The Schaehrer Initiative and Memorial Lecture Series was established by classmates of Pete Schaehrer ’65 — a career educator and a champion of civil rights.
Steve Coll: "Grand Delusions: Understanding America's Failed Counter-Insurgency in Afghanistan"
Dean & Henry R. Luce Professor of Journalism at Columbia University
Antoine Bousquet: "The Disappearance of the Battlefield and the ‘End of War’"
Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Birkbeck University of London
Séverene Autesserre: "Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention"
Associate Professor of Political Science, Barnard College; Author of Peaceland
Paul Amar: "Security Revolutions and Gender Justice"
Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara
Fredrik Logevall: "The Meaning of the Vietnam War"
Anbinder Professor of History, Vice Provost for International Affairs, and Director of the Einaudi Center for International Studies, Cornell University
Dr. Fredrik Logevall is the author of Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam which received the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for History and the 2013 Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians, among other awards.
Erica Chenoweth: "Why Civil Resistance Works"
Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Denver
Professor Erica Chenoweth is co-winner of the 2013 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, for her 2011 book co-authored with Maria Stephan Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Non-Violent Conflict (Columbia University Press). She is assistant professor at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies and directs that school’s Program on Terrorism and Insurgency Research. She has been a fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, and the University of California-Berkeley’s Institute of International Studies.
Joy Gordon: "The Invisible War"
Professor of Philosophy, Fairfield University
Professor Joy Gordon is a professor of philosophy at Fairfield University. She has a PhD in philosophy from Yale University, and a JD from Boston University School of Law. She has published articles in Le Monde Diplmatique, Global Governance, Harper's, The Atlantic, Ethics and International Affairs, Arab Studies Quarterly, and the Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, in addition to her book, Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions (Harvard University Press, 2010).
Carolyn Nordstrom: "The Global Shadow of Tomorrow’s War"
Professor of Anthropology, University of Notre Dame
Professor Carolyn Nordstrom gave the keynote to the "UNSPOKEN Human Rights Forum."
Professor Nordstrom is a professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. Her 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.
Scott Straus: "Violence and the Future of America"
Associate Professor of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison
Professor Scott Straus is an 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.”
Darius Rejali
Author of Torture and Democracy
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.