The conflict in Syria and peace efforts in that war-torn nation will be the topic of this year’s Arab World Lecture by Randa Slim, scheduled for 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday (Mar. 29) on the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire campus.
Slim is the senior Middle East fellow with New America’s International Security Program and founding director of the Track II Dialogues initiative at the Middle East Institute. Her talk, in Hibbard Hall 102, will be on the topic of “Conflict-Ending Processes in Syria and Implications of the Syrian War.”
The annual Arab World lecture series is sponsored by members of the Chippewa Valley Arab-American community with the goal of informing, educating and raising awareness on Arab-American issues. Other sponsors of this year’s lecture include UW-Eau Claire’s Middle East studies program and the departments of geography and anthropology, history, languages, philosophy and religious studies, political science, and sociology.
The program is free and open to the public.
Steven Fink, associate professor of religious studies and one of the coordinators of the lecture, said choosing Slim for this year’s Arab World Lecture was a matter of finding someone with hands-on experience in the field.
“I wanted to find out who’s doing work right now, and not just writing texts, but someone who’s actually there doing conflict resolution,” Fink said.
Slim’s background includes positions as vice president of the International Institute for Sustained Dialogue, co-founder of the Arab Network for the Study of Democracy, senior program advisor at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, guest scholar at the United States Institute of Peace, and program officer at the Kettering Foundation.
Fink said the pertinence of Syrians seeking refuge in the United States made a lecture on Syria the obvious choice for this year, and added that Slim’s experiences would offer a unique personal perspective on a deeply troubling global conflict.
Fink said that Slim’s lecture will focus will be on the current state of Syrian peace efforts and how neighboring countries are responding.
“It’s such an incredible humanitarian crisis, and I expect that her firsthand experience in Syria and working on the conflict and working on the mediation and trying her best to work toward a peaceful resolution will hopefully humanize a lot of what’s happening,” Fink said.
“However, implicitly, every single thing that she’s saying I think is very relevant to what’s happening in terms of American Islamophobia and the so-called Muslim ban,” he added.
“Many Americans, and perhaps some audience members, are very concerned about allowing Syrian refugees into the country,” he said. “Maybe her ability to dispel some stereotypes and present real human stories could do something about that, as well.”