Festival of Dangerous Ideas
IQ² debate: If you want peace forget justice
2 October 2010
Without Nelson Mandela and his ethos of forgiveness, many believe that Apartheid in South Africa could not have come to an end without a bloodbath.
But was justice done for apartheid’s victims, or was ‘Reconciliation’ valued over ‘Truth’? Is a viable future more important for the Timorese than righting the wrongs of the past? Is justice even possible when one side making an agreement has all of the power?
Our panel will discuss some of the thorniest issues and most intractable conflicts throughout the world – Ireland, Timor, Cyprus, the Middle East - to draw out what peace and justice can mean in the 21st century - and which of the two we should strive to achieve.
Learn more about the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, including other events.
Speakers
For:
Eric Kaufmann is a writer, researcher and teacher of politics and sociology at the University of London. He is the author of Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century and has also written extensively about Northern Ireland.
Andrea Durbach was born and educated in South Africa where she practised as a political trial lawyer and human rights advocate. She moved to Sydney in 1989 and is now the Director of the Australian Human Rights Centre at the University of New South Wales.
Agio Pereira is Secretary of State for the Council of Ministers of Timor L’Este. He also serves as Official Spokesman for Xanana Gusmao’s government. Agio moved to Australia from Portugal where he was studying when Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975.
Against:
Stuart Rees is the Director of the Sydney Peace Foundation at the University of Sydney and an advocate for the concept of peace with justice in the Australian community. He established the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney.
Ratih Hardjono was for many years an international correspondent for Kompas, Indonesia’s leading daily, where she reported on the breakup of the Soviet Union in central Asia, the transition process and ‘Truth and Reconciliation’ in South Africa and ethnic cleansing in Burundi and in Bosnia.
Graham Blewitt, AM was the deputy chief prosecutor at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague for 10 years during which he was instrumental in the prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic. Prior to that he was the Director of the Nazi war crimes unit in Australia, where he oversaw the indictment of three Nazi war criminals.
Chair:
Dr Simon Longstaff is Executive Director of St James Ethics Centre. Simon spent five years studying and working as a member of Magdalene College, Cambridge. Having won scholarships to study at Cambridge, he read for the degrees of Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy. He was inaugural President of The Australian Association for Professional & Applied Ethics and is a Director of a number of companies. He is a Fellow of the World Economic Forum and a member of the International Advisory Committee of the Foreign Policy Association, based in New York. Simon has been Executive Director of St James Ethics Centre since shortly after it was founded.
