November 26, 2018 at 3:03 pm

2019 Baker Peace Conference To Focus on International Cooperation and World Order Since 1945

Adm. (ret.) James Stavridis

By Dr. Ingo Trauschweizer
Associate Professor of History & Director of the Contemporary History Institute

The Contemporary History Institute hosts the 2019 Baker Peace Conference on March 28-29, 2019. Our theme this year is “Temple of Peace? International Cooperation and World Order since 1945.”

With this conference, we hope to revisit questions that exercised John Calhoun and Elizabeth Evans Baker when they helped start the Baker Peace Studies program and our annual conference in the 1980s. Why and in what ways did a “liberal order” built on the framework of the United Nations and held up by political, economic, and military alliances translate into peace for Europe and North America? Why did it not equally bring peace to much of the rest of the world? Where do we stand in the 21st century, amidst a seemingly never-ending War on Terror and with the postwar order fraying?

Our keynote speaker, Adm. (ret.) James Stavridis, served as Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, from 2009 to 2013. He recently retired as Dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and now serves as Operating Executive with the Carlyle Group.

Some of his recent books include Sea Power: The History and Geopolitics of the World’s Oceans (2017), The Accidental Admiral: A Sailor Takes Command at NATO (2014), and Command at Sea (2010, 6^th edition). Stavridis is a frequent contributor to news programs on television and radio and his commentary appears in Foreign Policy and major newspapers.

Other participants offer international perspectives and include leading scholars of the UN, transatlantic relations, the Cold War, and the changing nature of warfare as well as students and practitioners of peace-building in our time:

We are delighted that three of our recent Ph.D.s agreed to moderate the three panels: Seth Givens (historian at the U.S. Marine Corps Histories Division); Laura Seddelmeyer; and Steven Wills.

The March 28-29 program opens with a Thursday evening keynote address, followed by three discussion panels on Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.