The Stanford Daily - April 23, 2010

By Caity Monroe

“The important thing is not to let your heart grow cold while keeping your head cool.”

It was with this assertion that Helen Stacy, a senior lecturer in law, introduced José Zalaquett, Chilean lawyer, legal scholar and human rights defender, at his lecture on Thursday evening.

The quote, spoken by Zalaquett in a previous interview, was an apt way to acquaint the audience with a man who, despite being exiled for 10 years and having encountered thousands of stories of oppression and mass atrocity, demonstrated a mastery of balancing idealism and realism — all while maintaining an evident sense of morality and empathy.
“I do believe that law and ethics correlate a lot,” he said. “They are in my view like overlapping circles…and that area of overlap may be more or less considerable.”
Most of Zalaquett’s lecture focused on transitional justice and the various options for repairing and reconstructing a nation in the aftermath of mass atrocity. Zalaquett is renowned for his work defending human rights in his home country during General Augusto Pinochet’s oppressive regime. Having served on Chile’s National Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Zalaquett has first-hand experience with the importance of acknowledging atrocities and revealing the truth — however grim it may be.

“The idea that these atrocities may be left in the dark is repugnant to basic moral principles,” he said.

Stanford history Prof. James Campbell and political science Prof. Terry Karl provided commentary on Zalaquett’s lecture. Both sided with him on the importance of truth and recognition post-atrocity. However, all three also agreed that there are certain restrictions on truth’s ability to prevail and on the capacity of post-conflict societies to both uncover and subsequently handle such knowledge.

“One of the things that alarms me is that the more normal truth commissions become and the more normal some qualified amnesty provisions become…the more difficult it becomes to bring persecution to perpetrators of mass atrocity,” Campbell said, highlighting, as all three speakers did at some point during the event, one of the commonly-cited problems of such situations.

Dealing with complex issues of ethnic cleansing, mass atrocity and genocide is difficult and it appears that the general consensus on the matter is that there is no ideal solution.
Zalaquett depicted the transitional justice dilemma as necessary and promising, yet did so in a realistic framework.

“It’s a human endeavor, and human endeavors fail more than they succeed. Which is all the more reason to try over and over again,” he said.

This acknowledgment of some of the political and logistical restrictions that limit post-atrocity negotiations was one thing that students most appreciated about the lecture.
“This guy is amazing…He is one of the first people who acknowledged the idea that you have political constraints in post-conflict scenarios, and you have to deal with it,” said Cristina Brandao, a student SPILS fellow in the law school’s masters program. “This is, in my opinion, what makes him so important… somebody has to say this.”

Another part of the talk that appealed to many in attendance was the way in which Zalaquett spoke of acknowledgement. He emphasized that there is knowledge, and there is acknowledgement. In her comments after Zalaquett’s presentation, Karl added that such acknowledgement is particularly difficult for big powers like the United States that have been complicit in many different human rights violations.

“I really liked his distinction between acknowledgment and knowledge,” said Lila Kalaf ‘10. “We know that our government does some pretty messed up things all the time, but we don’t acknowledge it. And the step between knowledge and acknowledgment is so huge for Americans…it probably causes a lot of upheaval because once you acknowledge something, it usually starts to require action.”

The Stanford Humanities Center and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) are pleased to announce that four international scholars have been chosen to come to Stanford in 2010-11 as part of a jointly sponsored international program entering its second year. Nominated by Stanford departments and research centers, the international scholars will be on campus for four-week residencies. They will have offices at the Humanities Center and will be affiliated with their nominating unit, the Humanities Center, and FSI.

A major purpose of the residencies is to bring high-profile international scholars into the intellectual life of the university, targeting scholars whose research and writing engage with the missions of both the Humanities Center and FSI.

The following four scholars have been selected for the upcoming academic year.

• Anies Baswedan, currently President of Paramadina University in Jakarta, is a leading intellectual figure in Indonesia. In 2008, the editors of Foreign Policy named him one of the world's "top 100 public intellectuals." As an advisor to the Indonesian government, he is a leading proponent of democracy and transparency in Indonesia, a creative thinker about Islam and democracy, as well as a charismatic leader in the educational field. He was nominated by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.
• Stephane Dudoignon is a political scientist/senior research fellow at the EHESS in Paris. He is one of the world's leading scholars of Muslim politics and societies from the Caucasus to Central Asia. He is the author of pioneering work on Muslim movements, including the historical study of Sufi networks from the Volga River to China, Muslim intellectuals' debates about gender, and modern Sunni revivalist movements in Eastern Iran. While on campus, he will give lectures on Islam in Eurasia and Iran, among other things. He was nominated by CREEES, the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies.
• Monica Quijada is a high-profile public intellectual and historian of Spain and Latin America at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC) in Madrid. Her engagement with the UN in Argentina (working with refugees) and her directorship of the investigation carried out in the late 1990s regarding Nazi activities during the Second World War and in post-war Argentina shows her commitment to the public space. She has written extensively on dictatorship, populism, and war and their effect on the public sphere in Argentina and Spain as well as on the relationship between nineteenth-century Latin American states and their indigenous populations. She was nominated by the History Department and the Center for Latin American Studies.
• Patrick Wolfe is a historian at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. He is a premier historian of settler colonialism, currently working on a comparative transnational history of settler-colonial discourses of race in Australia, Brazil, the United States, and Israel/Palestine. While at Stanford, he will give lectures based on his core work on Australia and also on his forthcoming book Settler Colonialism and the American West, 1865-1904 (Princeton University Press). He was nominated by the Bill Lane Center for the American West.

While at Stanford, the scholars will offer informal seminars and public lectures and will also be available for consultations with interested faculty and students. For additional information, please contact Marie-Pierre Ulloa, mpulloa@stanford.edu.