Humanity, Warfare and Peacefare

UW-Madison Memorial Union, for room see the Today in the Union board - check here for day-of event updates.

media release: Along with UW-Madison students, Professor Nam C. Kim will share an anthropologist-archaeologist's view of the history of warfare and share family connections to armed conflict. We’ll discuss warfare/peacefare throughout human history. We plan to have another warfare/peacefare roundtable next semester, with a focus on Southeast Asia and Vietnam, as part of campus events to commemorate the 50-year anniversary, in April 2025, of the end of the American war in Vietnam. 

Professor Kim will discuss the concept of peacefare, a counterpoint to warfare. Culture allows for war and peace. It takes cooperation to avoid or prevent war, and the archaeological record shows that societies make huge investments in conflict avoidance, ceremonies to prevent war, marriages for alliance building, trade as a political alliance, and signaling peaceful intentions to outsiders.

UW-Madison student Charlene Huynh is winner of the 2024 Waging Peace in Vietnam Essay Contest, details here. She will read her winning essay.

Sophea Kai is a PhD student in the Department of History, where his research interests are history, religion, despicable wars, Asian Americans and multiracial interaction.

UW-Madison student Axell Boomer is the winner of the 2024 Beinecke Award, and works with the UW Nonviolence Project. He will share his work on Resurrection City, the encampment created in 1968 in Washington, DC by the Poor People’s Campaign, and how civil rights and anti-war organizing were interrelated.  

Sponsored by Madison for a World BEYOND War,  Veterans for Peace - Madison and the UW-Madison Center for Southeast Asian Studies.