UNC Greensboro|Directory|Genevieve Souillac

Genevieve Souillac

Genevieve Souillac

Ph.D., AP Professor

Peace and Conflict Studies

Email Address: g_souill@uncg.edu

Bio & Education

Dr. Geneviève Souillac’s academic career in Peace and Conflict Studies spans twenty years in universities around the globe. Souillac holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Hong Kong with a focus on the history of human rights. She earned three Master’s degrees, in History from the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, in International Relations from the University of Sydney, and in Theology and Religion from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium.

She is the author of Human Rights in Crisis (2005); The Burden of Democracy (2011); A Study in Transborder Ethics. Justice, Citizenship, Civility (2012) and of numerous articles and book chapters on the topics of global ethics and peace. These books explore the boundary between the religious and the secular, the interface of cosmopolitan norms and pluralism, and the nexus between contested emancipatory narratives, memory, and ecological crisis from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Prior to joining the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at UNCG, Dr. Souillac was an Academic Program Associate at the Peace and Governance Program at the United Nations University (UNU) in Tokyo, Japan. She directed a project on the ethics of international NGOs, which partnered the UNU with the Carnegie Council on International Ethics in New York, and was funded by the UN and the Open Society Foundation. Dr. Souillac has been a Lecturer at the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney in Australia and a tenured Associate Professor of International Studies at the International Christian University in Tokyo, Japan, where she taught in the International Rotary Peace Fellowship Master’s Program. She also has been Senior University Researcher at the Tampere Peace Research Institute (TAPRI) in Finland where she taught in the Master’s in Peace, Mediation and Conflict Research and Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, teaching in the Master’s Program in the Anthropology of Peace and Human Rights.

Courses Taught

  • PCS 205: Violence in the Modern World
  • PCS 415: Global Peacebuilding
  • PCS 606: Organizational Conflict: Diagnostic and Intervention Tools 3
  • PCS 677: International Human Rights Advocacy

Research

Research interests include:

  • Cosmopolitanism, Civic Values, and Peace Systems
  • Indigenous Rights and Knowledge
  • Theological Ethics of Nonviolence
  • The Spirituality of Reconciliation and Repair
  • Contemporary European Philosophy and Culture
  • Cultural Hermeneutics, Existentialism and Phenomenology
  • Ecology in an Age of Crisis

current projects

Geneviève Souillac is currently working on a project in the research unit of Theology and Comparative Ethics of the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KUL) on the theological sources of nonviolence. A central theme in this research is the ethical commitment to nonviolence within the ambivalent experience of secular modernity. As a recipient of a Japan Foundation Fellowship, Dr. Souillac conducted interviews of Hiroshima survivors of the atomic bomb and of peace activists in Okinawa, exploring how the constitutional renunciation of violence contributed to shaping a peaceful normative identity in post-war Japan. Stemming from this work, a current book project on Peace in the Anthropocene with Douglas P. Fry critically examines the foundational narratives and controversies about human nature that inform our local and global identities across contested civilizational narratives, and hypothesizes the human potential for sustainable human agency. Souillac and Fry are also actively exploring these issues within the Sustainable Peace Project of the Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict and Complexity (AC4) at Columbia University in New York.

books

  • Souillac, Geneviève (2012). A Study in Transborder Ethics: Justice, Citizenship, and Civility. Brussels: Peter Lang.
  • Souillac, Geneviève (2011). The Burden of Democracy: The Claims of Cultures, Public Culture, and Democratic Memory. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield/Lexington Books.
  • Souillac, Geneviève (2005). Human Rights in Crisis: The Sacred and the Secular in Contemporary French Thought. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield/Lexington Books.

selected publications

  • Fry, Douglas P. & Souillac, Geneviève. In Press. “Indigenous Approaches to Peacemaking” in Roger Mac Ginty and Anthony Wanis-St. John. Eds. Contemporary Peacemaking.
  • Fry, Douglas P. and Souillac, Geneviève. 2021. Peaceful societies are not utopian fantasy. They exist. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (March 22). Open Access:https://thebulletin.org/2021/03/peaceful-societies-are-not-utopian fantasy-they-exist/
  • Fry, Douglas P., Souillac, Geneviève, Liebovitch, L., Coleman, P. T., Agan, K., Nicholson-Cox, E., Mason, D., Palma Gomez, F., and Strauss, S. 2021. Societies within Peace Systems Avoid War and Build Positive Intergroup Relationships. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. Online, Open Access, January 18. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-00692-8.
  • Souillac, Geneviève. 2020. “Catastrophe and Conversion: Culture, Conflict and Violence in the Hermeneutics of René Girard”. In Alexandre Anselmo Guilherme and W. John Morgan. Eds. Peace and War: Neglected Historical and Cultural Perspectives. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Souillac, Geneviève. 2020. “Peace as Integration in the Modern Era” in Ron Edsforth. Ed. A Cultural History of Peace. Vol. 6. New York: Bloomsbury.
  • Fry, Douglas P. and Souillac, Geneviève. 2020. “Human Nature, Peace and War” in Ron Edsforth. Ed. A Cultural History of Peace. Vol. 6. New York: Bloomsbury.
  • Fry, Douglas P. and Souillac, Geneviève (2019) CA Commentary on “Anthropology’s Science Wars: Insights from a New Survey.” Current Anthropology 60:690-691.
  • Fry, Douglas P. and Souillac, Geneviève (2017) “The Original Partnership Societies: Evolved Propensities for Equality, Prosociality, and Peace.” Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies, Vol. 4, 1, article 4. Available at: http://pubs.lib.umn.edu/ijps/vol4/iss1/4.
  • Souillac, Geneviève, and Fry, Douglas P. (2016) “Anthropology: Implications for Peace” in Oliver P. Richmond, Sandra Pogodda, and Jasmine Ramovic. Eds. The Palgrave Handbook of Disciplinary and Regional Approaches to Peace. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 69-81.
  • Fry, Douglas P. and Souillac, Geneviève (2016) “Peace by Other Means: Lessons from the Indigenous World.” Common Knowledge, Vol. 22, 1: 8-24.
  • Souillac, Geneviève (2016) “Jean Jaurès: A Man of Peace.” Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice, Vol. 28, 1: 123-131.
  • Souillac, Geneviève, and Fry, Douglas P. (2015) “A philosophical anthropology of interculturality as a vehicle for the creation of higher-level identities and peace.” Thémata: Revista de Filosofía, Vol. 52: 31-49.
  • Souillac, Geneviève (2015) “The Cosmopolitan Ideal and the Civilizing Process: Expanding Citizenship for Peace” in Sybille De La Rosa and Darren O’Byrne. Eds. The Cosmopolitan Ideal: Challenges and Opportunities, London: Rowman & Littlefield, 137-156.
  • Souillac, Geneviève (2015) “De l’éthique de l’hospitalité à la capacité démocratique” in Luc Vigneault, Blanca Navarro Pardiñas, Sophie Cloutier, and Dominic Desroches. Eds. Le temps de l’hospitalité. Réception de l’Éthique de l’hospitalité de Daniel Innerarity, Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 147-160.
  • Souillac, Geneviève, and Fry, Douglas P. (2015) “The Human Quest for Peace, Rights, and Justice: Convergence of the Traditional and the Modern” in Johanna Seibt and Jesper Garsdal. Eds. How is Global Dialogue Possible? Foundational Research on Values, Conflicts, and Intercultural Thought, Berlin: de Gruyter, 225-249.
  • Souillac, Geneviève (2014) “Violence, Mimesis, and War.” Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice, Vol. 26, 3: 342-350.
  • Souillac, Geneviève, and Fry, Douglas P. (2014) “Indigenous Lessons for Conflict Resolution” in Peter Coleman, Morton Deutsch, and Eric Marcus. Eds. The Handbook of Conflict Resolution: Theory and Practice. 3rd Ed., San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 604-622.
  • Fry, Douglas P. and Souillac, Geneviève (2013) “The relevance of nomadic forager studies to moral foundations theory: Moral education and global ethics in the twenty-first century.” Journal of Moral Education, Vol. 42, 3: 346-359.
  • Souillac, Geneviève (2009) “Peace on the Margins of Democracy. Anti-Militarism, Activism and Globalization in Okinawa.” Ritsumeikan Journal of Asia Pacific Studies, Vol. 25: 1-19.
  • Souillac, Geneviève (2008) “Contested Models of Democratic Virtues. Towards Global Norms for Universal Citizenship?” ICU Social Sciences Journal, Vol. 63: 5-20.
  • Souillac, Geneviève (2004) “From global norms to local change: Theoretical perspectives on the promotion of human rights” in Albrecht Schnabel and Shale Horowitz. Eds. Human Rights and Societies in Transition: Causes, Consequences, Responses, Tokyo: UNU Press, 77-100.
  • Souillac, Geneviève, and Bell, Daniel A. (2002) “Ethics in Action? Assessing the Activities of Human Rights and Humanitarian INGOs.” Work in Progress: A Review of Research Activities of the United Nations University, Vol. 16, 3: 19-21.
  • Souillac, Geneviève (1998) “Charisme et prophétisme féminins: Marguerite Porète et le Miroir des simples âmes.” Australian Journal of French Studies, Vol. 35, 3: 261-278.