Tag Archives: war

Three “Reflections From the Field” events

We are thrilled to announce three upcoming events in “Reflections From The Field”, a new speaker series at Swarthmore College, which brings people working on the front lines of conflict and social change to campus to reflect upon *what* they do, *why* they do it and how *they* came to do it.

1. “These Birds Walk”, a film screening and conversation with director and cinematographer Omar Mullick.

Monday, March 13th @ 7:30PM
Science Center 101

In Karachi, Pakistan, a runaway boy’s life hangs on one critical question: where is home? The streets, an orphanage, or with the family he fled in the first place? Simultaneously heart- wrenching and life-affirming, THESE BIRDS WALK documents the struggles of these wayward street children and the humanitarians looking out for them in an ethereal and inspirational story of resilience. Listed by The New Yorker as one of the best foreign films of the 21st century, this is a must see!

Omar Mullick is a film director and cinematographer known for his work on the 2013 feature film THESE BIRDS WALK. A 2016 Sundance Institute fellow, his most recent work can be seen on VICE’s HBO series, Black Markets, and the Gloria Steinem hosted show Woman on VICELAND. Current clients as a director and cinematographer include CNN, PBS, HBO, VICE, Discovery and The Gates Foundation. Trained as a photographer, his work has been published in The New York Times, Foreign Policy Magazine, National Geographic and TIME. He has received awards from the Doris Duke Foundation, the Western Knight Center for Journalism, Annenberg and Kodak.

2. “Closing the gap between the world we have and the world most people everywhere want”, a virtual conversation with Ricken Patel, Founding President and Executive Director of Avaaz.org, the world’s largest online activist community.

Monday, March 27th @ 4:30 PM
Science Center 199

Ricken is the founding President and Executive Director of Avaaz, the world’s largest online activist community with 44 million subscribers in every country of the world.

Ricken has been voted the “ultimate game changer in politics” (Huffington Post), listed in the world’s top 100 thinkers (Foreign Policy magazine) and described as “the global leader of online protest” with a “vaunting sense of optimism” (The Guardian). Prior to starting Avaaz.org, Ricken was the founding Executive Director of ResPublica, a global public entrepreneurship group that worked to end genocide in Darfur and build progressive globalism in US politics, among other projects. Ricken has also lived and worked in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan and Afghanistan, consulting for organizations including the International Crisis Group, the United Nations, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Gates Foundation, Harvard University, CARE International and the International Center for Transitional Justice. Born in Canada, Ricken has a B.A. from Oxford University and a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard.

3. “From the streets of Kabul to the streets of New York: Reflections on covering war and crime”, a conversation with New York Times reporter,
Joseph Goldstein.

Friday, April 7th @ 4:30 PM
Science Center 105

Joseph Goldstein’s first newspaper job was at the 6,000-circulation Daily Citizen in Searcy, Ark, where he wrote, among other things, a feature story about how meth-fueled treasure hunters in rural Arkansas were creating an underground economy for arrowheads and other Native American artifacts.

He soon moved to New York City, where he worked at The New York Sun, until its demise, and later at The New York Post. He joined The New York Times in 2011 and writes mainly about the criminal justice system in New York. He has reported on the N.Y.P.D.’s over-reliance on stop-and-frisk tactics and about a secretive police unit that combs the city’s jails for Muslim prisoners in the hopes of pressuring them into becoming informants. He has covered Ferguson, the emergence of the alt-right, and Afghanistan, where he was based for a year.

Sponsored by the Department of Political Science, Global Affairs Program at the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, Media Studies, Career Services, and Peace and Conflict Studies.

Confronting War Crimes in the Middle East and Africa

Confronting War Crimes in the Middle East and Africa

A conversation with Sofia Candeias, international lawyer and member of the United Nations Team of Experts on Sexual Violence and the Rule of Law

Friday, February 17th, 2017
4:30 pm Kohlberg 115

Come listen to intimate reflections of those working on the front lines of today’s conflict and post-conflict contexts. In “Reflections from the Field”, a new speaker series at Swarthmore, diplomats, journalists,
activists, and humanitarians will discuss what they do, why they do it and how they came to do it.

An international lawyer and member of the UN Team of Experts on Sexual Violence and the Rule of Law, Sofia Candeias’ work focuses on the promotion
of accountability for sexual violence crimes. In her current role, she covers the global refugee crisis, with a special focus on Iraq and Syria, as well as the Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo and
Mali.

Prior to joining the UN Team of Experts, Sofia was the Criminal Justice Coordinator at the International Center for Transitional Justice where she focused on supporting national efforts on the investigation and prosecution of international crimes in Colombia, Congo, Ivory Coast, Tunisia and Uganda. She has held posts with the UN in Congo, was a member of the Legal Advisory Section of the War Crimes Chamber in Sarajevo, and served as a Legal Officer with the Serious Crimes Unit in UNMISET in East Timor. Sofia began her career in 2003 at the newly established International Criminal Court.

Sponsored by the Department of Political Science, Global Affairs Program at the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, and Peace and Conflict
Studies.

State Failure and War in the Middle East: A Conflict of Our Times

From our friends in the Political Science Department:

“State Failure and War in the Middle East: A Conflict of Our Times”

Wednesday 18th January
11:45 AM – 12:45 PM
Trotter 303
Swarthmore College

*Sandwiches will be provided

Please join us for a lunchtime talk with William Reno, Professor of Political Science & Director, Program of African Studies, Northwestern University. Professor Reno will speak about his ongoing research in the Middle East. A leading expert on political violence, the organization and behavior of insurgent groups and the politics of authoritarian regimes, Professor Reno is the author of Corruption and State Politics in Sierra Leone (Cambridge University Press, 1995), Warlord Politics and African States (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998) and Warfare in Independent Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2011). He visits Swarthmore from Iraq.

Race, War, and Police Power in the American Century

Nikhil Pal Singh
(New York University)
Tuesday, November 15th
4:15 pm Sci 101

Drawing on his forthcoming book Exceptional Empire: Race, War and Sovereignty in U.S. Globalism (Harvard University Press 2017), Nikhil Singh will speak on the topic of race, war and police power in the ‘American Century.’

Dr. Singh is Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University, where he also directs the NYU Prison Education Program. He is the author of Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Harvard UP, 2004), which won several prizes, including the Liberty Legacy Foundation Award for the best book in civil rights history from the Organization of American Historians in 2005.

He is the editor of Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder: the Black Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O’Dell (University of California Press, 2010). Author of numerous essays on race, empire and U.S. liberalism, he is a member of the editorial board of the American Crossroads Book Series at the University of California Press.

Sponsored by the Department of Political Science, Black Studies Program, Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility, English Literature, Peace and Conflict Studies, and Sociology and Anthropology

Contact: obalkan1

Israel/Palestine Film Series – Fall 2016

The Peace and Conflict Studies program will be organizing another Israel/Palestine Film Series this semester. Screenings are open to the entire community, and we hope you will join us.

Israel/Palestine Film Series

Sponsored by Swarthmore Peace and Conflict Studies

All screenings are on Wednesdays at 4:15pm in the Lang Performing Arts Cinema

September 7: Promises

Israeli filmmaker documents a group of Israeli and Palestinian children meeting for the first time in and around Jerusalem.

September 14: Walk on Water

Israeli filmmaker produces this psychological thriller focusing on the life of one Israeli intelligence officer.

September 21: The Gatekeepers

Israeli filmmaker interviews all six living heads of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service.

September 28: The War Around Us

American filmmaker follows the only two international journalists who covered the 2009 Israel-Hamas War in Gaza.

October 5: Paradise Now

Palestinian filmmaker produces this Academy Award-nominated fiction film examining the final hours before two Palestinian friends prepare to commit acts of violence in Tel Aviv.

October 19: Eyes Wide Open

Israeli filmmaker produces this breathtaking fiction film examining a love affair between two Orthodox Jewish men in Jerusalem.

Emeritus Professor Harold Pagliaro Reflects on Combat Experience

Emeritus Professor Harold Pagliaro Reflects on Combat Experience

from Swarthmore News and Events
by Mark Anskis
November 11, 2015

Seventy-two years removed from his military service, the fear of combat still lingers with Harold Pagliaro, Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor Emeritus of English Literature and Provost Emeritus.

“I still have nightmares about being sent to the front,” says Pagliaro, who was drafted into the U.S. Army as a naïve and optimistic 19-year-old during the Second World War. In one particular dream, Pagliaro is redrafted and, when he tells the draft board officer of his true age, his appeals fall on deaf ears and he’s sent back into service.

Pagliaro’s anxiety is similar to that of many who return from combat. In an attempt to come to terms with his experience, Pagliaro turned his memories into a memoir, Naked Heart: A Soldier’s Journey to the Front, which was published shortly after he retired from teaching at the College in 1992.

According to Pagliaro, the book, which is available in McCabe Library, is a tale “of what it’s like to be sent to the front. Thousands like me, boys just becoming men. We went up to the front lines alone.”

The idea for a memoir came to Pagliaro on a trip home to his parents’ house in the early 1990s. While there, he discovered a box of 200 letters he sent to his parents during the war. The letters were in stark contrast to what he recalls feeling at the time.

“I couldn’t believe how little they said of what I was experiencing,” he says. “I held back, I think, to keep my family from worrying.”

Trained for the infantry at Fort Benning, Ga., Pagliaro was taken from his division and sent directly into combat as a front line solo replacement in a reconnaissance unit, alongside soldiers he did not know. While in Europe, he was sent on high-risk patrol missions, with little guidance from his superiors and often in the dead of night. He recalls the emotions he felt at the time: fear of death from the night patrols, frustration that he knew little of the objectives of his missions, loneliness from fighting next to strangers.

Despite the near-constant danger, Pagliaro survived. He was ultimately sent home after a German shell fragment severely injured his right leg during an attack near the town of Erckartswiller, France. Pagliaro recovered after a long hospitalization. He says that even today, arthritis flares in the wounded leg are more frequent than in the “good” leg.

After being discharged from the Army in 1945, Pagliaro resumed classes at Columbia University, where he earned an A.B., M.A., and Ph.D. and taught from 1948-63. He came to Swarthmore in 1964, where he taught 18th-century English literature and English romanticism. He also served as provost from 1974 to 1980.

In addition to his memoir, Pagliaro is the author or editor of numerous other books and articles, including Selfhood and Redemption in Blake’s Songs (1987), Henry Fielding: A Literary Life (1998), and Relations Between the Sexes in the Plays of George Bernard Shaw (2004). At 90 and a longtime Swarthmore Borough resident, he continues to work in his Parrish Hall office most days. Over the past few years, he has written and published sonnets.

Since its publication, Naked Heart has drawn praise for its honesty and unique perspective. Along with the praise, Pagliaro admits that he has also received letters from baffled readers who cannot believe he found his wartime service less than ennobling.

Looking back, Pagliaro agrees there were positives to his war experience.

“I did a lot of growing up fast,” he says. “If anything, war left me cherishing life all the more, maybe because I came close to losing it. But the experience of war is overwhelmingly destructive – war is a loser. Hitler and Mussolini had to be stopped, of course. But there remains the question many ask: why are humans so ready to go to war?”

Jody Williams, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, to speak at Swarthmore College

“Women in Peace and Conflict: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow”

A panel discussion with Jody Williams (1997 Nobel Peace Prize recipient and chair of the Nobel Women’s Initiative), and Wendy E. Chmielewski, George R. Cooley Curator, Swarthmore College Peace Collection

Moderated by Marjorie Murphy, James C. Hormel Professor in Social Justice

Date: September 28, 2015
Place: Scheuer Room, Kohlberg Hall, Swarthmore College (Directions)
Time: 7:30 p.m.
Open to the public, Reception to follow

Jody Williams received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for her work to ban landmines through the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which shared the Peace Prize with her that year. At that time, she became the 10th woman – and third American woman – in its almost 100-year history to receive the Prize. Since her protests of the Vietnam War, she has been a life-long advocate of freedom, self-determination and human and civil rights.

Williams chairs the Nobel Women’s Initiative and from 1992 she oversaw the growth of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines to over 1,300 organizations in 95 countries working to eliminate antipersonnel landmines. In an unprecedented cooperative effort with governments, UN bodies and the International Committee of the Red Cross, she served as a chief strategist and spokesperson for the ICBL as it dramatically achieved its goal of an international treaty banning antipersonnel landmines during a diplomatic conference held in Oslo in September 1997. Since 1998, Williams has also served as a Campaign Ambassador for the ICBL.

She holds the Sam and Cele Keeper Endowed Professorship in Peace and Social Justice at the Graduate College of Social Work at the University of Houston where she has been teaching since 2003. In academic year 2012-2013, she became the inaugural Jane Addams Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Social Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Her memoir on life as a grassroots activist, My Name is Jody Williams: A Vermont Girl’s Winding Path to the Nobel Peace Prize was released by the University of California Press in early 2013.

Wendy E. Chmielewski is the George R. Cooley Curator of the Swarthmore College Peace Collection, a position she has held sine 1988. Trained as a historian, she has specialized in the history of women, social movements, and social reform. Chmielewski received her Phd in American History from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1989, and her dissertation explored issues of feminism and women’s roles in U.S. communal societies and utopian literature of the nineteenth century. Parts of this work were published in a volume she co-edited Women in Spiritual and Communitarian Societies in the United States, Syracuse University Press, 1993. Chmielewski has since published several articles, essays, and books on the history of women, peace, and communal societies, with her most recent publication being a co-edited volume on Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Jane Addams: Jane Addams and the Practice of Democracy, edited by Marilyn Fischer, Carol Nackenoff, and Wendy Chmielewski, University of Illinois Press, 2009.

Chmielewski’s most recent projects include work on the role women played in both the in the nineteenth century British and American peace movement. She is also one of the founders and directors of “Her Hat Was in the Ring: U.S. Women Elected to Political Office Before 1920,” <www.herhatwasinthering.org>, a digital humanities project tracing over 5,000 women who campaigned for elective office before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, granting women the right to vote. For her work on this continuing project Chmielewski received two fellowships in 2013-2014 from the Gilder-Lehrman Institute for American History and the Carrie Chapman Catt Center on Women and Politics at Iowa State University.

Chmielewski has worked on the board of several institutions, including the Archives Committee of the American Friends Service Committee, the Communal Studies Association, the Centre for Peace History at the University of Sheffield, and the Peace History Society. From 2002-2004 she was the president of the PHS. In 2014 Chmielewski was invited to join the Advisory Council for the American Museum for Peace. She has also served on the board of her local public library in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania.

Marjorie Murphy teaches courses on U.S. history, especially in the fields of working-class history, women and gender, and foreign affairs. Her other scholarly interest are in the history of the teachers union and educational reform.

Murphy earned her Ph.D. in History at the University in California at Davis in 1981, under the guidance of David Brody. She taught at Loyola College and Bryn Mawr College before coming to Swarthmore in 1983. Professor Murphy’s book, Blackboard Unions, came out in 1991.

Co-sponsors:
Swarthmore College Peace Collection
Peace and Conflict Studies, Swarthmore College
President’s Office, Swarthmore College

(Williams’ bio was adapted from the website of the Nobel Women’s Initiative.)

Prof. Dominic Tierney and Nell Bang-Jensen ’11 Discuss Media and War

Political Scientist Dominic Tierney and Nell Bang-Jensen ’11 recently led a discussion on the media’s responsibilities in times of war.

The discussion followed The Body of An American, which explores the friendship of photojournalist Paul Watson and playwright Dan O’Brien (played by Harry Smith and Ian Merrill). Photo by Alexander Iziliaev.

Swarthmore’s zeal for interdisciplinary studies and collaboration took center stage at the Wilma Theater earlier this month, when Associate Professor of Political Science Dominic Tierney and Nell Bang-Jensen ’11 guided a lively discussion on the media’s responsibilities in times of war.

The discussion followed a performance of The Body of an American, which explores the international repercussions of the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dead American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia. The image skewed the perception of the U.S. intervention in Somalia and may have dissuaded its leaders from intervening in catastrophes such as Rwanda, Tierney says.

Nell Bang-Jensen ’11 cites collaborating with Dominic Tierney and other Swarthmore community members as “a wonderful melding of worlds.”

“The play deals with important issues about the power of photographs in wartime, which resonates with my teaching and research,” says Tierney, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and an official correspondent of The Atlantic. “I was excited to participate.”

Prof. Dominic Tierney

One of the actors in the play, Harry Smith, is a friend of Tierney’s. He recommended him as someone who had researched the events in Mogadishu and could lend context to the performance. In what Bang-Jensen deems a “funny coincidence,” it was she who called Tierney to arrange the collaboration.

“I sent him the script in advance so he could get a feel for it and see the connections to his own work,” says Bang-Jensen, who works in the Wilma’s artistic department. “There are different levels on which to interpret the play: How do we come to terms with the idea that war lives inside all of us, and how can we solve these internal wars before we can solve global ones?”

The play centers on photojournalist Paul Watson, who is haunted by what he believes he heard the soldier say right as he took the prize-winning photo: “If you do this, I will own you forever.” Playwright Dan O’Brien, also obsessed with the notion of hauntings, heard Watson tell the story on the radio in 2007, and a friendship bloomed between them. Written by O’Brien and directed by Michael John Garcés, the production runs through February 1.

Tierney’s appearance followed the January 16th performance, which drew a young and socioeconomically diverse audience (thanks partly to the WynTix program that offers $10 tickets to students and theater employees). With the Charlie Hebdo attack in France fresh on everyone’s minds, the audience pondered the media’s obligation to citizens.

“It’s the constant question of how the media can give outsiders a more nuanced view of what’s happening,” says Bang-Jensen, “going beyond these images that often only tell one part of the story.”

Also lending context to the performance was an exhibit of wartime photography in the lobby. It included the work of David Swanson, an embedded correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer in Iraq in 2004 and the husband of Laila Swanson, assistant professor in set and costume design for Swarthmore’s Department of Theater.

Swarthmore’s connections to the Wilma don’t end there, however. Madeline Charne ’14 has been an intern at the theater since June, and Matt Saunders, assistant professor of design and resident set designer, has designed sets for its productions such as Age of Arousal and Angels in America.

“I feel very lucky to be a part of this wonderful melding of worlds,” says Bang-Jensen, who majored in English literature with a theater minor at Swarthmore and then traveled for a year as a Watson Fellow. “It’s so exciting to engage these fellow artists at the professional level, and for these academic conversations to carry beyond the classroom and manifest as art.”

100th anniversary of the start of World War I

Recognition of the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I-the Great War

Swarthmore College Peace Collection

Anti-conscription demonstration 1916

Wendy Chmielewski, Curator of the Peace Collection attended the “Resistance to War” conference at the University of Hull (UK), September 7-9, 2014 . The conference included presentations historians and other scholars from the UK and other countries focused on resistance to war from the mid nineteenth century through World War I. Chmielewski presented a paper on the role of women in fundraising efforts that financed the peace movement in Great Britain in the 1850s.

On September 30th, Anne Yoder, Peace Collection Archivist, spoke on World War I conscientious objection at the Kate Furness Public Library in Wallingford, Pennsylvania. This presentation was part of the Furness Library’s program recognizing the centenary of the Great War.

Yoder and Chmielewski will both be attending the “World War I: Dissent, Activism, and Transformation” conference at Georgian Court University (NJ), and co-sponsored by the Peace History Society, in mid October. Yoder will be speaking about WWI conscientious objectors, David and Julius Eichel. Chmielewski will present on the war and anti-rhetoric in the suffrage speeches and writings of movement leaders Carrie Chapman Catt and Jane Addams. Both papers will use resources housed in the Peace Collection.

Peace Collection staff have contributed articles on resistance to World War I as part of the new web site “Home Before the Leaves Fall, Digital Resources in the Delaware Valley on the Great War”. The web site <http://wwionline.org/> contains information about resources in the Peace Collection and Friends Historical Library on peace congresses leading up to the war, women efforts for peace from 1914 onward, conscientious objectors, the varieties of opposition to the war, and the work of British and American Quaker relief organizations.

Screening of “The 5 Powers” film to celebrate the International Day of Peace

The 5 Powers

A film about the transnational peace work of Thich Nhat Hanh, Sister Chan Khong, and Alfred Hassler.

Thursday, September 18, 2014
7:00 – 8:45 p.m.
Swarthmore College
Lang Performing Arts Center Cinema (directions)
OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Download a flyer and help advertise the event.

Each year, we mark the International Day of Peace at Swarthmore College as part of Peace Day Philly.

This year, we will screen a new documentary film, “The 5 Powers” about the transnational peace work of Thich Nhat Hanh, Sister Chan Khong, and Alfred Hassler during the Vietnam War.

Discussion with the producers of the film (Anthony Nicotera, Gregory Kennedy-Salemi, and Stuart Jolley), Laura Hassler ’70, and George Lakey (who worked with Alfred Hassler of the Fellowship of Reconciliation) will follow the screening.

The 5 Powers film is organized around central tenets of Buddhist philosophy and features a captivating mix of comic book style animation (by Dave Gibbons of Watchmen fame), live interviews, archival audio, photos, and documents, some of which were procured from the Peace Collection at Swarthmore.

Read more about the film and view the trailer here:

http://vimeo.com/92386876

Sponsored by Peace and Conflict Studies, Film and Media Studies, the Religion Department, Asian Studies, the Swarthmore College Libraries, the Peace Collection, and Alumni Relations

For parking: See the campus map at http://www.swarthmore.edu/campusmap/ Enter campus at the NORTH ENTRANCE and follow the drive, Whittier Place, to the first large parking lot on the right. For drop-off, continue to follow Whittier Place, turning right at the corner of the parking lot. The drive will proceed around the back of several buildings to a circular turn around at the Lang Performing Arts Center. For more information about accessibility at the Lang Performing Arts Center, visit http://bit.ly/1uKd9uR For those parking in the large lot, walk to the corner of the lot, cross the street, and proceed diagonally across the quad to the Lang Performing Arts Center. The cinema is located just to your left as you enter the main lobby.