2003 Student Conference Highlights Student Views of Iraq War

This year’s student conference proved especially timely. Held just ten days after the war against Iraq was launched the conference, entitled “Shadows of War, Visions of Peace,” attracted undergraduates and graduate students from 12 colleges and universities across the United States.

“Back in the fall, it looked like [war with Iraq was impending],” said Emily Badrov, senior political science major and an organizer of the conference. The students selected ‘Shadows of War’ as a conference theme back in October, when the Bush administration began making its case for war.

Panels of four to five undergraduates addressed a wide variety of issues, ranging from “Opportunities and Challenges of NGO’s and IGO’s in Global Society” to “Religious Paths to Peace” to “Innocence Lost: The Effects of War on Children.”

In a particularly timely panel entitled “Justifying War in the Modern World,” students presented papers that related to just war theory and argued that the current war with Iraq did not meet this criteria.

John Viano from Marquette University argued for the need for greater information sharing among nations in order to better predict empirically the actions of countries. Such trust and complicity among nations, Viano argued, would remove much guesswork from international politics.

“If we all recognize that we are insecure, we can do something about it that is not violent,” he said.

De-Yuan Kao from the University of Chicago discussed the evolution of U.S. doctrine regarding the use of force from 1980 to the present day and compared the use of force in the first and second Gulf Wars.

Claire Carter from Indiana University compared the political philosophies of Michael Walzer, Simone Weil and Albert Camus with respect to pacifism and just war theory and argued that the war with Iraq clearly violated the concepts of just war theory.

“This war is preventive, designed to respond to a distant threat. [There is] no pressing need to act in self defense,” she concluded.

Notre Dame’s Ky Bertoli focused on the Catholic Church’s views toward just war theory and the war with Iraq, illustrating the differences between the Church and the Bush administration with respect to the war.

“[The Bush Administration says that] we are acting because the risks of not acting would be much greater. The Vatican stands starkly on the other side,” he said.

In addition to student-led panel discussions, the peace conference featured a workshop by George Lopez on “Resolving Conflicts with Other Americans Over the Current War”; presentations from Take Ten, a peacebuilding program for fourth through sixth graders led by Notre Dame volunteers; and a dramatization of Aristophanes’ anti-war play Lysistrata. The conference concluded with a concert sponsored by Amnesty International.

Shabnam Siddiqui, a graduate student in peace studies from India who helped organize the conference, was impressed with the level of discussion.

“Over here [in America] the kind of intellectual understanding and dialogue that youth are involved in is particularly spectacular,” she said.

This article was adapted from an article by Joe Trombello in the Observer, March 31, 2003.

Top of Page

Home > Publications > Peace Colloquy > Issue 4 (Fall 2003)