Conferences: North America

The American Experience in Southeast Asia, 1946-1975

Conference Date: September 29-30, 2010
Washington, DC

The conference will take place in the George C. Marshall Conference Center at the Department of State in Washington, D.C. and will serve three purposes. It will showcase and commemorate the work of the Historian’s Office in documenting United States policy in Southeast Asia in the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series in over 24,000 pages of documents; and it will provide--through participants’ papers, presentations, and panels--a full-scale examination/re-examination of United States policy, beginning with the Indochina War (1946-1954), continuing through the American periods of advice and support (1955-1964) and intervention (1965-1973), and ending with the Fall of Saigon (1975). Finally, the conference will explore the relationship between force and diplomacy in both the prosecution of the war and the peace negotiations. Proposals on the post-1975 era leading to “normalization” will be considered but the conference will focus on the period of greatest American involvement.

The first day’s program will include the following: a keynote address by a senior official of the Department of State; a roundtable discussion by Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon-Ford Administration policy advisors on Vietnam; presentations by scholars from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam; and a panel of presentations by senior scholars of the War. The second day’s program will consist of a series of panels where academic and independent scholars will present papers on topics/themes related directly or indirectly to American policy in Indochina from 1946 to 1975.

Since 2000, the Triangle Institute for Security Studies (TISS) – a consortium of UNC-Chapel Hill, Duke, and North Carolina State University - has hosted an annual two-day conference called the “Junior and Interdisciplinary Faces of International Security.” The objective of the TISS “New Faces” project is to foster a generation of future leaders capable of bringing to bear on national problems keen powers of analysis and an ability to communicate with a wide range of audiences. To that end we invite a small group of scholars from a variety of fields to speak at our “New Faces” Conference. They are chosen from a pool of applicants from across the nation and beyond.

To qualify to speak at this event, students must have just completed, or be nearing completion of, their dissertations and must have a record of proven excellence. At the conference the participants give what amounts to an “off-Broadway” preview of their job talk. After each presentation, a faculty member and a graduate student (one from within the speaker’s field, the other from without) offer focused comments. The participant then engages in an extended question and answer session with the audience, composed of an eclectic mix of local faculty, graduate students, and members of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies.

Our next conference will be held on Friday, October 1 and Saturday, October 2nd, 2010 at the Friday Center in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. You are warmly invited to apply – the deadline is April 8th, 2010. Application forms and further details about the program can be found on the TISS web site.

Carolyn Pumphrey,
Triangle Institute for Security Studies
132 Rubenstein Hall, Box 90316
302 Towerview Drive
Duke University
Durham, NC 27708-0316
Tel. 919-613-9280
Fax. 919-684-9940
Email. tiss@duke.edu
Web: www.tiss-nc.org

Email: pumphrey@duke.edu
Visit the website at http://sanford.duke.edu/centers/tiss/programs/newfaces/nfwebpagenf11.php

Posted: March 3, 2010



Accidental Armageddons: The Nuclear Crisis and the Culture of the Second Cold War, 1975-1989

Conference Date: November 4-6, 2010
Washington, DC

In the most significant accident in the history of the U.S. nuclear power industry, the reactor at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, suffered a partial core meltdown on March 28, 1979, allowing large amounts of radioactive reactor coolant to escape. Exacerbating the panicked public reaction to this incident was the fact that a popular movie depicting a major nuclear accident, The China Syndrome, had been released only 12 days earlier. Three Mile Island was not only a turning point in public opinion regarding atomic technology but also helped fuse two protest movements together: that against nuclear energy and that against nuclear weapons.

Over the next several years, this combined "anti-nuclear" movement staged mass protests around the globe. On October 10, 1981, in the largest peace demonstration in German history to that point, between 250,000 and 300,000 demonstrators of diverse social, political, and cultural backgrounds gathered in Bonn to voice their opposition to the renewed arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union and the Federal Republic's role in it. This protest was matched by other mass rallies in Europe and North America. Two weeks later, some 200,000 people assembled in Brussels; on November 21, Amsterdam saw almost 400,000 demonstrators; and on June 12, 1982, more than one million people participated in a Nuclear Weapons Freeze demonstration in Central Park and the streets of New York City. In the fall of 1983 alone, about five million people, mostly in Western Europe, took part in demonstrations against the deployment of "Euro Missiles" (Pershing II). Protests stretched as well to Japan and Australia. Anti-nuclear activism even emerged in Eastern European countries, paving the way for greater political dissent toward the end of the decade. The nuclear disaster in Chernobyl in April 1986 served to intensify the global anti-nuclear movement.

The proliferation of the anti-nuclear movement, which entailed the founding of countless national and transnational grassroots organizations, think tanks, and pressure groups, as well as the mass mobilization of people in street protests in diverse countries, was brought about by escalating fears of nuclear annihilation. This new anxiety over a "nuclear holocaust" had several sources, among them concerns raised by the growing environmental movement and heightened public distrust of the peaceful use of nuclear technology. Increased East-West confrontations that departed in alarming ways from the détente policies of the previous decade also fueled new worries.

In December 1979, NATO announced its "Double-Track" strategy: If arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union should fail, the West would station intermediate nuclear forces to counterbalance the Soviet Union's recent deployment of SS-20 mid-range missiles. This momentous decision, alongside the contemporaneous Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, heightened international tensions. Finally, a new brand of conservative leader - embodied in Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Helmut Kohl - came to power in the West, fomenting domestic protest and renewing fears of an actual nuclear war. The world thus moved from an era of reduced tension during the détente years of the 1970s to a "Second Cold War" in the 1980s.

Nuclear fears, partly precipitated by scientists' warnings that even a limited nuclear war could cause an apocalyptic "nuclear winter," also reverberated within popular culture. The American television movie The Day After (1983), which depicted this doomsday scenario, reached a record audience of 100 million, noticeably impacting leading decision-makers. Anti-nuclear messages abounded: in movies such as War Games (1983) and When the Wind Blows (1986); in Jonathan Schell's best seller The Fate of the Earth (1982); in songs by David Bowie, The Clash, and the German singer Nena; and in all-star concerts accompanying demonstrations. The "Second Cold War," in sum, entailed a deep and widespread cultural response to new, perceived dangers generated by the renewed nuclear arms race.

The first of its kind, the conference "Accidental Armagedons" seeks to explore the political and cultural discourse on nuclear weapons and atomic energy during the Second Cold War. While welcoming myriad approaches, the conference has several core goals:

(1) To explore diplomatic, political, and strategic debates surrounding nuclear armaments and the doctrines governing their possible use. "Traditional" actors, such as the political, diplomatic, and military elites, certainly shaped these debates, but "anti-establishment" forces such as civil society organizations and activist groups also played an important role within them.

(2) To merge "establishment" perspectives with an analyses of protest cultures by looking at non-state actors, grassroots activists, civil society organizations, and artists.

(3) To transcend the traditional East-West divide of the Cold War by examining both sides of the Iron Curtain, the views and activities of those in "non-aligned" countries, and the cooperation of policy makers, organizations, activists, scientists, and intellectuals across borders.

(4) To understand how "ecological" protests against the civilian use of nuclear energy and activism against nuclear weapons converged in a new, comprehensive anti-nuclear movement. That movement, from diverse vantage points, articulated a new and profound critique of the postwar, industrial, and technological modernity that had emerged after 1945.

(5) To establish how nuclear anxiety and fears of environmental apocalypse facilitated the rise of global consciousness and conceptions of global citizenship.

Dr. Martin Klimke
German Historical Institute
1607 New Hampshire Ave, NW
Washington, DC 20009-2562
USA

Website: GHI

Posted: March 8, 2010



Russian-Speaking Jewish Diaspora

Conference Date: November 14-15, 2010
Harvard University

We are interested in papers from a range of disciplinary perspectives that address the history, evolution, and future of Russian-speaking Jewish communities, cultures, and identities. We encourage papers that move beyond the description of particular populations or institutions and introduce analyses of the problems, paradoxes, contradictions, and challenges involved in thinking about the Russian-speaking Jews.

Background:
The emigration of about 1.5 million Jews from the former Soviet Union (FSU) in several large waves since the mid-1970s—more than three times as many as those who remain—has affected Jewish life in its successor states and in the host countries. The post-1989 migration of Jews from the FSU, for example, constitutes the single largest immigration in the sixty-two-year history of Israel and the largest group of Jews to come to the United States and to Germany since the early twentieth century.

This conference will focus on how Russian-speaking Jews in the late 20th–early 21st centuries have affected the cultures, politics, and economies of Israel, the United States, and Germany, as well as the "sending" countries of the FSU. Conferees will consider whether Russian-speaking Jewry constitutes "a global community," and how this recent migration challenges the larger concepts of "identity" and "diaspora" across geographic and national borders.

For a fuller description of the suggested themes, please see our Web site at http://daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu/seminars_conferences/diaspora.

Project Organizers:
Zvi Gitelman, Professor of Political Science and Preston R. Tisch Professor of Judaic Studies, University of Michigan
Lisbeth L. Tarlow, Ph.D., Associate Director, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Harvard University

More Information:
For additional information about the conference, please see http://daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu/seminars_conferences/diaspora or contact diaspora@fas.harvard.edu.

Diaspora Project
Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies
Harvard University
+1-617-496-9536

Email: diaspora@fas.harvard.edu
Visit the website at http://daviscenter.fas.harvard.edu/seminars_conferences/diaspora/index.html

Posted: March 10, 2010



Consensual Empires: Orientalism as the Economy of Sameness

Conference Date: January 6-9, 2011
LA, California

With the alleged end of Cold War conflicts, an epistemological shift occurred within the discourse of Orientalism from the colonial-type rhetoric of essential difference to the global rhetoric of desirable sameness. Former communist countries ranging from China to Czech Republic to Russia are now seen as caught up in a halting but inevitable process of becoming-the-same as the West: liberal, modern, normal. The shift reflects the transition to an era of increasing globalization, marked no longer by overt exclusions of difference but rather by conditional inclusions into the global capitalist “family” based on a host of meritocratic criteria. This panel wishes to theorize the new trajectories of imperial power based on the discourse of enforced sameness, which reflects capital’s force and logic of abstract equivalence. It also asks how the insistence on sameness is aided by the ubiquitous phenomenon of self-Orientalization (or internalization of the desire to become-the-same as the West) and by imperial regimes of consensus building.

Prof. Natasa Kovacevic, Eastern Michigan University, at nkovacev@emich.edu


Prof. Daniel Vukovich, Hong Kong University, at vukovich@hku.hk
Email: vukovich@hku.hk

Posted: March 3, 2010



Human Rights and Religion in Historical Perspective

Conference Date: April 8-10, 2011
Boston, Mass

Historians have only recently turned to the study of human rights, which was long the preserve of legal academics and political scientists. Among the many topics in need of serious historical study, the relationship between human rights and religion is among the most urgent. Religious belief has often been a crucial motivator for human rights activism. Just as often, religion has been a source of grave human rights abuses. And of course religious belief and practice have themselves frequently been coded as human rights.

It is therefore high time to interrogate in a sustained, transnational and above all historically sophisticated way the relationship between human rights and religion. When and where has religion been a boon to human rights or a motivator for human rights activism? When and where has religion been a source of grave human rights violations? What role does the history of, first, religious toleration and, later, of secularization, play in the dissemination of human rights ideas? How have theological debates and concepts influence and been influenced by the discourse of human rights? Where and when has religious belief and practice itself been coded as a “human right,” deserving of political support and (international) legal protection?

The conference seeks to interrogate the relationship between human rights and religion in three registers: religion as a source of human rights, religion as itself a human right, and, finally, religion as a cause of human rights violations. This interrogation is intended to be historical, paying careful attention to changes over time in each of these registers, and transnational, noting regional and national variation in the nature of the relationship between religion and human rights.

Devin Pendas
Department of History
Boston College
Chestnut Hill, MA 02467
Phone: (617) 552-6881
Email: pendas@bc.edu

Posted: August 16, 2010