FSI researchers strive to understand how countries relate to one another, and what policies are needed to achieve global stability and prosperity. International relations experts focus on the challenging U.S.-Russian relationship, the alliance between the U.S. and Japan and the limitations of America’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan.
Foreign aid is also examined by scholars trying to understand whether money earmarked for health improvements reaches those who need it most. And FSI’s Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center has published on the need for strong South Korean leadership in dealing with its northern neighbor.
FSI researchers also look at the citizens who drive international relations, studying the effects of migration and how borders shape people’s lives. Meanwhile FSI students are very much involved in this area, working with the United Nations in Ethiopia to rethink refugee communities.
Trade is also a key component of international relations, with FSI approaching the topic from a slew of angles and states. The economy of trade is rife for study, with an APARC event on the implications of more open trade policies in Japan, and FSI researchers making sense of who would benefit from a free trade zone between the European Union and the United States.
The Responsibility to Protect in Syria
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About the Speaker: Eric Schwartz became Dean of the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota in October 2011, after a 25-year career in senior public service positions in government, at the United Nations and in the philanthropic and non-governmental communities.
Prior to his arrival in Minnesota, he was U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration. Working with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, he served as the Department of State’s principal humanitarian official, managing a $1.85 billion budget, as well as State Department policy and programs for U.S. refugee admissions and U.S. international assistance worldwide.
From 2006 through 2009, Schwartz directed the Connect U.S. Fund, a multi-foundation – NGO collaborative seeking to promote responsible U.S. engagement overseas. From August 2005 through January 2007, he served as the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s Deputy Special Envoy for Tsunami Recovery. In that capacity, he worked with the Special Envoy, former President Clinton, to promote an effective recovery effort. Before that appointment, Schwartz was a lead expert for the congressionally mandated Mitchell-Gingrich Task Force on UN Reform. In 2003 and 2004, he served as the second-ranking official at the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva.
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Eric Schwartz
Dean, Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota; Former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration
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European and Global Economic Crisis Series: "The Spanish Economic and Financial Crises"
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Conference on "History and Memory: Global and Local Dimensions"
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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).
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