EDUCATING FOR PEACE AT HARVARD

With members of the class and faculty at Harvard's 

Kennedy School. I'm in the front row left, standing. 

Dr. Kathryn Sikkink (seated just to my right) 

and Dr. Luis Moreno Ocampo (standing, front row, 

4th from right). 

It was my honor this past week to accept an invitation to visit Harvard University. More specifically, I visited Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School and its Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, both of which are teaching programs and doing research that coincide with areas of investigation included in my latest book, War: A Crime Against Humanity. These areas include ways to reform and improve the United Nations and the International Criminal Court (ICC), as a means of making them more effective in establishing and maintaining world peace; strategies to bolster and protect the rule of law, democratic values, and human and civil rights; tactics for preventing torture and methods for imparting peace education.

In other words, through these department sections—and the brilliant scholars teaching in them—Harvard is practicing what I consider the only way to find a road toward world peace and toward the worldwide prohibition of war: namely, educating for peace.  

I was pleased to be asked to take part in a special event within the framework of a program organized by the university’s Kennedy School: two intensive days of study and analysis to mark the end of an extraordinary course entitled The Politics of International Law: The International Criminal Court and the UN Security Council. The aim of this program/course was to cast light on the roles and effects of the UN Security Council and the ICC, within the political landscape in which they both operate today, and to discover how these factors affect the functions of specific areas of international law.

The program was coordinated by renowned international affairs experts and educators Dr. Kathryn Sikkink and Dr. Luis Moreno Ocampo.

Left to right: Roberto Vivo, Kathryn Sikkink and 

Luis Moreno Ocampo.

Holder of master’s and doctoral degrees from Columbia University, Dr. Sikkink is a human rights policy and advanced studies professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School, as well as being a renowned author. In 2012, she won the John F. Kennedy Book Award for The Justice Cascade, a brilliant work that delves into the origins and effects of human rights trials, and which served as one of many high-level scholarly sources for my own War: A Crime Against Humanity. She is also the author of Ideas and Institutions: Developmentalism in Brazil and Argentina (1991) that explains the influence of Developmentalism on the fate of two of Latin America’s largest economies, and of Mixed Signals: Human Rights Policy and Latin America (2004), in which she recounts how Washington’s callous anticommunist stance of the 1970s tarnished the reputation of the United States throughout Latin America by associating it with tyrannical and often brutally murderous regimes. She warns that the current war against terrorism could very well lead to a repetition of these past mistakes unless Americans insist that the struggle against terrorism be conducted within a framework of respect for human rights and for the rule of law.

Dr. Luis Moreno Ocampo is a world renowned human rights attorney, having served in his native Argentina as Assistant Special Prosecutor for the unprecedented trials of former military junta members when democracy returned to that country in the 1980s. More recently, he served for nine years as the founding Chief Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court. He is Co-Professor at Harvard for the Kennedy School’s course entitled The Politics of International Law: The International Criminal Court and the UN Security Council.

Luis collaborated closely with me while my team and I were gathering research for War: A Crime Against Humanity, guiding me skillfully through the complex maze of international law and politics, areas in which he is exceedingly well-versed. He also introduced me to international law personalities who were instrumental in helping me better understand how worldwide arms sales, acts of aggression, war crimes and human rights violations have played a fundamental role in creating a worldwide culture of war that ignores the basic tenets of democracy and rule of law, while undermining efforts to establish lasting world peace.

The sessions I took part in were packed with a series of fascinating presentations, debates and surveys on some of the most compelling of current legal issues. For example, one of the issues discussed was whether there is a genuine possibility open for the ICC to intervene in two of the most controversial conflicts of the day: Syria and Palestine. 

Besides participating in the program itself, I also had an opportunity to meet with a group of Harvard students, distribute copies of my book among them and engage in an enthusiastic one on one discussion session with them. My book was the reason behind my being invited to take part in this event, since part of its thesis is a call for UN Security Council reform and for a strong and independent International Criminal Court with extensive police powers that would permit it to be truly effective in the investigation and trial of not just some but all war crimes, atrocities, human rights abuses and international acts of aggression.

Later, Professor Douglas A. Johnson invited me to visit the Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, where he is Faculty Director, a post he has held since 2013. Professor Johnson took up this post after serving for 24 years as Executive Director of the international Center for the Victims of Torture (CVT). During his tenure there, the CVT provided clinical and other services to more than 23,000 victims of torture at the organization’s facilities in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea, Jordan, Liberia, Sierra Leone and the United States.

The Center—founded in 1999, through a gift from Kennedy School alumnus and renowned entrepreneur/philanthropist Gregory Carr—is guided by a commitment to making human rights principles central to the formulation of good public policy in the United States and throughout the world.

During my visit, Professor Johnson personally explained to me the function of a Tactical Map formulated by the Carr Center as a means of ending torture worldwide. In War: A Crime Against Humanity, I compare the establishment of a path toward the prohibition of war with progress made in the past century toward outlawing torture entirely. It was fascinating for me, then, to see how people like Professor Carr are inventing practical means of making such worldwide bans effective. The Center’s dual mission is training human rights practitioners to think and act more strategically, and drawing on the best research in the social sciences to create viable human rights solutions.

On the second day of my Harvard visit, I joined Kennedy
Center students in receiving a sneak preview of a soon to be published report on the effectiveness of the International Criminal Court as it stands today. Some of the findings of the report were presented to us by Harvard University’s Beth Simmons, one of the two authors of the report, whose co-researcher was Hyeran Jo of Texas A&M University.

With Professor Beth Simmons following her presentation.

In her absorbing presentation, Professor Simmons explained common perceptions regarding the ICC, including the idea that, in its current form, the Court has so little power to prosecute aggression, war crimes and other human rights abuses and atrocities—since, basically, countries and leaders can choose whether or not to recognize the ICC’s jurisdiction—that it cannot possibly act as a deterrent. And underscoring this perception is the fact that the Court has only managed to hand down three convictions in the past thirteen years.

The breakthrough in Simmons and Jo’s report—soon to be published in the Journal of International Organization—is that their research has developed hard evidence that reality does not bear out this perception and that, in fact, the ICC is already acting as a deterrent. Although its conviction record alone might seem to belie its effectiveness, this latest research tends to show that the mere threat of an ICC investigation has managed to get not only actual governments but also some other political movements to clean up their human rights acts.

On a final note—and once again, my most heartfelt thanks to Harvard’s Kennedy School and Carr Center for this opportunity to make direct contact with some of the finest peace educators in the world—I’m anxious to see Simmons and Jo’s report once published, since their findings are exciting for researchers like myself who are seeking a stronger ICC. The idea that even today, in its current deficiently empowered state, the Court is able to improve the quality level of worldwide human rights, is a major point in favor of campaigns to broaden its powers and to push principal world leaders like (especially) the United States, China and Russia to fully recognize it and submit to its authority. In the end, if they had nothing to hide, they would have nothing to fear from the International Criminal Court and their reticence toward not only recognizing but fully empowering  the ICC stands as a testimony to their failure to adhere to the fundamental rules of respect for human and civil rights and for the inviolability of international law.