Calendar of Events

Free and Open to the Public
Location: Vanderbilt University Law School (Google map of this location)

2013 Burch Memorial Lecture: A Conversation with Ian Smilie, Chairman of the Diamond Development Initiative

Ian Smillie was a founder of Inter Pares, a Canadian non-governmental organization, in 1975, and then served as executive director of CUSO from 1979-83. He has worked on projects with the Humanitarianism and War Project at Tufts University (now the Feinstein International Center) since 1997 and was an adjunct professor at Tulane University from 1998 to 2001.

As a development consultant he has worked for many Canadian, American and European organizations. His latest books are The Charity of Nations: Humanitarian Action in a Calculating World (with Larry Minear, 2005), Freedom From Want: The Remarkable Story of BRAC (2009) and Blood on the Stone: Greed, Corruption and War in the Global Diamond Trade (2010).

Smillie was a founder-participant in the 50-member ‘Kimberley Process’ (representing more than 75 governments), which has developed and is managing a global certification system to halt the traffic in ‘conflict diamonds’. He was appointed to the Order of Canada in 2003.