The Lemkin Reunion, 5th Annual Meeting

Type: 
Conference
Audience: 
CEU Community + Invited Guests
Building: 
Nador u. 15
Room: 
N15: 103 Tiered (public panels)
Tuesday, March 19, 2019 - 10:00am
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Date: 
Tuesday, March 19, 2019 - 10:00am to Wednesday, March 20, 2019 - 7:30pm

March 2019 marks eight years since people in a wide web of villages and cities across the Syrian landscape took to the streets in defiance of the Assad family’s rule. Initially responding with gunfire, imprisonment and torture, the regime’s strategy evolved into the carpet bombing and mass destruction of whole rural and urban communities, culminating in the forced transfer of all remaining residents from areas such as Ghouta and eastern Aleppo, which remain largely uninhabited. Although the fighting has ebbed, the war in Syria has not ended and a political settlement has not been reached. The near ten million displaced, mainly in harsh conditions in and around Syria, do not feel safe to return to their neighbourhoods and villages. However, the Syrian government has promulgated laws enabling the construction of development projects where displaced communities once resided with no or few guarantees of compensation for displaced property owners. One such project, Marota City, plotted over the demolished informal district of Basateen al-Razi, is already under construction. What will reconstruction under the current conditions serve? Under what conditions can reconstruction in Syria be equitable?

The Shattuck Center invites experts and young scholars to submit papers to present at the 5th annual Lemkin Reunion. Applications from the CEU community are also welcome.

Applicants should send their CVs and 300-word (max) abstracts to ccnr@ceu.edu no later than December 10th, 2018. Selected applicants will be contacted by December 20th, 2018.

Accepted participants must then submit their final paper drafts by March 11 and give a ten-minute presentation of their work during one of the three Lemkin seminars on March 19 - 20.  

Accepted participants residing outside the EU will be sent a formal invitation letter, but it is their responsibility to obtain a visa. Funds for a limited number of participants will be available, but applicants who have other sources of funding are also encouraged to apply.

Each year the Shattuck Center hosts the Lemkin Reunion, a gathering named in honor of Raphael Lemkin, the Polish lawyer who lost his family in the Holocaust and first coined the word genocide. He campaigned tirelessly during his life to ensure that the crime of genocide was codified as an international crime. The Lemkin Reunion gathers policymakers involved in responding to atrocity crimes and assesses the lessons they learned.