Steve Sharra's blog

When I stumbled upon peace studies as an academic discipline in 2003, I saw the myriad questions I had developed over a life time, some of which I was unaware of, begin to gel into an intelligible, coherent pursuit. I wondered why it had taken me five years into graduate school to learn of the existence of peace studies as a discipline. And had it not been for a dissertation research fellowship, I can not tell whether I would have become acquainted with the discipline, and gone ahead to adopt it as an intellectual and activist framework.  read more »

One morning at a school near Lake Chirwa in Zomba in 1972, pupils entering their Standard 8 classroom received the shock of their lives. The portrait of then Life President Ngwazi Dr. H. Kamuzu Banda had been defaced. Someone had drawn into the portrait a pair of spectacles, and had written unsavory comments about the then president. The pupils informed the teacher, who informed the school's head. The head immediately convened a staff meeting. After lengthy deliberations, the school administration agreed on investigating to find out who did it.  read more »

The current issue of Foreign Policy magazine (May/June 2008) has a list of what the magazine says are the top 100 public intellectuals living today. The subjective nature of the definition "public intellectual", and the names of people I notice included, and left out, is enough to make me not take this exercise seriously.

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When I learned that the Reverend Dr. Jeremiah Wright was going to give a speech at Michigan State University on February 7^th, I spread the word to friends and colleagues I knew would love to hear Barack Obama's pastor speak. Of the half dozen or so people I mentioned his name to, none of them had heard of the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, let alone his spiritual connection to Barack Obama. I prepared a question to ask Rev. Dr. Wright, but as it turned out, I did not need to ask the question. Such was the freestyle nature of the luncheon with Rev. Dr.  read more »

Pan-Africa and the Third World are certainly on the move insofar as the west’s colonialist and racist perceptions of African and Third World people are concerned. However there are certain areas in which negative perceptions of African and Third World peoples are deeply entrenched, and will require specialized forms of informed and analytical critique to address them.  read more »