
Mrs. Catriona Murdoch, Starvation and the Pursuit of Accountability
Prof. Uğur Ümit Üngör, Syria and the Global History of Famine Crimes
Why Judgments Are Not History: the limitations of courtroom contributions to the historical record in Africa
Monday, November 4, 2019
5 p.m.
The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy
160 Packard Ave. Cabot 703
Medford, MA
A central claim of international criminal prosecutions is that they contribute to fact-finding and establishing a historical record. But do they? In this presentation Dr. Thijs Bouwknegt addresses the process of legal-historical truth finding, the use of witness testimonies as historical sources, and the legacies of international trials in the wake of the civil war in Sierra Leone (1991-2002), the genocide in Rwanda (1994), and contested leadership change in Côte d’Ivoire (2010 -2011). He raises important questions about the discrepancies between prosecutorial and historical endeavors.
Thijs Bouwknegt is a researcher and lecturer at the Netherlands Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD). He specialises in transitional justice, international criminal justice, mass violence in Africa and comparative genocide studies.
Overcoming Extreme Inequality and its Evils
Presented by Yale Global Justice program and Quinnipiac Albert Schweitzer Institute
November 1-November 3, 2019
‘Inequality’s Evils’
November 1, 2019
3:30-5:30pm
Faculty Room, Connecticut Hall, Yale University
New Haven, CT
Panelists:
Alex de Waal, Executive Director, World Peace Foundation : Famine
Bridget Conley, Research Director, World Peace Foundation : Mass Atrocities
Michal Apollo, Pedagogical University of Cracow
Chair: Anat Biletzki, Albert Schweitzer Institute / Quinnipiac University)•
Full program available at Yale Global Justice.
Agency of Bones Marginal Memory
a talk with Bridget Conley
October 28, 2019
6pm
Bard College
30 Campus Rd.
Annandale-On-Hudson, NY 12504
The Hannah Arendt Center
Contemporary efforts to answer the question, ‘Why memorialize Atrocities’, usually begins with the question, ‘For whom is memory?’
Prospects for Democracy in Sudan
Friday, October 11, 2019
6:30pm to 8:00pm
Hosted by the Conflict and Civil Society Research Unit
London School of Economics
Old Theatre, Old Building, LSE
Houghton Street, London
The panel will discuss the dynamics of the 2019 Sudanese revolution, characterised by both non-violent civic mobilisation and the fast-evolving transnational and mercenarised political marketplace.
Panel:
Alex de Waal, Executive Director, World Peace Foundation, Research Programme Director, Conflict Research Programme
Raga Makawi, Sudanese Activist and Editor at Zed Books & African Arguments
Dr Rim Turkmani, Research Director, Conflict Research Programme – Syria
Law, Justice and Civicness: lessons from South Sudan
Tuesday, October 15, 2019
6:30pm to 8:00pm
Hosted by the Conflict and Civil Society Research Unit
London School of Economics
Wolfson Theatre, New Academic Building
The panel will discuss the efforts of civil society actors campaigning for systematic change despite being a part of a system that profits from their oppression.
Panel:
Alex de Waal, Executive Director, World Peace Foundation, Research Programme Director, Conflict Research Programme
Rachel Ibreck, Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, Goldsmiths University
David Deng, Human Rights Lawyer
Red Flags and Red Diamonds: the warning signs and political drivers of arms trade corruption
Thursday, September 19, 2019
12:30-1:45pm
The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy
160 Packard Ave., Mugar Room 231
Medford, MA 02155
Why is corruption so prevalent in the international arms trade? And what are the key warning signs or “Red Flags” that an arms deal might be corrupt? Dr. Samuel Perlo-Freeman, Program Director of the World Peace Foundation program on Global Arms Business and Corruption presents his latest report for World Peace Foundation, “Red flags and Red Diamonds – the warning signs and political drivers of arms trade corruption”, which discusses some of the key red flags relating to the buyer, the seller, and the details of the deal itself; but also challenges the discourse of corruption “risk” or “vulnerability”, which often seems to present corruption as a pitfall into which companies and governments may accidentally stumble. On the contrary, it is often an active choice by both arms companies and recipient governments, and in “Red Flags and Red Diamonds”, Perlo-Freeman analyses the political and economic drivers that make this a choice they are all too often willing to make.
Memory from the Margins:
Ethiopia’s Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum
This book asks the question: what is the role of memory during a political transition? Drawing on Ethiopian history, transitional justice, and scholarly fields concerned with memory, museums and trauma, the author reveals a complex picture of global, transnational, national and local forces as they converge in the story of the creation and continued life of one modest museum in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa—the Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum. It is a study from multiple margins: neither the case of Ethiopia nor memorialization is central to transitional justice discourse, and within Ethiopia, the history of the Red Terror is sidelined in contemporary politics. From these nested margins, traumatic memory emerges as an ambiguous social and political force. The contributions, meaning and limitations of memory emerge at the point of discrete interactions between memory advocates, survivor-docents and visitors. Memory from the margins is revealed as powerful for how it disrupts, not builds, new forms of community.
Book events:
August 21, 2019
14:00-17:00
Hilton Addis Ababa
Menelik II Ave, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
August 23, 2019
9:00am
Mekelle University
Adihaki Campus
‘The Missing Picture’: Rethinking Genocide Studies & Prevention
14th Conference of the International Association of Genocide Scholars
July 14 – 19, 2019 Phnom Penh, Cambodia
https://www.iags2019.com/
July 16, 2019 15:30 – 17:00
Panel: Missing Pictures: Critical Genocide Studies and Prevention, ‘Missing the Point: Deconstructing Genocide Memory’
Bridget Conley, World Peace Foundation, Tufts University
July 17, 2019 9 – 10:30
Panel: Representing Violence and Suffering: Linguistic, Artistic and Conceptual Frameworks as Limits and Opportunities
Chair: Alex de Waal, World Peace Foundation; Tufts University
July 18, 2019 11:00 – 12:30
Panel: Starvation Crimes as Part of the Missing Picture in Genocide Studies and International Criminal Justice
The Fear of Famine: Why do International Criminal Justice Actors Avoid Addressing Starvation Crimes Randle DeFalco, University of Liverpool
The Seven Uses of Mass Starvation Bridget Conley, World Peace Foundation, Tufts University
Starvation Crimes Alex de Waal, World Peace Foundation; Tufts University