Harvard University organizes lectures on Kashmir

SRINAGAR (SANA): The Harvard University is organizing a string of lecturers on Kashmir scheduled to be started from November 12.

The lecture series titled “The Kashmir Initiative: Human Rights Policy for the World’s Most Militarized Dispute”, is being organized jointly by the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and The South Asia Initiative of the Harvard University. “The objective of organizing the Kashmir lecture series is an attempt to capture the nuances of the conflict and to build an inclusive dialogue on the issue,” says the Harvard Kennedy School website.

“As the US works with India and Pakistan on a diplomatic solution for Kashmir, the voice of the Kashmiri people must not be lost. In an attempt to capture the nuances of the conflict and to build an inclusive dialogue, we are weaving in historians, anthropologists, lawyers, policymakers, artists, Kashmiris and non-Kashmiris, with the hope to begin a conversation that unravels the issues that led the US President, Obama to classify Kashmir as a diplomatic tar pit,” the website says.

The speakers of the lecture series include Dr Sugata Bose, professor of History and director of the South Asia Initiative at Harvard University, Dr Angana Chatterji, professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in San Francisco, Alexander Evans, a Yale World Fellow and a Gwilym Gibbon Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, Dr Ayesha Jalal, the Mary Richardson professor of History and the director of Centre for South Asian and Indian Ocean Studies at Tufts University, John Halpern, a documentary filmmaker living and working in New York, Dr Suvir Kaul, AM Rosenthal Professor of English and Department Chair at University of Pennsylvania, Dr Ahmad Faruqui, a social scientist based in San Francisco, US and an associate of the Pakistan Security Research Unit at the University of Bradford, Parvez Imroz, a human rights lawyer and the founder of the Indian Held Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society and Robert Nickelsberg, a photojournalist whose works often feature in Time magazine.