Hal Culbertson
Associate Director

A colleague once confided to me that he found academic conferences quite tedious. “I’d rather just wait for the book to come out,” he quipped.

While somewhat tongue in cheek, his comment nonetheless raises an important question: Why do we organize conferences?

As an institute focusing on peace studies, our stock in trade is gathering diverse and often contentious groups of people together to examine international conflicts. In addition to providing venues for presenting and critiquing research, we also hope that such gatherings will stimulate dialogue between researchers and practitioners; provide opportunities for students to interact with prominent researchers, global leaders and peacebuilders; and call attention to neglected topics.

In this issue, we capture some of the insight, the inspiration, and the interaction that was sparked by our conference “Peacebuilding After Peace Accords,” held on September 11- 13, 2003. The conference was sponsored by the Kroc Institute’s Research Initiative on the Resolution of Ethnic Conflict (RIREC) and marked the culmination of a three-year effort.

Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu delivered a profoundly moving keynote address, much of which is reprinted in this issue. The resonance of Tutu’s speech can be seen in the poignant reflections on his visit by our graduate students in peace studies as well as students from nearby Culver Academies.

The conference also featured a challenging — and controversial — keynote by Johan Galtung; an engaging panel on the peace process in South Africa; an international youth panel with students from Israel, the Balkans, and Northern Ireland; and presentations by sixty scholars and practitioners from more than a dozen countries.

In the words of Father Ted Hesburgh, “It was a Notre Dame moment.”

I can’t wait for the books to come out.

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