Rima SalahRima Salah provides a Palestinian Christian woman’s perspective on the past, present, and future of women’s empowerment, peace-building, and striving for justice and dignity in the Holy Land.   Rima Salah, Ph.D., served as a member of the United Nations High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations and as the Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary-General, U.N. Mission in the Central African Republic and Chad. In addition, Salah has had a distinguished career with UNICEF. Her service includes: Deputy Executive Director for UNICEF (2004-07, 2011-12), Regional Director for West and Central Africa (1999-2004). As a highly effective advocate for the rights of children and women in armed conflict and post-conflict situations, she contributed to Security Council Resolution 1612 on child rights violations and Security Council resolution 1325 Women, Peace, and Security. Salah has received many awards of distinction from several non-governmental organizations and U.N. Member States, including the French Legion of Honor. In October 2015, Salah was elected to chair the newly formed Early Childhood Peace Consortium.   Food and refreshments will be available following the formal portion of the event program. This is a free event and advanced registration is not required.  A live-streamed video of this event will appear here at the appointed time.                         The Rev. Drew Christiansen S.J. served as director of the Office of International Justice and Peace of the U.S. Catholic Conference (now the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops) and editor-in-chief of the Jesuit weekly America. He taught at the Jesuit School of Theology/Graduate Theological Union-Berkeley and the University of Notre Dame, where he was a member of the founding team of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. He was also a frequent consultant to the Holy See and a member of the steering committee of the Catholic Peacebuilding Network. Fr. Drew spent the last years of his teaching career at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs at Georgetown University. When he passed away in the Spring of 2022, Fr. Drew left behind a legacy of applying Catholic Social Teaching to peacebuilding specifically in the Holy Land. This lecture carries forth Fr. Christiansen's enduring spirit.  It is co-sponsored by the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, the Catholic Peacebuilding Network, Bethlehem University Foundation, and Churches for Middle East Peace. Originally published at ansari.nd.edu.

Join the Klau Institute and NDVotes for this installment of "Pizza, Pop, and Politics" as Luis Fraga, professor of Transformative Latino Leadership, and director of the Institute for Latino Studies, and Erin Corcoran, associate teaching professor and executive director of the  Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, discuss the politics of immigration. Originally published at klau.nd.edu.

Join John Marks, the founder and long-time president of Search for Common Ground, as he speaks about how he and his wife, Susan Collin Marks, used the methodology of social entrepreneurship to create the world’s largest peacebuilding organization — with a staff of 600 and offices in 35 countries — and earned a nomination for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2018. Included in the presentation is a short video, demonstrating how a flexible, opportunistic approach led to breakthroughs in resolving conflict on a societal level and producing media for social change in such places as the Soviet Union, Iran, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Originally published at kroc.nd.edu.

As part of the Keough-Naughton Institute's fall 2024 speaker series, Professor Peter Shirlow will deliver a lecture titled “The Failings of Irish Republicans and the National Question in Ireland.” Lecture Abstract This lecture will explore how, despite post-Brexit Referendum predictions of a united Ireland by as early as 2021, there has been, at best, limited growth in recorded support for ending partition between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Growth of Northern Ireland’s Catholic population has been less dramatic than predicted and the region now has the fastest growing economy in the UK. Peter Shirlow asserts that in this context, pro-united Ireland campaigns and republican activism, especially via civic fora and social media, have failed to significantly close the gap between Irish unity and pro-union proponents. In this lecture, Shirlow will consider how Irish Republican arguments for unity contain internal contractions: underscoring the economic successes of the South while also indicating its structural deficiencies, or pointing to socio-economic deficiencies of Northern Ireland even while Republicans are co-authors of its new found economic growth. Ultimately, Shirlow argues, the shortcomings of Irish republicanism lie in its inability to read and understand the new sociology of Northern Ireland– particularly temporal and social shifts that potentially render the inevitability thesis of Irish unification inconsistent, if not ineffective, in the short to medium term. Speaker Biography Professor Peter Shirlow (FaCSS) is the director at the University of Liverpool’s Institute of Irish Studies. He was formerly the deputy director of the Institute for Conflict Transformation and Social Justice, QUB. He is the independent chair of the Executive Office's Employers' Guidance on Recruiting People with Conflict-Related Convictions Working Group and a board member of the mental health charity Threshold. He is a visiting research professor at the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice. He sits on the editorial boards of Irish Political Studies and International Planning Studies. Professor Shirlow has undertaken conflict transformation work in Northern Ireland and has used that knowledge in exchanges with governments, former combatants and NGOs in the former Yugoslavia, Moldova, Bahrain and Iraq. He has also presented talks to members of the US Senate and House of Representatives and is a regular media contributor. Originally published at irishstudies.nd.edu.

The Center for Social Concerns presents the 2024 Annual Rev. Bernie Clark, C.S.C., Lecture: An evening with Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative and author of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. Welcome from University President Rev. Robert Dowd, C.S.C. Part of Notre Dame Forum 2024-25 Free, no ticket required. Doors open at 5:00 p.m. Interested in taking a free shuttle from the Notre Dame campus? Shuttle Interest Form Co-sponsors: Department of American Studies, Klau Institute for Civil and Human Rights, Initiative on Race and Resilience, The Law School, Office of the President --- Bryan Stevenson is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a human rights organization in Montgomery, Alabama. He is the author of the bestselling book Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, which has been adapted into a feature film. Under his leadership, EJI has won major legal challenges eliminating excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerating innocent death row prisoners, confronting abuse of the incarcerated and the mentally ill, and aiding children prosecuted as adults. Stevenson has argued and won multiple cases at the United States Supreme Court, including a 2019 ruling protecting condemned prisoners who suffer from dementia and a landmark 2012 ruling that banned mandatory life-imprisonment-without-parole sentences for all children 17 or younger. Stevenson and his staff have won reversals, relief, or release from prison for over 140 wrongly condemned prisoners on death row and won relief for hundreds of others wrongly convicted or unfairly sentenced. Stevenson has initiated major new anti-poverty and anti-discrimination efforts that challenge inequality in America. He led the creation of EJI’s highly acclaimed Legacy Sites, including the Legacy Museum, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and Freedom Monument Sculpture Park. These new national landmark institutions chronicle the legacy of slavery, lynching, and racial segregation, and the connection to mass incarceration and contemporary issues of racial bias.

Join the Klau Institute and NDVotes for this installment of "Pizza, Pop, and Politics" as Chloe Gibbs, assistant professor of economics, discusses the imapct of the economy on the upcoming US election.  Originally published at klau.nd.edu.