S.T. Lee Lecture: After Syria: The Future of the Responsibility to Protect
Gareth Evans
Chancellor of the Australian National University and former Foreign Minister of Australia
March 12, 2014
In this lecture, Gareth Evans, Chancellor of the Australian National University and former Foreign Minister of Australia, posits whether it is possible to end, once and for all, genocide and other major crimes against humanity occurring behind sovereign state walls to ensure that there will never again be another Cambodia, Rwanda, Srebrenica, or Darfur. Evans also questions if the new principle of "the responsibility to protect" (R2P), which was unanimously embraced by the U.N.
Most violent conflicts today are fought within states, and many are related to identity. They are, therefore, inextricably linked to how people perceive their history. How political leaders view and use history and historical narratives, often as the foundation for their claims, has a great impact on negotiations and can hold a peace process hostage.
From the very beginnings of cinematography, themes from the ancient world and the Bible have provided directors and screenwriters with inspiration. The representation of antiquity in the movies, and more generally in pop culture, is now a stimulating field of research within classical studies. In the last decade, perhaps no film has attracted so much interest and debate among historians and classicists as 
In the past ten years, the term “heritage” in African art studies has gone from being a cliché used only by cultural bureaucrats to a burgeoning academic growth industry, brought into being by studies of collective memory or national trauma in relation to both historical and invented pasts. In this lecture, 
Late medieval and Renaissance painters in northern Europe took pride in characterizing the forms of attention specific to the votive encounter. Amidst the hubbub of the Crucifixion, certain witnesses to the event are shown poised between acceptance and rejection of the dying man as the Christ of prophecy. These figures allowed beholders to measure their own response to Jesus’s paradoxical identity along a spectrum between seeing and blindness, between discipleship and reprobacy. Captured in the dawning of their comprehension, such characters embodied that passage from ignorance to knowledge that Aristotle, in The Poetics, called “recognition” (anagnôrisis). In this lecture, 
A blue mushroom cloud fills the page, its contour traced by the comet-like tails of shrieking heads whose gaping mouths spew out furious curses in a rain of profanity over needle-stiff bodies littering the ground. This lecture by Mignon Nixon borrows its title, “Sperm Bomb,” from Nancy Spero, who, in 1964, in response to the escalating American war in Vietnam, abruptly abandoned painting on canvas for more immediate means: gouache and ink liberally diluted with spit. Returning to the scene of war resistance and nascent feminism in the Vietnam era, Nixon reflects upon newly pressing questions of what art concerned with subjectivity brings to a situation of war.
Prior to the Terror (1793–94), the French Revolution was generally viewed very positively by progressive constitutional thinkers and law reformers. On November 18, 1792, more than a hundred distinguished Anglo-American democrats, including several founders of modern feminism, gathered at the British Club in Paris to celebrate liberty, human rights, and the spread of democracy across the world—what they viewed as the assured democratic future of mankind. In this lecture, 
What is the relationship between the idiom of the observer (historian, anthropologist) and the idiom of the actors, dead or alive? This question, which has been addressed from widely different (and usually unrelated) points of view, provides an oblique approach to the cognitive, moral, and political implications of the historian’s craft today.