Are you interested in learning more about career opportunities at United Nations and international non-profit organizations? Come listen to recruiters and alumni in this field! Informal networking time will be provided after presentations and a panel. The event is hosted by The Career Center and Area Studies Centers at University of Illinois. Please see the attached materials for more information.
Global Career Series:
Careers at UN and International Organizations
Date/ Time: Thursday, April 26th, 2018, from 3-6 pm
Location: Illini Union Ballroom (2nd Floor) located at 1401 W. Green Street, Urbana, IL
For a schedule of the events, please check out the Agenda.
Best Wishes to Kathy!
Our Office Manager, Kathy Anderson-Conner, retired on February 28th! After over ten years of working in the program, she has touched the lives of so many students who have pursued the certificate. All of us here at ACDIS cannot express how sad we are to see her go, as she was the heart and soul of our office. However, we know that her retirement is well-deserved, and we wish her the best as she now gets to enjoy endless amounts of freedom and relaxation!
Alumna Leah Matchett named Knight-Hennessy Scholar!
Leah graduated from UIUC with a double major in Global Studies and Geology, and she was a founding member of our ACDIS Security Group. She is currently a Marshall Scholar studying International Relations at the University of Oxford, and now has the opportunity to pursue her Ph.D. in Political Science at Stanford thanks to the newly established Knight-Hennessy Scholar program. We’re so proud of everything she has accomplished so far, and we wish her all the best of luck in pursuing her future goals!!
For further information on what Leah has done, check out this article!
Photo taken by Javier Flores
A Special Thank You
The Nanjing Symposium was very successful! We would like to thank everyone who took the time to attend the symposium and to honor the memory of UIUC alumnae Minnie Vautrin and Iris Chang. We were honored to welcome members of the Vautrin and Chang families at the symposium. We are especially grateful to our guest speakers: Provost John Wilkin, Vice Consul Han Li, Poshek Fu, Suping Lu, Jinhee Lee, Hua-Ling Hu, Shau-Jin Chang and Ying-Ying Chang. We thank Adele Suslick and Elizabeth Majerus for their readings from Iris Chang’s work and Minnie Vautrin’s diary and the Uni High Madrigal Choir under the leadership of Richard Murphy for its performance.
ICAN Ban Nuclear Weapons
In October of 2017 the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), “for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons”. Jürgen Scheffran, Professor of Geography at the University of Hamburg and former Senior Research Scientist at ACDIS (2004–2009), contributed the following commentary.
On September 20, 2017, the United Nations opened for a treaty to ban nuclear weapons that will enter into force after ratification by 50 countries. After decades of arms races and little or no recent progress on nuclear disarmament, many countries no longer want to accept the special status of the nuclear weapon states. The treaty bans the last weapon of mass destruction, following the ban on biological and chemical weapons. However, the treaty does not implement the disarmament process to the nuclear-weapon-free world, and the nuclear-weapon states and their allies are not yet involved.
ACDIS is hosting our first annual lecture in memory of former director, Jeremiah Sullivan. This year, Dr. Jürgen Scheffran, a professor from the University of Hamburg, will be giving a lecture on ICAN, the recipient of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. ICAN played a major role in the signing of The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which is currently backed by 122 states. Dr. Scheffran and millions of people around the world who participated in the ICAN movement have seen a breakthrough in the ratification of this treaty by numerous states. Each ratification shows that the world is slowly uniting against the threat nuclear weapons poses to society and the security risks WMD hold.
We welcome everyone to come to this lecture to hear this discussion! This event will take place prior to the graduation ceremony that we offer for our outgoing ACDIS certificate students. We look forward to seeing you all there!
At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, students simulated several reactions to a Korean Peninsula crisis in the 2020s. In the simulation, the United States and North Korean heads of state had previously agreed to a halt to joint military exercises by the United States and South Korea as long as North Korea froze its nuclear and ballistic missile programs. After receiving an intelligence report about suspected clandestine uranium enrichment in North Korea, the U.S. president issued a demarche demanding prompt elimination of North Korea’s nuclear weapons materials. The claim of an ongoing clandestine uranium enrichment program was disputed by North Korea, and a summary of the conclusions of the report was not supported by China, Japan, or South Korea. After an initial round of heated statements, the concerned parties in each of the simulations agreed to inspections to verify that North Korea had not been enriching uranium during the agreed upon freeze period. In one simulation, South Korea resorted to announcing its intention to withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty if the United States did not agree to limit the U.S. role to review of a report by a joint inspection team from the Republic of China and the Republic of Korea. Neither the premise nor the outcome of the simulation should be attributed to any individual or group of students, as the simulation exercise was only intended to draw attention to some of the complexities of the security situation in Northeast Asia.
Professor Lesley Wexler Writes on Chlorine Gas Attacks in Syria
During World War I, use of chlorine gas a weapon violated prohibitions of the 1899 and 1907 Hague Conventions on use of poison weapons. Use of chlorine gas as a weapon is banned by the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). Syria acceded to the CWC in 2013 but has since been accused of chlorine gas attacks. Has prospect of attacks on their homelands by much smaller smuggled amounts of potent nerve gas agents like sarin led some of the permanent members of the UN Security council to question whether a “red line” against poison gas attacks by Syria also applies to chlorine gas? In a 20 February 2018 commentary, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign law professor Lesley Wexler asks how seriously the use of chlorine gas as a violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention is being taken.
This workshop aims to probe what globalization really means in today’s Middle East, and how it is reflected in movements, peoples, cultures, art forms, and networks. The aim is to show how groups, ideas, and practices that originated in the region are developing not in isolation, but the indirect and complex connection with other cultural and socio-economic geographies. The conference aims to scrutinize the prevailing view of the Middle East as an inward-looking and insular cultural unit. It will highlight the globality of the region by examining the trans-local flows and formations in the domains of ideas, arts, science, culture, economy, politics, and movement of people.
For the Program and the full schedule of events click here
In honor of two U of I alumnae, ACDIS will host a public symposium on the 80th Anniversary of World-War-II’s Nanjing Massacre. Missionary and humanitarian Minnie Vautrin (Illinois class of 1912) rescued over 10,000 Chinese women from rape during the massacre. And Iris Chang (Illinois Class of 1989) later described these events in her acclaimed book, The Rape of Nanjing. Join Iris Chang’s parents and Minnie Vautrin’s family to recall the events of December 1937, this Saturday, December 16, starting at 9:30am in the Levis Faculty Center.
For the program and more information click here. Free parking at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts.
For more information on the symposium, click here.
On September 29, 2017 ACDIS and the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (CSAMES) hosted the symposium, “Shifting Iran-US Relations: Return to Status Quo Ante or New Alignments in the Middle East Region?” Speakers included Asef Bayat, Shireen Hunter, Kevan Harris, Frederick Lamb, Matthias Grosse Perdekamp, and Trita Parsi, Founder and President of the National Iranian American Council, who gave the the keynote speech.
Need help researching topics in security? Use the library as a resource!
The Arms Control Collection consists of indexes, yearbooks, handbooks, bibliographies, monographs and serials dealing with arms control, disarmament, and international security. The collection does not represent all of the library’s holdings on these subjects; additional materials on these subjects are available throughout libraries on campus, and the call numbers listed below will help you find materials on the shelves. In addition, the Library has a large number of electronic (e-) books and journals. E-books can be found in the Online Library Catalog and e-journals can be found in the Online Journals & Databases.
