Suffering upon suffering: Panel reflects on a year of war and crisis

On Monday, the Kennedy School community, like the rest of the world, looked back on a year of war that seems to have no discernible end. The Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and the Middle East Initiative, based at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, organized a panel that reflected on the pain and moral complexity of the conflict, and its impact on the lives of those living amid war and on those affected at a distance. “What gathers us here at this moment is tremendous, almost incalculable death and human suffering—the suffering of Israelis, the suffering of Palestinians, the suffering of Lebanese ,and, increasingly, we fear, the suffering of an entire region,” said Tarek Masoud, the Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Governance and the director of MEI, and co-moderator of the panel with Mathias Risse, the Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights, Global Affairs, and Philosophy and director of the Carr Center. “And as we learned over the last year,” Masoud continued, “that suffering compounded upon suffering isn't a distant phenomenon, it is one that is felt intensely on our campus. ... This kind of gathering is the only way we know of to be part of the eventual alleviation of pain.”