Former U.S. ambassador lectures at UO on Rwanda genocide

Former United States Ambassador Joyce Leader will lecture on “The Rwandan Genocide Twenty Years Later: Its Origins, its Legacy and its Lessons for the Prevention of Genocide” at 7:30 p.m. on April 16 in the Duncan Campbell Auditorium of the UO's Knight Law Center.

The talk is free and open to the public.

Leader served 21 years in U.S. Foreign Service, with positions including U.S. Ambassador to Guinea in West Africa and deputy to the ambassador in Rwanda. She was working in Rwanda when the genocide broke out in 1994. She has since represented the U.S. in multiple attempts to build confidence among the countries of the region so that they can resolve threats to peace and human rights in Central Africa.

Leader received several State Department awards for both superior and meritorious service. She has lived in Eugene for the past five years.

Leader is this year’s visiting Savage Professor for International Relations and Peace, a program partially funded through a gift given in 1987 by Carlton Raymond Savage. Savage devoted his life to world peace and the promotion of human rights, and the endowment has become central in the UO's work in international relations, human rights, peace and conflict resolution.

UO psychology professor Paul Slovic, who is the founddr and president of Decision Research, will give an introduction at the event. Slovic serves as co-chair of the “Genocide and Mass Atrocities: Responsibility to Prevent” initiative, which examines personal and political responses to mass atrocities from the perspectives of numerous disciplines. The goal of the project is to formulate strategies that will motivate students, citizens and governments to become more responsive to issues related to the prevention of genocide and politicide.

The initiative is inspired by the work of Slovic, an internationally known scholar in the areas of decision research, psychic numbing and apathy to genocide.

- by Katherine Cook, UO Office of Public Affairs Communications intern