diplomacy | Academic Department News

This academic year the Aydelotte Foundation launched a program to support the promotion of significant scholarly works by our faculty and staff. We are pleased to co-sponsor the first event that is tied to this initiative:

Transnational Solidarities, Diplomatic Endeavors, and International History: A Roundtable on Researching and Writing Histories that Cross Borders

This roundtable, thematically linked to Professor Megan Brown’s recent book, The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community, will focus on transnational movements, international solidarity, diplomacy, and more.

Event Details:

Location: Scheuer Room
Roundtable: Thursday, February 9th, 4:30-6pm
Reception to follow until 7pm

Panelists:

Dr. Megan Brown is Assistant Professor of History at Swarthmore College, specializing in modern Europe with a focus on France. Her book, The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community (Harvard), was published in 2022.

Dr. Cindy Ewing is the Assistant Professor of Contemporary International History at the University of Toronto. She specializes in histories of decolonization and the Cold War in South and Southeast Asia. Her in-progress book examines how Asian and Arab diplomats imported indigenous ideas about rights and sovereignty into the burgeoning international human rights system at the United Nations.

Dr. Kesewa John is a historian of Caribbean radicalism and intellectual history particularly interested in the intersections of Black feminist and Black radical histories of early twentieth century Caribbean activism. Dr. John is a Lecturer in Caribbean History in the Institute of the Americas at University College London and the current Chair of the Society for Caribbean Studies, the UK’s only learned society focused on promoting scholarship about the Caribbean and its diasporas.

Moderator:

Dr. Angela Zimmerman is professor of history at George Washington University. She is the author of Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton, 2010) and the editor of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Civil War in the United States (International Publishers, 2016). She is currently writing a history of the Civil War as an international anti-slavery revolution with roots in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. It will be called “A Very Dangerous Element.”

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Sponsored by the Aydelotte Foundation and the Swarthmore College Libraries.

Co-Sponsored by the Asian Studies, Black Studies, French, Global Studies, History, Peace and Conflict Studies, and Political Science Departments at Swarthmore College

Catalytic Diplomacy for Peace: Lessons Learned from the Half Century of Experience of Two Swarthmore Graduates

Jeremy J. Stone ‘57 Swarthmore College, Honorary Doctor of Laws for peace activities ’85 and B.J. Stone, ’57

On April 19, 2016, Dr. Jeremy Stone spoke to approximately 150 students in Science Center Room 101 at Swarthmore College*

Creative ideas, pursued with personal diplomacy through political structures, can make a real difference to peace and conflict. Stone will reference successes and failures. These include inventing five tabled Washington-Moscow Summit arms control proposals. They also include: catalytic undertakings in initiating scientific exchange with China, Vietnam and Iran; efforts to end the Cambodian civil war; stabilizing the conflict between Mainland China and Taiwan; defending human rights in Russia and Constitutional rights in America; and a series of failures to reverse current American doctrine on first use of nuclear weapons.

Jeremy Stone in Science Center 101

Dr. Jeremy J. Stone graduated from Swarthmore College in 1957 before going on to complete a Ph.D. in mathematics from Stanford University. After holding positions at the Hudson Institute, the Harvard Center for International Affairs (CFIA), and Pomona College, he became the CEO of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS)–founded in 1945 as the Federation of Atomic Scientists (FAS)– which focused on policy related to the nuclear arms race, human rights, ethnic violence and civil conflict, small arms, controlling biological and chemical weapons, energy conservation, global warming, and other related subjects.

Jeremy Stone

Through what Stone calls “catalytic diplomacy” and with the assistance of his wife, B.J. Stone ’57, they shaped a range of negotiations over nuclear weapons during the Cold War, played a key role in renewing scientific exchange with U.S. and China (1972) and U.S. and Iran (1999), and worked to contain super-Maoist movements in North Korea, Cambodia and Peru, among other topics.

Swarthmore College awarded Dr. Stone an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree in 1985 for his career pursuing peace as a public interest activist. He is the author of two books on arms control: Containing the Arms Race: Some Specific Proposals (MIT Press, 1966) and Strategic Persuasion: Arms Limitations Through Dialogue (Columbia University Press, 1967) as well as two memoirs: Every Man Should Try: Adventures of a Public Interest Activist (Public Affairs Press, 1999) and Catalytic Diplomacy: Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran.

Dr. Jeremy Stone ’57 lecturing, in June, 1979, to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on the arms limitation treaty called SALT II. The Senators from left to right are: Charles Percy, Jacob Javits, Frank Church, George McGovern, and Joseph Biden.

Dr. Jeremy Stone ’57 and his wife, B.J. Stone ’57, in 1972, negotiating, after dinner, with Prime Minister Zhou En-lai of the People’s Republic of China in 1972–a month after relations with Communist China were opened by President Nixon.

Sponsored by the Program in Peace and Conflict Studies and Catalytic Diplomacy

Download a flyer.

(*The video above is a re-recording of the lecture Dr. Stone delivered at Swarthmore College.)