For Immediate Release:
October 5, 2001

EXPERT TO SPEAK AT MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE
ON HUMAN RIGHTS AND A WAR AGAINST TERROR

SOUTH HADLEY, Mass. -- Michael Ignatieff, one of the leading experts on human rights issues and the causes of human conflict in the world, will speak on "Human Rights and Terror" on Wednesday, October 17, at 7:30 PM in Hooker Auditorium at Mount Holyoke College. Ignatieff's talk is sponsored by the Harriet L. and Paul M. Weissman Center for Leadership.

Ignatieff, director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, says he will speak about the ethical and legal rules that must govern a war on terror. "How do we wage a war when the rules of armed combat don't apply – have never applied – to people who call themselves terrorists?" asks Ignatieff, a journalist, historian, and novelist. "What new rules of engagement do we need to put into place so that democracy is not disgraced by yet another dirty war? More widely, what do young citizens need to understand about the enemy and the war we will have to wage against them?"

Ignatieff's study of ethnic war has led him to Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Afghanistan. His works combine eyewitness accounts of modern war with a historian's insight into the constancy of human conflict. Recent essays examine four primary themes: the moral connection created by modern culture with distant victims of war, the architects of postmodern war, the impact of ethnic war abroad on our thinking about ethnic accommodations at home, and the function of memory and social healing.

Among Ignatieff's publications are Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (Henry Holt & Co., 2000); The Warrior's Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (Henry Holt & Co., 1997); Blood and Belonging: Journeys Into the New Nationalism (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994); The Needs of Strangers: An Essay on the Philosophy of Human Needs (Viking Penguin, 1985); and Isaiah Berlin: A Life (Metropolitan Books, 1998).

Ignatieff was born in Toronto, educated at the University of Toronto, and took his doctorate in history at Harvard. He was senior research fellow at King's College, Cambridge, for several years, and has held academic posts in France, the United States, and Canada.

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