Peter Wallensteen to give Wallenberg Memorial lecture

Peace scholar Peter Wallensteen will visit Gustavus Adolphus College to give a lecture on the life and work of Dag Hammarskjöld at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 26 in Wallenberg Auditorium.

Wallensteen’s lecture on Hammarskjöld continues the Raoul Wallenberg Memorial Lecture Series tradition at the College. Each year, the Peace Studies program invites a speaker to campus who has dealt with genocide, mass murder, or another world tragedy. The goal is to educate and raise awareness about international conflict, war crimes, and high-scale warfare.

Peter Wallensteen is the Dag Hammarskjöld Chair in Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University in Uppsala, Sweden. An internationally recognized peace scholar and political scientist, he is currently researching conditions for conflict prevention, trends in conflict, peace and security, targeted sanctions, and the United Nations. He has published more than 35 works on trends in conflict prevention, mediation, and resolution during the last six years alone.

Wallensteen will commemorate the 100th anniversary of Hammarskjöld’s birth. Hammarskjöld entered the world stage in 1949, when he was chosen to represent Sweden as delegate to the United Nations. Four years later he was appointed as secretary-general and in the next few years became world famous for his influence in mediating international conflicts around the world. Hammarskjöld died in 1961 when his plane crashed in the Congo while on a peace-keeping mission. He was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace Prize that year.

Hammarskjöld was a passionate writer, poet, and photographer, and his writing was published in an autobiography titled Markings. Throughout the month of October, there will be an exhibit inside Christ Chapel on Hammarskjöld, the world events surrounding his life, and also the poetry, music, and art which he passionately pursued in his personal life.

The Raoul Wallenberg Memorial Lecture Series, named for a Swedish diplomat who directly opposed the Nazi Party, has been a Gustavus tradition since 1983.