For commentary on the ongoing popular resistance in Egypt, visit this interview with a friend of PCS, Professor Stephen Zunes,  Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of San Francisco and chair of the program in Middle Eastern Studies. Juan Cole’s blog, Informed Comment, is also a helpful resource.

Here is a must-see report on the nonviolent organizing behind the uprising.

For global context on the proliferation of strategic nonviolent action:

You may have heard David Hartsough (co-founder of Nonviolent Peaceforce) speak in the Scheuer Room last semester about the historical and ongoing development of nonviolent responses to injustice and global and local social, economic, and environmental problems.  Several students expressed an interest in the local chapter of Nonviolent Peaceforce, so the local chapter is holding an information session to share more about the work of the organization and how you can get involved.

Thursday, January 27, 7:30-8:30 p.m.

Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility

Keith Room

Swarthmore College

This meeting will provide students with an opportunity to learn about Nonviolent Peaceforce and find out how it facilitates peace in conflicted regions.

Nonviolent Peaceforce is an unarmed, professional civilian peacekeeping force that works in conflict zones worldwide (Current projects in Sri Lanka, Philippines, and Sudan).

The organization’s mission is to build a large-scale, trained, international civilian nonviolent peaceforce. Nonviolent Peaceforce is sent to conflict areas to prevent death and destruction and protect human rights, thus creating the space for local groups to enter into dialogue and to seek peaceful resolution to local conflicts.

View short videos, enjoy conversations with local Nonviolent Peaceforce supporters, and consider how to get involved.

For more information about Nonviolent Peaceforce, please visit www.nonviolentpeaceforce.org

Maps and directions to campus are available at http://www.swarthmore.edu/visitordash/dash_visitors.php

A flyer is attached to this email

Sponsored by Peace and Conflict Studies and the local chapter of Nonviolent Peaceforce

Nationalism, Anarchism, Reform: Understanding Political Islam from the Inside Out

A lecture by James Gelvin

How can the United States identify its true enemies in what George W. Bush called the “Global War on Terror”? How useful and accurate are the labels such as “Islamo-fascist” or “violent extremist” in this task? This talk will lay out a framework for understanding political Islam in all its diversity. That framework is based on a close examination of the rhetorical battle currently being waged amongst Islamists themselves from pulpits and television studios, in print and in cyberspace.

January 21, 2011

12:30-2 PM

Science Center 101

Nationalism, Anarchism, Reform:

Understanding Political Islam

from the Inside Out

James L. Gelvin is professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests include the social and cultural history of Greater Syria during the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries, Islamic movements, and nationalism in the Arab Middle East. He is author of Divided Loyalties: Nationalism and Mass Politics in Syria at the Close of Empire (1998), The Modern Middle East: A History (2004, 2007, 2011), and The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War (2005, 2007), along with numerous articles and chapters in edited volumes. He is presently co-editing a volume entitled, Circuits and Networks: Islam and Islamic Communities During the First Age of Globalization: 1815-1914.

Hosted by The Department of History Co-Sponsored by the French section of Modern Languages, Political Science, Religion, and Sociology and Anthropology Departments, and the Islamic Studies, and Peace & Conflict Studies Programs at Swarthmore College and the Middle East Center at the University of Pennsylvania

Visiting Professor and Research Fellow George Lakey was honored on October 2 by the Peace and Justice Studies Association (PJSA) in its conference in Winnipeg, Canada.

The PJSA is the professional association of scholars and teachers in the U.S. and Canada, and is part of the International Peace Research Association. Its annual conference is held on university campuses in North America and this time was at the University of Winnipeg and Canadian Mennonite University.

George Lakey is in his fifth year at Swarthmore, the first three of which he served as Eugene M. Lang Visiting Professor for Issues in Social Change. His Peace and Conflict Studies courses at Swarthmore have included “Nonviolent Responses to Terrorism” and “Research Seminar in Nonviolent Struggle and Strategy.” In the latter course students create case studies which will be mounted on an internet website in the Global Nonviolent Action Database Project. The project, initiated by Lakey, aims to include all countries in the thousands of cases of “people power” aiming for human rights, peace, environmental sustainability, democracy, and economic justice. The web-based database will, in addition to a standardized database format, include 2-3 page narratives for each case.

The PJSA gave its “Peace Educator of the Year” award “for excellence in scholarship and dedication to peace education.” In addition to a teaching career that has included Haverford College and the University of Pennsylvania, Lakey has led over 1500 social change workshops on five continents. He is author of eight books and many articles both scholarly and popular. In his activist role he has led campaigns for social change on neighborhood, city-wide, state, national, and international levels, and was a founder of the Movement for a New Society and the Jobs with Peace Campaign. Lakey’s first arrest was for a civil rights sit-in in Chester, PA, and his first book was for the civil rights movement, A Manual for Direct Action, co-authored with fellow sociologist Martin Oppenheimer. At Swarthmore Lakey is based at the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility and the Peace and Conflict Studies program of the College.

see also this release from Swarthmore’s Office of News and Information.

See this piece about Jim MacMillan and War News Radio in the latest issue of Swarthmore College Bulletin.

Jim MacMillan, journalist in residence

By Jeffrey Lott

Contrary to popular opinion—or at least the opinion of a lot of other journalists—Jim MacMillan says it’s a “great time to be a journalist.” The new journalist in residence at War News Radio. (WNR) sees great promise in new and emerging media and is eager to share his perspective with the Swarthmore students who produce weekly radio programs that aim to fill the gaps in the media’s coverage of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Read More …

Nico Udu-Gama

School of the Americas Watch

Thursday, November 11, 2010

7:30 p.m.

Scheuer Room, Kohlberg Hall

Swarthmore College

Maps and directions to campus are available.

On Thursday, November 11th, Nico Udu-Gama will be coming to discuss the School of the Americas and his role as a field organizer with the School of the Americas Watch, an independent, grassroots organization devoted to closing the SOA in Fort Benning, Georgia and changing the oppressive U.S foreign policy it represents.  Since its establishment in 1946, the SOA, or, as it is now known, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, has trained over 60,000 Latin American soldiers in clandestine military operations, often used to carry out violent campaigns against their own people. Those targeted by SOA graduates include union and community organizers, educators and student leaders, as well as others working for social and economic justice. SOA Watch organizes fasts, demonstrations and other nonviolent protests against the School of the Americas, and also engages in media and legislative work.  Udu-Gama was trained in resistance by the campesinos and campesinas of Colombia and spent a year in the Peace Community of San José de Apartadó, as well as three years with the communities in the Magdalena Medio, Arauca, Catatumbo and Bogotá.  He has also worked in the US with tenants facing displacement in Brooklyn, NY, and with villagers in Palestine resisting the Apartheid Wall.

Feel free to follow this link to a video about the attendance of Swarthmore students at the School of the Americas vigil in 2008.

This event is sponsored by Students for a Democratic Society, Swarthmore Labor Action Project, and the Program in Peace and Conflict Studies.

Contact:

Alison Roseberry-Polier

arosebe1@swarthmore.edu

Our friends at Haverford have launched a new concentration in Peace, Justice and Human Rights! We congratulate them and look forward to many fruitful collaborations!  Visit their website.

… and speaking of Swarthmore’s historical links to the pursuit of justice, see this announcement about an upcoming event at Swarthmore’s Public Library.

A Discussion with Mary Walton, author of A Woman’s Crusade: Alice Paul and the Battle for the Ballot

Tuesday, December 7, 2010
7:00 pm Swarthmore Public Library (location)

Praise for A Woman’s Crusade:

“Mary Walton, a veteran reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer, has captured Paul’s fire, her slow burn in A Woman’s Crusade. Part of the genius of the book lies in Walton’s quiet analysis of the methods used by the National American Woman Suffrage Assn. and the National Women’s Party, founded by Paul in 1916.”–Los Angeles Times

“Perhaps more than any other person, Alice Paul was responsible for U.S. women finally securing the right to vote in 1920—and yet most Americans have never heard of her. It’s astonishing that an individual of such courage and accomplishment would have to be “rescued” from obscurity, but that’s precisely what Mary Walton has done with this dynamic and entertaining biography. Walton sweeps the reader along in Alice Paul’s seven-year crusade for suffrage, all the way to its nail-biting conclusion. This is a wonderful and important book.”—Thomas Kunkel, author of Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross of The New Yorker

Copies of A Woman’s Crusade will be available for purchase and signing after the program.

All programs are free and open to the public. Please register at the library, call 610-543-0436 or email swarthmore@delcolibraries.org.

I would like to draw our attention to this announcement about an upcoming conversation about Quaker values at Swarthmore. I expect that discussion will touch on why Swarthmore has a Peace and Conflict Studies program.  Hope to see you there.

Interested in the role of Quakers, and Quaker values at Swarthmore? Want to talk about how we balance being a secular institution with our spiritual roots? This conversation began on the strategic planning website and will continue with a gathering on Friday, November 12, from 1:00 – 2:30 in Bond Hall.

We encourage faculty, staff and students to participate in this important discussion as we make plans for the future of the College.

Interested in the role of Quakers, and Quaker values at Swarthmore? Want to talk about how we balance being a secular institution with our spiritual roots? This conversation began on the strategic planning website and will continue with a gathering on Friday, November 12, from 1:00 - 2:30 in Bond Hall. We encourage faculty, staff and students to participate in this important discussion as we make plans for the future of the College.

Freelance journalist Anna Badkhen spent the last 10 years covering conflict zones. She shares the personal stories of the affected people with whom she met, spoke, laughed, and ate along the way in her new book, Peace Meals, in which the meals she shared serve as a frame for humanizing the way she reports on war.

Anna Badkhen was born in the Soviet Union, where she began her journalism career, and has been working as a freelance journalist since she moved to the US a few years ago. “Peace Meals” is her first book.

Wednesday, November 3, 2010

4:30 p.m.

Scheuer Room, Kohlberg Hall

Maps and directions to campus are available.

Sponsored by: Serendipity Fund, FFS, Peace and Conflict Studies, and War News Radio

Listen to Anna Badkhen interviewed by Chuck Nevius of the San Francisco Chronicle.

[podcast]http://cdn.sfgate.com/blogs/sounds/sfgate/chroncast/2006/07/31/NewsWrap-20060731.mp3[/podcast]