Stories
The Seville Statement Newsletter
Mayor DiLieto and the Peace Commission
Plans for
a general human theory
Facing the internal culture of war
Student Conferences at Wesleyan
Shell mobiles
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The Seville Statement on Violence
By the end of the 1980's, several currents of my teaching at Wesleyan came together and led to a couple of New England student conferences. One current was my insistence on active participation by the students in real-life projects. In my earlier years at Wesleyan this was primarily in my laboratory course, but by the end of the 80's, I was using the same approach in teaching the Psychology of War and Peace.
One of the working groups in the War and Peace course in the spring of 1989 begain working on the summit idea. They formulated a plan for the conference, including goals of the final declaration, type of participants (they decided to limit to students and exclude faculty and administrators), and a method to reach and involve the Soviet exchange students who were now in New England. They located and spoke with administrators of the US-Soviet student exchange programs in five New England colleges and five prep schools and high schools, and they obtained commitments to put it on their agenda for the fall semester.
In the course of Psychology of War and Peace in the fall of 1989, a new student group carried out the conference. The two students shown in the photo took leading roles in the administration of the conference, and one of them, Eric Dusansky, then wrote an excellent undergraduate thesis with a detailed description of the conference and its process.
Everything was accomplished in the span of a 3-day weekend. An interim drafting committee was formed on Friday evening; discussion groups on Saturday then reacted to the report from the interim drafting committee. A final drafting committee was formed on Saturday evening and produced the document to be signed on Sunday by the participants. The students held a party on Saturday night and sold t-shirts on the campus to help finance their work.
The Final Declaration written by the student participants is a remarkably clear and profound document. As I read it now, over 15 years later, it remains perfectly valid for our historical moment.
US and Soviet students line up to sign the Final Declaration of their student summit in 1989. From the left, Michael Ostrowski and Eric Dusansky.
Thanks to help from the University's publicity service, the summit got a good write-up in the main state newspaper, the Hartford Courant.
In the fall of 1992, the students of the Psychology of War and Peace ran a similar student conference in association with the Rio Summit on Environment and Development, inviting student speakers who had taken part in the summit.
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Stages
1986-1992
Fall of Soviet Empire
1992-1997
UNESCO Culture of Peace Programme