During her studies in the GSPIA PhD program, Vera Achvarina was a researcher at the Ford Institute for Human Security from 2005 through 2007. She will present on:

-A Ford institute project under her leadership which closely examined security situations in African refugee and IDP camps.
-Her research on child soldiering seeking to answer why some armed rebel groups recruit minors for armed conflict while others do not.
-Her recent co-authored work on transitional justice in Northern Uganda and people's attitudes towards retribution.

Have you ever thought about interning or working with refugees or internally displaced people (IDP) in a camp where they sought shelter?

Vera Achvarina conducted research in a refugee camp (Liberian refugee camp in Ghana) for her doctoral fieldwork.

Hear about camp conditions, viability of interning at a camp, and ways to do field research with people in this situation.

“Should Scotland be an independent country?” In a referendum scheduled for September 18th, voters in that country will have an opportunity to vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on that very question. On Tuesday, Sepetember 23rd, the EUCE at Pitt will devote the first session of its award-winning Conversations on Europe virtual roundtable series to a discussion of the results of the referendum. What is the future of the Scottish National Party? How will this effect UK politics? What are the implications of the results for other nationalist movements in Europe and North America?

For the last decade there has been wide debate on European Union (EU) as a normative power actor in international politics. Visiting scholar Işık Kuşçu contributes to this debate by analyzing the impact of the EU in Kazakhstan in the field of human rights. As one of the former Soviet republics in Central Asia, Kazakhstan has emerged as an actor with a desire to win the recognition of the West as a modern, progressive power in the region. While the EU`s engagement in Central Asia does not have a long history, it considers Kazakhstan an important partner in the region.

The story of Jewish refugees in China during World War II is something that relatively few people understand or know about in the overall history of Jewish immigration and settlement. As many as 16,000 Jews fled Europe during WWII to live and work in Shanghai. This exhibit is in collaboration with the Jewish Refugees Museum of Shanghai and consists of 45 storyboards outlining the process of immigration from Europe to China, the various struggles and cultural adaptions, and the personal stories of survivors and their families.

The first lecture in the new "Talking About Asia" series will outline some of the controversies that exist when researchers, museum specialists, political figures, and eyewitnesses from the West and China talk about the World War II refugee community in Shanghai, China.

With responses by Paul Bove (English), Nancy Condee (Global Studies), and Michael Goodhart (Political Science)

Readings for Thursday's colloquium can be found here.

In the early 1920s and 30s, the first purpose-built mosques were established in the United States and Japan. Despite being on the far sides of the planet in Detroit and Kobe, their foundation reflected the ability of South Asian Muslim "religious entrepreneurs" to operate on what was by the 1920s a truly global scale. In tracing the commonalities between this first institutional emergence of Islam in two new world regions, the lecture identifies the global processes of religious competition and exchange and the reasons why Indian Muslims emerged at the forefront of them.

Because of the dramatic growth of Asian economies, the salience of Asia among world historians has risen significantly in the past decades. We can see this prominence in the greater space devoted to Asia in world history textbooks, curricula, and to some extent in faculty positions. Yet because of the lingering influence of Eurocentrism and the constraints imposed by traditional Area Studies, gaps and discrepancies remain.

From a global perspective, even using the term "empire" in relation to Japanese history is not just about the past but about modernity—colonial modernity—and its implications for the present. My talk will consider various recent trends in approaching the Japanese empire writ large. Particular focus rests on the enduring problem with many broader imperial studies' continued failure to examine and/or incorporate Japan's experience into their theoretical frameworks, which only perpetuates exceptionalist ideas about Japan as "different" from home pre-supposed norm.