Directors Lecture Series

Kosovo, Milosevic era are topics for Watson Institute lecture series

Author Michael Ignatieff will speak on “Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond” on Wednesday, Feb. 14, and historians Misha Glenny and Aleksa Djilas will discuss “The Downfall of Milosevic” on Wednesday, March 14. The lectures are part of the Watson Institute’s Directors Series on Contemporary International Affairs.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. - Journalists, historians and commentators will speak about the war in Kosovo and the Milosevic regime in two lectures sponsored by the Thomas J. Watson Jr. Institute for International Studies at Brown University.

These are the third and fourth talks in the Watson Institute’s Directors Lecture Series on Contemporary International Affairs, which brings leading intellectuals to campus to discuss compelling global issues. The lectures are free and open to the public.

Wednesday, Feb. 14, 7:30 p.m
“Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond”
C.V. Starr Auditorium, MacMillan Hall, 167 Thayer St.

In his latest work, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond, author and journalist Michael Ignatieff writes that “Kosovo was...a virtual war, a war in which U.S. and NATO forces did the fighting but only Kosovars and Serbs did the dying.” This, he wrote, “raises the troubling possibility that virtual wars, so much easier to fight, could become the way superpowers impose their will in the century ahead.”

Ignatieff is the Carr Visiting Professor of Human Rights Practice at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. The author, a native of Canada, is working on a 10-part history of the 20th century for the BBC and CBC radio. Ignatieff is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.

Wednesday, March 14, 7:30 p.m.
“The Downfall of the Milosevic Regime and Its Aftermath”
Salomon Center for Teaching, The College Green

Misha Glenny, former Central Europe correspondent for the BBC’s World Service, is the author of The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers, 1809-1999. In this recent work, he argues that foreign intervention in the Balkans has exacerbated the complex balance in the region. Glenny also authored The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War.

Aleksa Djilas is an internationally recognized commentator on the recent Balkan wars and a critic of Slobodan Milosevic. He is a former research associate at the Russian Research Center, now the Davis Center, at Harvard University, and the author of a noted work on Yugoslav nationalism, The Contested Country: Yugoslav Unity and Community Revolution.

Previous lecturers in the Directors Series this fall were author Frances FitzGerald, who spoke on “Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War,” and political philosopher Pierre Hassner, who spoke on “The New Dynamics of Violence: Beyond War and Totalitarianism.”