by Eranda Jayawickreme
There are good reasons to celebrate the Sri Lankan government’s final victory over the Tamil Tiger rebels last week. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) were one of the most brutal and repressive terrorist organizations in the world, with a crypto-fascist ideology focused on the personality cult of their now-slain leader [...]

Asch’s newest project is up and running!  Under the direction of Associate Director for Conflict and Visual Culture Initiatives Jonathan Hyman, the Asch network is expanding to include photographers, fine artists and filmmakers exploring the interaction between conflict and visual expression.   We look forward to new kinds of collaboration and cross-pollination as a result [...]

From cartoons of Muhammad in a Danish newspaper to displays of the Confederate battle flag over the South Carolina statehouse, acts of cultural significance have set off political conflicts and sometimes violence. These and other expressions and enactments of culture–whether in music, graffiti, sculpture, flag displays, parades, religious rituals, or film–regularly produce divisive and sometimes [...]

Jennifer Lind
Dartmouth College
Governments increasingly offer or demand apologies for past human rights abuses, and it is widely believed that such expressions of contrition are necessary to promote reconciliation between former adversaries. Lind challenges the conventional wisdom by showing that many countries have been able to reconcile without much in the way of apologies or [...]

Chaim Kaufmann, from Lehigh University’s International Relations department, spoke at Asch on February 24th.  Here is a brief summary:
Academia, human rights organizations, and governments agree: partition is no solution to communal conflict. Indeed partition is just another name for ethnic cleansing   Chaim Kaufmann has a radically different view, based on years of study of dozens [...]