Events and Video Lectures

Over the years, CENFAD has invited guest speakers to give talks on issues that relate to the study of force and diplomacy. Past speakers have included Pulitzer- and Bancroft-winning scholars such as John Lewis Gaddis, Ari Kelman, Melvyn Leffler, and Fredrik Logevall, current and former government officials including Gov. Tom Ridge, Gen. Wesley Clark, Anthony Lake, and Aaron O’Connell, and scholars working on the cutting edge of military and diplomatic history like Ali Ahmida, Alejandro Bendaña, Daniel Immerwahr, Barbara Keys, Stephen Kinzer, Adrienne Lentz-Smith, Margaret MacMillan, Jennifer Mittelstadt, Tim Naftali, Andrew Preston, Thomas Schwartz, and Mark Stoler. Many of these speakers have appeared under the auspices of the CENFAD colloquium series, which is an annual highlight at Temple.

CENFAD normally schedules colloquia once or twice a month during the semester in the Russell F. Weigley Room, Gladfelter 914. To suggest a speaker, contact CENFAD’s Thomas Davis Fellow, Marcella Aline Toledo.

Call for Abstracts: 2026 Peace in the Age of Forever Wars Symposium

Temple University
April 3–4, 2026

We invite submissions for an interdisciplinary symposium, which will bring together academics from the humanities and social sciences to present new scholarship on how to achieve and maintain peace in the age of forever wars. The hope is to reexamine old frameworks and to bring to light new ones, to understand more deeply the core questions of peace and conflict in historical and transnational context. The symposium is organized under the auspices of Temple’s Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy (CENFAD). We will cover the cost of travel and accommodations for all participants.

Questions of interest may include:

• What is the aim of forever wars? Can forever wars aim at or produce peace?
• Does understanding peace require a separate and distinct framework from war?
• Can war still be defended as a means for promoting a stable international order? For example, as the EU pledges to increase its military spending, should we predict a corresponding increase in stability?
• How does the examination of historical precedents of peace processes (both failures and successes) help us to understand what a viable peace process might look like in Israel/Gaza and in Russia/Ukraine?
• What are the conditions, if any, under which victory in war can produce peace? What are the conditions, if any, under which losing a war can produce peace?
• Why has peace acquired a bad reputation – as a weak position, as akin to appeasement, as utopian?
• What kinds of mechanisms can international law and global human rights organizations develop to promote peaceful cooperation among states?

Interested participants are warmly invited to submit abstracts of approximately 500 words and a short CV (1–2 pages) to Profs. Lee-Ann Chae at [click-for-email] and Petra Goedde at [click-for-email], by November 21, 2025. More information can be found on the Challenging War website.