The indigenous population in Latin America ranks among the highest in underdevelopment in the world, experiencing high levels of illiteracy, unemployment, poverty, disease, discrimination, violence and expropriation of their lands. In an effort to examine the common trends, actors, and challenges affecting this vulnerable community, the Program on Human Rights (PHR) at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) together with the Center for Latin American Studies is hosting a one-day conference on Tuesday, May 8 2012 at Stanford University to shed light on the important human rights issues indigenous populations face.

Alejandro Toledo, the former president of Peru and its first president of indigenous descent will deliver the opening address. Toledo was a visiting scholar at CDDRL from 2007-2009. The conference will bring together a diverse group of scholars to present research papers on a range of topics relating to indigenous communities in Latin America and the Caribbean, including: violence and security, education, the effect of climate change, health challenges, cultural survival, national and international property rights and political movements.

According to Helen Stacy, the director of the Program on Human Rights, “The goal of the conference is to create an integrated network of professionals that includes Stanford University students, faculty and researchers, who will advance and support continuous research on human rights issues affecting indigenous people in Latin America.”

The lunchtime keynote address will be delivered by the former first lady of Peru, Eliane Karp-Toledo, an anthropologist and economist who specializes in Andean indigenous cultures. Conference speakers include: Alexia Romero, a second year JD candidate at Stanford University, who will address the issue of indigenous property rights; Oliver Kaplan, a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University, who will explore civil war violence in Columbia; Paul Kim, assistant dean and chief technology officer for Stanford’s School of Education, who will speak about the impact of mobile phone technology for indigenous people in Latin America; and Claire Mantini-Briggs, visiting lecturer at UC Berkeley’s Department of Anthropology, who will discuss inequalities in epidemiology and human rights.

The Center on Latin American Studies and the Program on Human Rights view this conference as the beginning of an ongoing research initiative to examine the state of indigenous rights. 

The sessions begin at 9:00 am and will be held in the Bechtel Conference Center. They are free and open to the public. To view the complete program and RSVP to the conference, please click here.

Propelled by the need to develop new and more productive avenues of communication among scholars and policy-makers based in Europe, North America, and the Middle East, in 2010 the Europe Center at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute agreed to launch the multi-year collaborative project titled "Debating History, Democracy, Development, and Education in Conflicted Societies." Our joint initiative aims to promote research and policy projects with partners in Europe, the U.S., and the Middle East.

Viewed in an international context, with a focus on Europe and the Middle East, this collaborative project investigates how societies debate internally and attempt to reconcile differences of historical interpretation and political positions.  The first conference took place at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, and was dedicated to “Democracy in Adversity and Diversity” (May 18-19, 2011). Topics for the conference included democracy in comparative perspective, political reform, the notion and strategies of democracy promotion, regime transition, negotiating religion and democracy, immigration challenges, minorities and East-West relations, emergence or recovery of civil society, the role of non-governmental organizations in democratic societies, and human rights. 

The next conference, at Stanford University May 17-18, 2012 aims to deepen our understanding of the interplay between history and memory. Given the extensive discussion of memory and history across a variety of disciplines in recent decades, we would like to take stock of our current understanding of the concepts of memory and history as they affect society, politics and culture.  At the same time we wish to examine in what ways insights gained in the course of this cross-disciplinary and global discussion may be effective when considering the circumstances of the Middle East, especially the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We are inviting new, innovative approaches to the study of memory and history as they affect different societies. We especially welcome contributions that engage the concepts of memory and history comparatively. Our goal is to advance beyond restating examples of conflicts between versions of history, and to seek new paths of research that may further the work in various cases, and also potentially offer guidance for engaging particular international and civil conflicts.

The questions that we seek to address at the conference include, among others:

• How do we understand the historians’ role and engagement in political and cultural conflicts about the past and present?
• What are the historians’ responsibilities in developing shared narratives about war, civil conflict, occupation, and genocide?
• How do we understand the relation between the work of professional historians and that of civic society organizations?
• How do we understand the roles and interplay of history and memory in efforts towards reconciliation?
• How should one think about the relative importance of historical commissions and truth commissions in “coming to terms with the past.”
• What is the relationship between the historian’s work on international and domestic conflict and that of judicial institutions?
• How do efforts in post-conflict situations to reach accurate assessments (“truth”) of the events meet the needs of healing social, ethnic, and/or religious wounds (“reconciliation”)?
• How do we understand the effectiveness, necessity, and/or legitimacy of remembering and forgetting in models of reconciliation?
• What are the consequences and meaning of actions of forgiveness, including the formal granting of amnesty? Do these actions conflict with the writing of history?

The conference committee consists of Norman Naimark (Core faculty member of The Europe Center at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor in East European Studies at Stanford), Yfaat Weiss (Director, The Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History at Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Gabriel Motzkin (Director, The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute), and Amir Eshel (Director, The Europe Center and Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies at Stanford).