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William Kirby ’59, former executive director of Search for Common Ground in the Middle East and former president of the American Foreign Service Association, will discuss the complexities of religious and political movements in the Middle East in a talk titled “The Middle East Mosaic” noon today in Interfaith Chapel, Hogg Hall.
Lunch may be brought or purchased for $3. Free and open to the campus community, the program is part of a series of discussions about peace and conflict resolution sponsored by the Chaplain’s Office Brown Bag Series and advocates for peace studies.
Kirby will give Israeli and Palestinian perspectives of the conflict dividing the groups, and will present his own viewpoint as well.
Kirby was executive director of Search For Common Ground in the Middle East from 1993-1999. Previously, he was deputy assistant secretary of state for the Near East and South Asia. A career diplomat, he began working in Middle East affairs in 1968, with particular emphasis on the Arab-Israeli peace process. In the State Department, he served on the Policy Planning Staff and as director of the Office of Israeli and Arab-Israeli Affairs. His overseas assignments have included Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Israel. Prior to joining Search for Common Ground, he was president of the American Foreign Service Association. He has a master’s in Middle East Studies from Harvard Unviversity.
Based in Washington D.C. and Brussels, the Search For Common Ground’s mission is to transform the way the world deals with conflict away from adversarial approaches and toward cooperative solutions.
“Although the world is overly polarized and violence is much too prevalent, we remain essentially optimistic,” according to the organization. “Our view is that, on the whole, history is moving in positive directions. Although some of the conflicts we are currently dealing with may seem intractable, there are successful examples of cooperative conflict resolution that we can look to for inspiration — such as in South Africa, where an unjust system was transformed through negotiations and an inclusive peace process.”
The next talk in the series on peace and conflict resolution will feature Jamaican playwright Trevor Rhone Friday, March 5.
Last Friday, in the first talk of the series, Neil Englehart, assistant professor of government and law, discussed findings from a book manuscript he recently completed in a lecture titled “Making Little Dictators: The U.S. in Afghanistan.”