Gene Sharp, an international proponent of nonviolent warfare, will be the featured speaker at the University of Notre Dame’s eighth annual John Howard Yoder Dialogues on Religion, Nonviolence and Peace on Friday (Sept. 22) at 11 a.m. in the auditorium of Notre Dame’s Hesburgh Center for International Studies. The event is free and open to the public.
Sharp’s presentation, titled “Principled Non-Violence: Options for Action,” is part of the Yoder Dialogues sponsored by Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. The lecture series was established in honor of the late John Howard Yoder, a Mennonite theologian, Notre Dame faculty member from 1977 to 1998, and founding fellow of the institute.
A senior scholar at the Albert Einstein Institute in Boston, Sharp founded the institution in 1983 to promote research, policy studies and education on the strategic uses of nonviolent struggle in the face of dictatorship, war, genocide and oppression. He held research appointments in Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs for nearly 30 years and is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. Sharp earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Ohio State University and a doctorate in political theory from Oxford University.
Sharp maintains that the major unsolved political problems of our time – dictatorship, genocide, war, social oppression and popular powerlessness – can only be remedied if people rethink politics in order to develop fresh strategies and programs. He is convinced that pragmatic, strategically planned, nonviolent struggle can be made highly effective as a means of lifting oppression.
Contact: Julie Titone, director of communications at the Kroc Institute, 574-631-8819, jtitone@nd.edu
Originally published by at newsinfo.nd.edu on September 19, 2006.