McCormack School conference, lecture to bring together Truth and Reconciliation leaders
The UMass Boston Community is invited to a public lecture on Thursday, October 25th at 7 p.m. in the Campus Center ballroom.
Last month, McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies professor Padraig O’Malley was in Finland, where he’d organized peace talks between Sunni and Shiite leaders from Iraq. This month, he’s back in Boston, where the McCormack School will host representatives from six countries who have begun the healing process after being torn apart by sectarian violence.
To be held October 23 through 25, the conference, titled “Truth and Reconciliation Commissions: Do They Do Justice to Justice?” will explore a concept O’Malley, holder of the John Joseph Moakley Chair of Peace and Reconciliation, has worked with for years: That people from divided societies can help others in divided societies.
“We’re hosting delegations from four countries that have had truth and reconciliation commissions--Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, and South Africa—and putting them together with delegations from two countries that are trying to begin the process of reconciliation—Northern Ireland and Serbia,” said McCormack School Dean Steve Crosby. “The road to reconciliation is long and tortured, but we hope that Padraig O’Malley can use the expertise that he’s gathered over the years, and the legacy of Joe Moakley, to get the journey on that road started.”
While the conference will include full-group meetings as well as a public lecture to be held on Thursday evening, O’Malley says that the greatest benefit of conferences like this one are the personal relationships that form out of the public eye.
“We put a lot of emphasis on what we call “one-on-ones,” conversations with whatever individuals you want, in a room, on your own, with nobody else present,” said O’Malley. “People always say something slightly differently when they’re just talking to one person than when another person is present, and often are very honest once they have reasonable trust in the person they talk to.”
It’s a concept that O’Malley has seen work many times before, whether between people from far-apart countries who form mentor/mentee relationships, or between people from the same country who are on opposite sides of a violent conflict. First involved in peace work in 1972 when he helped organize a fundraiser in Dorchester for the families of the victims of the Bloody Sunday massacre, O’Malley said he and his co-activists later sought to take a more proactive role.
“At the time, I said, ‘Why are we always just raising money for the families of dead people?’” he recalled. “We had this crazy idea of trying to bring all the parties together.”
The first big experiment came in 1975, when he helped bring over 30 representatives of warring parties in Northern Ireland for a weeklong conference at UMass Amherst. Years later, some of the same people who attended that conference went to South Africa to mentor leaders there. Most recently in Finland, O’Malley says the Iraqi delegates immediately formed bonds with the Northern Irish and South African peace leaders who had been invited to help bring the two Iraqi sides together.
“The premise that we were operating from—that people from divided societies are in a better position to help people from other divided societies—was quite apparent after the first day and a half of interaction between the Iraqis and the Northern Irish and the South Africans,” said O’Malley. “They could share things and understand each other in a way that people from normal societies wouldn’t really understand.”
The John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies was created in August 2003 to recognize the University's strengths in policy studies and develop a signature area of excellence. The school offers a broad range of graduate degrees in public policy, public affairs, and gerontology and teaches students to think and work across traditional boundaries, particularly at the intersection of the public, private, and not-for-profit sectors. Research centers within the Graduate School focus on State and Local Policy, Social Policy, Women in Politics & Public Policy, Gerontology, Media and Society, and Democracy and Development. For more information, go to www.mccormack.umb.edu.
Established in 1964, UMass Boston prides itself on providing challenging teaching, distinguished research, and extensive public service to Boston and the Commonwealth. Through its six colleges—Liberal Arts, Science and Mathematics, Management, Nursing and Health Sciences, Public and Community Service, and Graduate College of Education –the McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies, and the Division of Corporate, Continuing, and Distance Education, UMass Boston offers undergraduate and graduate study to 13,200 students in more than 150 fields. For more information, please see www.umb.edu.