The Norris and Margery Bendetson EPIIC International Symposium

Preventing Genocide and Mass Atrocities
October 9-10, 2020

The international symposium is an annual public forum designed and enacted by EPIIC students. It features international practitioners, academics, public intellectuals, activists and journalists who come to Tufts each year for three days of discussion and debate in panels and small-group discussions determined by students in the EPIIC course. Students who conduct research projects also have the opportunity to present alongside the invited experts.

The 2020 EPIIC symposium, originally scheduled for March 2020, has been postponed until October 2020. The gathering will be two days of far-reaching discussions on issues critical to understanding and thinking about preventing mass atrocities, from early warning and prevention to transitional justice, from intervention to the role of the media, from prosecution to memory and memorialization.

Participants include: Simon Adams, Executive Director of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect; John Cox, Associate Professor of Global Studies and History at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, where he directs the Center for Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Studies; John Packer, Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Human Rights Research and Education Centre at the University of Ottawa; Theary Seng, Cambodian-American human-rights activist and lawyer who founded the Cambodian Center for Justice & Reconciliation and is the founding president of CIVICUS: Center for Cambodian Civic Education; and James Siguru Wahutu, Assistant Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University and an expert in the sociology of media, with an emphasis on genocide, mass violence, and ethnicity in sub-Saharan Africa.

The Boston Globe made this assessment of the EPIIC Symposium:
"At a time when the national discourse seems forever reduced to its lowest common denominator…to sound bites and slogans…EPIIC is a refreshing antidote. Far from looking to simplify the world, the symposium aims to teach students to view life in a way that respects complex human systems."

For the schedule, panelists and more information, click here

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