In this event, professor in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, and director of the Global Insecurities Centre, at the University of Bristol, Roddy Brett will present his monograph, Victim-Centred Peacemaking: Colombia’s Santos-FARC-EP Peace Process (Bristol University Press, 2024), which he wrote during his time as Kroc Institute visiting fellow (2022–23). The book addresses the fundamental question of how, in the face of unrelenting barbary and adversity, survivors of political violence and atrocity have sought to assert agency and contest power as they painstakingly forge a path through which to bring an end to political violence, craft the effective means through which to reckon with the past, and reconstitute their political and moral communities. The book is, in part, about how war is fought, what its impact is, particularly on civilians, and the means that armed groups employ in order to achieve their ends. It is also about how those who survive atrocious violence narrate and make sense of war and attempt to construct peace, and, in so doing, transform political subjectivity, shape formal peacemaking processes and accountability mechanisms, and reconfigure relations of power. Based on unique empirical research into Colombia’s Santos-FARC-EP peace process (2012-2016), this book interrogates, specifically, how, if at all, survivors and victims may assert agency and contribute to formal peacemaking and transitional justice initiatives. The research argues that victim inclusion — through the so-called victims’ delegations — meaningfully transformed victim-perpetrator relations and dynamics in Havana, while partially shaping the content of both the Victims’ Agreement and Final Agreement. As such, the delegations created paths for empowerment at the individual and, in part, collective levels. However, victim inclusion also precipitated experiences of victim depoliticization, revictimization, retraumatization and instrumentalization. Drawing on insights from across academic disciplines, the book proposes an instrumentalization/empowerment spectrum to analyze the complex impact of victim-centered approaches to peacemaking/transitional justice, and is valuable for both researchers and practitioners. Brett will be joined by Kroc Institute PhD student, Patrick McQuestion (peace studies and political science) and visiting scholar, Alison Ribeiro de Menezes as respondents. Josefina Echavarría Alvarez, professor of the practice and director of the Peace Accords Matrix (PAM) will provide opening remarks. This event is cosponsored by the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies. Originally published at kroc.nd.edu.

The Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, in partnership with its Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) Working Group, as part of the Keough School of Global Affairs, proudly offer a four-part lecture series over the 2024–25 academic year. The series focuses on U.S. imperialism and U.S. military and humanitarian involvement in the Middle East, and in particular Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan. Graduate students serve as discussants after each lecture, prior to Q&A with the audience. The series conducts a critical evaluation of U.S. policy in the Middle East and calls for a reassessment of the nature and function of a U.S. presence, and the implications posed for peacebuilding practitioners and contemporary global affairs scholarship. The United States used "burn pits" to dispose of military waste on its bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. These massive incineration fields caused respiratory illness, cancer, and death for thousands of soldiers. Iraqi and Afghan communities continue to endure the consequences of exposure to burn pits as just one form of harm to their health and livelihoods. Recently returned from fieldwork in Fallujah, Iraq, Kali Rubaii, cultural anthropologist and assistant professor of anthropology at Purdue University, reports on the condition of Iraq's environment, 20 years since the 2003 US invasion. Her talk poses the question: What are the routes to justice and accountability for the most privatized war in human history? Richard "Drew" Marcantonio, assistant professor of environment, peace, and global affairs, will serve as a respondent. 

Ches Thurber is an associate professor of political science at the School of Public and Global Affairs, Northern Illinois University, who studies global conflict and security. Thurber studies international conflict, security, peace-building and global governance. His book, Between Mao and Gandhi: the Social Roots of Civil Resistance (Cambridge University Press, 2021), examines dissident choices between violent and nonviolent strategies of resistance.  Sponsored by the Liu Institute's South Asia Group. In support of the Liu Institute’s growing commitment to sustainability, we will no longer be offering drinks at our public lectures and panels. We encourage audience members to bring their own water bottles or to drink from nearby water fountains. Thank you for your understanding. Registration Required - Sign Up Here Originally published at asia.nd.edu.

The Center for Italian Studies is pleased to host a lecture by Professor John Welle (Notre Dame). “L’unica poetessa che abbia oggi l’Italia,” Gabriele D’Annunzio declared of Amalia Guglielminetti, who began her literary career at the age of eighteen in 1901 with the ode “Al giglio sabuado” celebrating the birth of Princess Jolanda of Savoy. In the following decade, emerging onto the rich cultural scene of her native Turin, the Italian center of both the worker’s movement and the drive for female emancipation, she would bring forth three of the most important books of poetry of the new century: Le vergini folli (1907), Le seduzioni (1909), and L’insonne (1913). Adopting classical forms such as the songbook, the sonnet, and the tercet, her modernizing self-fashioning showcases various masks of the modern “donna nuova,” from the femme fatale to the emancipated woman. While linked to such traditional figures as Gaspara Stampa and other female poets of the Renaissance, she was also praised for her “stupefacente originalità.” Moreover, her early career, in its rapid rise to literary success, parallels that of her intimate friend, confidant and fellow Turin poet, Guido Gozzano. Their epistolary exchanges, numbering some 126 letters, dated between 1906 and 1912, shed light on their mutual admiration, tense romantic engagement — more literary than amorous — and common “will to fame.” Within the context of women writers of the early 20th century, as well as within that of the modern Italian poetic canon, this research seminar proposes revisiting Amalia Guglielminetti’s literary accomplishments for serious critical reconsideration. While focusing on the dialogue in letters and in verse between these two poets from Turin during the high point of their literary celebrity, I will also trace the factors that have marginalized the female writer in relation to her male counterpart(s), denying her the fame that she so richly deserves. John P. Welle is professor of Italian and concurrent professor of film, television and theatre, emeritus at the University of Notre Dame.The Italian Research Seminar, a core event of the Center for Italian Studies, aims to provide a regular forum for faculty, postdoctoral scholars, graduate students, and colleagues from other universities to present and discuss their current research. The Seminar is vigorously interdisciplinary, and embraces all areas of Italian literature, language, and culture, as well as perceptions of Italy, its achievements and its peoples in other national and international cultures. The Seminar constitutes an important element in the effort by Notre Dame's Center for Italian Studies to promote the study of Italy and to serve as a strategic point of contact for scholarly exchange.Originally published at italianstudies.nd.edu.

As part of the Keough-Naughton Institute's fall 2024 speaker series, Professor Martyn Powell will deliver the lecture, "Wolfe Tone and the Hibernian Catch Club: Sociability in Revolutionary Ireland." Lecture Abstract Theobald Wolfe Tone, Irish political radical, best-known of the leaders of the United Irish rebellion of 1798, was a cultural polymath. As Martyn Powell will explain, this is perhaps something that, amidst the memorialising and commemorating that goes on in Irish republicanism, could be a little better understood. Theobald Wolfe Tone was an aspiring novelist; exceptionally accomplished in the genre of diarist and master of the epistolary craft; and even had an early dalliance with amateur theatricals. Less well-known, however, was that he was an accomplished singer, and in 1790 he joined the Dublin musical society, the Hibernian Catch Club. His diary shows that, after a financial windfall, he paid for his membership to the club, but beyond this we are very much in the dark. This lecture will explore his arrival in the club, his network of friends and acquaintances who nominated and supported him, and the tensions that operated in this particular brand of club-life in 1790s Dublin. Political divisions were to be expected, but tense stand-offs also occurred between those who valued a commitment to music-making over sociability. Powell asserts that much more can be said about Tone’s cultural and artistic impulses through a study of Dublin club-life in one of the most fractured periods of Ireland's history. Speaker Biography Martyn J. Powell is professor of history and dean of the Faculty of Arts, Law and Social Sciences at the University of Bristol. He is a specialist in Irish political, cultural and social history, and his publications include Britain and Ireland in the Eighteenth-Century Crisis of Empire (2003), The Politics of Consumption in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (2005), Piss-Pots, Printers and Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century Dublin (2009), Clubs and Societies in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (2010) (edited with James Kelly), and many articles and essays. He is currently working on a study of violence in Irish society, ‘Houghers and Chalkers: The Knife in Revolutionary Ireland, 1760-1815’, a book on the early club-life of Wolfe Tone, and an edition of the political works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, part of a Leverhulme-funded research project, for Oxford University Press. Originally published at irishstudies.nd.edu.

Unpacking the Election: Where Do We Go From Here?  is presented by Gerry Baker, editor-at-large of The Wall Street Journal, as part of the Thomas H. Quinn Lecture Series. Widely recognized for his sharp political commentary, Baker writes and speaks on U.S. and global politics, economics and business trends. His weekly column for the WSJ editorial page, “Free Expression,” features some of the world's leading writers, influencers and thinkers about various subjects.Matthew E.K. Hall, the David A. Potenziani Memorial College Professor of Constitutional Studies and director of the Notre Dame Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy, will serve as moderator. Hall specializes in interdisciplinary research that spans the fields of American politics, law and society, and organizational behavior. His current research examines popular support for democratic norms in the United States, political psychology and the role of politics in the workplace. The talk is free and open to the public. No registration is required. The Quinn Lecture is sponsored by Notre Dame alumnus and trustee John W. “Jay” Jordan II (BBA ’69) in memory of Quinn (ND ’69), who was Jordan’s college roommate, longtime friend and business partner.