Conference April 13 examines effects of the wars in the former Yugoslavia

A conference titled "International Relations in a New Key," Saturday, April 13, at Cornell will examine whether the latter part of the Bosnian war of 1992-1995 and the entire course of the war of 1999 in Kosovo saw the beginning of fundamental changes in the nature of international relations.

The conference, which will have a morning and an afternoon session, will take place in G-08 Uris Hall beginning at 10 a.m. It is free and open to the public, but preregistration is required.

Sponsored by the Cornell Institute for European Studies and the Office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, the conference will include participation by Haris Silajdzic, former prime minister of Bosnia-Herzegovina, who is on campus as an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell (see related story); Walter Slocombe, former U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy; and Peter W. Galbraith, former U.S. ambassador to Croatia; as well as several experts on the issues from the Cornell faculty. James O'Brien, former senior adviser to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and President Clinton's special representative for Bosnia will join the discussion via phone conference at a designated time during the conference's afternoon session.

During a lecture at Cornell in the fall of 1999, Silajdzic suggested that a paradigm shift might be occurring in which an ethic of international conduct driven by humanitarian concerns had begun to replace a standard of "realpolitik" based on geopolitics, economics and technological calculations of the traditional sort. The NATO intervention in Bosnia brought Serbs swiftly to the table at Dayton, Ohio, and its bombing in Kosovo and the rest of Yugoslavia brought the removal of Slobodan Milosevic's forces and a transformation of the region's political culture.

Silajdzic thus proposed a workshop bringing together policy-making insiders and scholars to attempt to establish the degree to which, and the ways in which, the authors of these events turned away from realpolitik as a guide.

The goal of the Cornell conference, says Elvir Camdzic, the conference coordinator and special assistant to Silajdzic, is to engage a group of international relations specialists and experts in a disciplined, undistracted examination of this issue.

The morning session will begin at 10 a.m. with an opening statement from Silajdzic, followed by remarks from Slocombe and a round-table discussion. The afternoon session will begin at 2 p.m. with remarks from Galbraith, followed by a phone conference with O'Brien and round-table discussion. Both the morning and afternoon discussions will be moderated by Silajdzic and Dominic Boyer, assistant professor of anthropology at Cornell.

For the complete schedule and list of participants, visit the conference web site at http://www.einaudi.cornell.edu/europe/seminar.html. Due to the limited seating capacity in Uris Hall G-08, interested attendees are required to pre-register. To obtain further information on pre-registration, contact Camdzic via e-mail at ec47@cornell.edu or contact the Institute for European Studies at 255-7592.