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The Schaehrer Initiative and Schaehrer Memorial Lecture Series was established in 2009 by fellow alumni of Pete Schaehrer '65, who was a career educator and a champion of civil rights. The P-CON faculty and students and the entire Colgate community gratefully acknowledge their contributions and ongoing commitment to the ideals Pete Schaehrer stood for.

2011 Peter C. Schaehrer Memorial Lecture

Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 7 pm in
Love Auditorium (300 Olin Hall)

Carolyn Nordstrom

Professor of Anthropology, University of Notre Dame

The Global Shadow of Tomorrow’s War

Partnering with the Mohawk Valley Resource Center in Utica, NY, Professor Nordstrom will give the keynote to the "UNSPOKEN Human Rights Forum" on Friday, October 14. The conference schedule and registration information are available on the UNSPOKEN website.

Carolyn Nordsrom is a professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. Her recent books, Global Outlaws: Crime, Money, and Power in the Contemporary World, and Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the 21st Century, touch on the invisible economies and networks created during times of war, especially in conflict countries, and her eyewitness accounts provide deep access into these strange but accepted worlds in many different countries. Some of her research interests include the anthropology of war and peace, epicenters of conflict and peace-building, transnational crime, and gender, along with the intersection points along each area.

Notre Dame Faculty page here and here.

Look for more news as the date approaches, and a link to the video after the lecture!

2010 Peter C. Schaehrer Memorial Lecture

Professor Scott Straus lecture – “Violence and the Future of Africa”

Scott Straus is associate professor of political science and international studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he also directs the Human Rights Initiative. His book, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda received the 2006 Award for Excellence in Political Science and Government from the Association of American Publishers. Leading genocide scholar René Lemarchand calls The Order of Genocide “a landmark in the field of genocide studies” for its combination of meticulous survey research and interviews with hundreds of detainees accused of taking part in the genocide in Rwanda. Lemarchand writes that Straus’s book is “the most significant effort to date to bring the horrors of mass murder into the cold light of social scientific inquiry. If for no other reason, it will remain for years to come the definitive book on the most horrifying and puzzling genocide of modern times.”

2009 Peter C. Schaehrer Inaugural Lecture

Peace and Conflict Studies is most honored to present Darius Rejali, author of the much-acclaimed Torture and Democracy, to inaugurate the Peter C. Schaehrer Memorial Lecture.

Tracing the development and application of torture techniques over the last century leads to startling conclusions. Dictatorships may have tortured more, and more indiscriminately, but the U.S., Britain, and France pioneered and exported techniques that have become the common base of modern torture: methods that leave no marks. Police and soldiers developed "clean" techniques, such as torture by electricity, ice, water, noise, drugs, and stress positions. As democracy and human rights spread after World War II, so too did these methods. As part of this talk, Rejali also takes up the challenging question of whether torture works, asks what we might expect of the Obama administration, and explores prospects for the future prevention of torture internationally.

Professor Rejali is a nationally recognized expert on government torture and interrogation. His monumental 2007 book, Torture and Democracy (Princeton U. Press) is an unrelenting examination of the use of torture by democracies in the 20th century. It won the Human Rights Book of the Year Award from the American Political Science Association and the 2009 Raphael Lemkin Award from the Institute for the Study of Genocide for the best non-fiction work in English on the causes of genocide and crimes against humanity. In 2009, the Fulbright Commission awarded Rejali the Distinguished Danish Chair for Human Rights and International Studies in Copenhagen. He is also a 2003 Carnegie Scholar, one of the most distinguished awards in the American academy.
Trailer for Professor Rejali's Lecture

Professor Rejali's full lecture