Madeleine Schlefer '09 Heads to Indonesia to Pursue Davis Project for Peace

With the help of a substantial grant, Madeleine Schlefer '09 will spend the summer exploring her theory that an understanding of past violence can lead to a more peaceful future.

Schlefer will go to Indonesia to meet with members of organizations working for peace, and will put together a book of their quotes and ideas. Her project is being funded by a grant from the Davis United World College Scholars program, commonly known as Davis Projects for Peace. The program provides 100 grants of $10,000 each to college students across the country in support of their grassroots peace initiatives.

An anthropology major with a concentration in peace and conflict studies, Schlefer was inspired by Visiting Assistant Professor Leslie Dwyer's class“Introduction to Peace and Conflict,” for which she served as a teaching assistant.“It was easy for people to describe and agree on definitions of violence, but peace seemed to be an obscure idea, not an actualized reality.” She wanted to explore how one community uses its history to generate concrete ideas of peace.

Schlefer has previously traveled to Indonesia through the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship (which oversees the Davis Projects application process). In 2008, she participated in Haverford's Indonesia Summer Research Program, organized by Leslie Dwyer and her husband and fellow professor Degung Santikarma. Schlefer took language and social science classes, partnered with Indonesian students for research projects, and worked for an HIV-positive women's group called Ikatan Perempuan Positive Indonesia (The Positive Women's Network of Indonesia) in Denpasar, Bali.

During this time she met student Roro Sawita, who has been collecting oral histories from survivors of Indonesia's 1965 genocide, in which an estimated one million people were killed under the regime of President Suharto. This summer, Schlefer will assist Sawita in gathering narratives, and will collaborate with two nonprofits, Syarikat and Taman 65, both of which are dedicated to educating the current generation about the events of 1965.“We'll interview people involved with these organizations to learn how their work promotes peace in the present and for the future,” says Schlefer.

Schlefer wants her book to be used throughout Indonesia and the U.S. as a starting point for discussing different meanings of peace.“It is my hope that asking people to think about peace will make this abstract idea seem more attainable,” she says.

-Brenna McBride