Scholarship as Advocacy and Activism

We don't usually think of the Ivory Tower as a catalyst for change. One rarely hopes to effect action through doctoral theses and journal articles. But a session at last month's Genocide Prevention Advanced Leadership Summit at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum got me thinking. Entitled "Scholarship as Activism," and led by Scott Strauss, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the session emphasized the easily overlooked role academics play in genocide and human rights advocacy. It is safe to say, for example, that Professor Strauss's 2005 article on Darfur in the journal Foreign Affairs reaches far more policymakers than my blog entries. Furthermore, the big take-away from the session was that human rights and genocide studies will remain "fuzzy subjects" only so long as talented, dedicated people ignore them. So my thought for the day/week is this: academic work can never replace phone-ins or rallies, letter-writing or meeting with Congressmen. But getting a Ph.D. and writing in journals doesn't mean you can't make a big difference in advancing the genocide prevention and human rights agenda among policymakers, intellectuals, and the public at large. A few programs in this area, if anyone's interested (they're on my Bookmarked list):

Yale University Genocide Studies Center
University of Minnesota Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies
Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies
Harvard University Carr Center for Human Rights Policy