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PROFESSOR DEEN CHATTERJEE CELEBRATES IRELAND’S PEACE-BASED BID TO THE UN SECURITY COUNCIL

A wish for world peace is often uttered as a naive hope for the impossible, but Professor Deen Chatterjee, Faculty Affiliate at the Oxford Consortium for Human Rights at the U, would argue that world peace is attainable when we shift our mindset to accomplishing it.

Chatterjee offers Ireland’s recent successful bid for a rotating seat on the UN Security Council as evidence of a global appetite for alternate approaches to peace that are enduring and active—more than just the end of conflict. Chatterjee’s research played a supporting role in Ireland’s victory and, though Covid restrictions prevented him from attending the formal celebration in Dublin, he is gratified to see the approach so publicly endorsed on the world stage.

“We cannot think of peace as a resting state or absence of war,” says Chatterjee. Ireland ran their campaign for the UN seat on the idea of global security by way of sustainable development goals (SDGs), leaning heavily on SDG16—peace, justice, and strong institutions. These global goals promoting just, peaceful, and inclusive societies were set in 2015 by the UN General Assembly as a way to achieve a more equitable and sustainable future for all.

The active pursuit of the SDGs toward global peace offers a marked difference from a traditional view of “war readiness” as a plan to reinforce peace.

“We have to rethink this strategy of global security. We cannot simply think of peace in terms of war. This war-ready mindset makes us live in perpetual fear. We end up being a security nation, which is not conducive to peace or national health. We need a shift in our thinking that would prioritize proactive policies of peace over a reactive path to war,” said Chatterjee. He proposes an approach called “Just Peace as Preventive Non-intervention” and has championed the concept through lectures, books, and articles all over the world.

Over the past two decades, Chatterjee has delivered ideas on this theme as an NEH fellow at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, through his role as a Faculty Affiliate at the Oxford Consortium for Human Rights at Oxford University, as a Trustee of Pax Natura Foundation in Costa Rica and Cuba, and in Japan as a Carnegie Council Fellow, among other appointments.

Chatterjee spoke on the topic in Dublin in 2017 on behalf of Ireland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Trinity International Development Initiative (TIDI) at Trinity College in a lecture series aimed at showcasing the Irish strategy toward the UN Security Council seat. He believes that it’s “high time that we shift our discourse from finding security in resorting to a just war to building security via a just peace.” It’s a nuanced perspective shift, but he explains it as, “a prospect that is far more achievable and less costly in lives and resources than the current practice of perpetual war for perpetual peace, which has taken us nowhere near peace.”

The study of peace and, more broadly, human rights and global justice, has been the focus of Chatterjee’s life’s work. As a former philosophy professor at the U and then a senior fellow at the S.J. Quinney College of Law, Chatterjee sees his work as a continuation of the formative years of his student days. Chatterjee came of age on the West Coast as an activist during the tumultuous days of the late sixties, protesting the Vietnam war and participating in peace efforts.

When asked why he has spent so much of his life focused on researching peace, Chatterjee replies, “We have to be proactive, engaged, and relevant in this world. What can be more fulfilling than finding ways to make this planet a better place for all its inhabitants? We all need to find our own ways to go about it.”

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Oxford Human Rights Consortium

By Kseniya Kniazeva

The refugee crisis may seem far from the shores of our Great Salt Lake, but six Utes are about to travel to Thessaloniki to spend ten days working with refugees, staff and stakeholders to do their part in this humanitarian disaster. The “Refugee Policy and Global Ethics” work/study visit will be preceded by lectures and meetings in Geneva with the International Committee of the Red Cross, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and the International Organization for Migrants, among others, as part of a two-and-a-half week summer seminar organized by the Oxford Consortium for Human Rights.

The International Rescue Committeee estimates that 62,000 refugees are stranded in Greece today, though more than a million refugees crossed into Europe in 2015, at the height of the refugee crisis. Many are housed in overflowing refugee camps with squalid conditions,  but one camp named Elpida, which means hope in Greek, has set out to create a new model; it is here where the summer Consortium cohort will conduct their service-learning. Funded by a chocolatier, a philanthropist and the president of the Radcliffe Foundation, the refugee camp has individual units housed within a large factory and room for up to 700 refugees. Medical care is included for everyone. Cupboards are full of real dishes, “not plastic.” The camp epitomizes the notion of “human rights” for a people who have faced anything but humane conditions for many years, and all for cost of “gas money for somebody’s private jet,” says Ahmed Khan, one of the primary donors to the project in an interview with the Huffington Post.

Professor Deen Chatterjee of the University of Utah College of Law and one of the faculty directors of the Oxford Human Rights Consortium, has been thinking about these issues for years. “The real world belongs to future generations. What are we giving them? How do we get them into [the area of human rights] and get motivated and focused to find solutions to the world’s most pressing problems?”  asks Chatterjee.

Along with Cheyney Ryan, the Director of Human Rights at Oxford, Chatterjee and faculty from Oxford and the US invite a select group of students to ask the right questions – What are human rights? How far can we extend charity or obligation? How do nations join hands? How do you peace build after conflict? – and hopefully spend their lives working towards a more just and peaceful world.

The Oxford Consortium started five years ago with students from three US universities. Now a group of 30 to 35 attending the seminars each Spring, Summer, and Fall come from Oxford and several US universities, including the Universities of Southern California, Oregon, Georgetown, and Utah, and also lately from universities in Brazil, Kenya, and India, reflecting the Consortium’s push for inclusion of voices from the Global South.

Chatterjee says diversity is important in the selection of candidates for the seminars. The University of Utah selects students from several departments, including the Honors College, the Business School, the Hinckley Institute of Politics, the Law School, along with one student from Westminster’s Honors College. In addition, the Office for Global Engagement sponsors one student and provides the institutional support for the program. Eighty-percent of the Utah attendees are women. Most, if not all, are globally and locally engaged.

While this summer’s seminar will be focused on the refugee crisis, in March, another group of 35 tackled the main reason for which so many are fleeing their homes in the first place. Titled “Human Rights, Violent Conflict and the Struggle for Peace,” the six-day program was held at Oxford University. It concluded with a workshop on bringing human rights home, with Utah students focusing on climate justice, and how poor air quality such as that in the Wasatch negatively impacts residents’ human rights.

Last fall the Consortium conducted a ten-day workshop in New York City at the Carnegie Council and the UN, and at Quinnipiac University and Yale. This fall, students will be going to Nairobi, Kenya, for a week-long seminar on the topic of human rights and sustainable development, hosted by the United States International University-Africa.

“The Human Rights Oxford Consortium is the epitome of the Ripple Effect,” Elizabeth Gamarra, a graduate student at the College of Social Work and an attendee of the March workshop, says of her experience. “It is composed of driven, leadership-oriented individuals that never seem to underestimate the pivotal importance of human rights, and the impact a small act of kindness may hold along the way. I had the opportunity to become part of a vibrant and engaging cohort that discussed the complexities of social challenges required for interdisciplinary partnerships to catalyze holistic human-rights oriented resolutions.”

The ability to study at Oxford with such “a long legacy and aura as the oldest university in the English speaking world” has an immense impact on the attending students, Chatterjee says. “They realized they were no less, perhaps even better, than the Oxford students.” Chatterjee remembers a student who came from humble beginnings, born to a drug-addicted mother and a father in prison. “She couldn’t believe she was at Oxford. She felt she can now do anything.”

Students that complete the Consortium have many doors opened to them. Past Utah participants have gone on to study at Cambridge University and at top graduate schools in the US, and one is on a Fulbright to Spain. The networking opportunities with like-minded others interested in migrant and refugee studies has lit Spring 2017 attendee Angie Portel’s inner fire. “Making these connections has re-energized me and motivated me to pursue a career as an immigration attorney, with the hopes of one day working for an international human rights organization,” says Portel, a student at the College of Law.

For Gamarra, the Consortium “provided an understanding of critical challenges still rooted in our engagement in the communities in which we reside, and those national and global communities with vulnerable populations we serve.”

“Upon my return from Oxford, I have had several actions that I’ve undertaken to “stay on the pulse” with community needs. I have also been motivated to enhance my local involvement as an advocate, ally, and agent of difference in my community and sphere of influence,” says Gamarra.

Perhaps one day, an army of Oxford Human Rights Consortium allies believing in justice beyond borders will design a global society where refugee crises don’t simply seem far away, but are a distant memory of a confused and turbulent world.