Visting Professor George Lakey
Named Peace Educator of Year

by Stacey Kutish
11/9/10

George Lakey

For his "excellence in scholarship and dedication to peace education," the Peace and Justice Studies Association (PJSA) recently gave George Lakey its Peace Educator of the Year award. Lakey, a fellow at the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility and visting professor of peace and conflict studies, received the award at the PJSA's annual conference, a gathering of scholars and teachers in the U.S. and Canada.

Lakey, in his fifth year at Swarthmore, is continuing to develop the Global Nonviolent Action Database Project, whose case studies aim to provide information and inspiration on hundreds of real life examples of nonviolent action from around the world. The work, conducted with the help of students, is an outgrowth of his research seminar in Nonviolent Struggle and Strategy.

In addition to a teaching career that has included posts at Haverford College and the University of Pennsylvania, Lakey has led over 1500 social change workshops on five continents and has written widely about his work. As an activist, he has led campaigns for social change on neighborhood, city-wide, state, national, and international levels and is a founder of the Movement for a New Society and the Jobs with Peace Campaign. Lakey's first arrest was for a civil rights sit-in in Chester, Pa., and his first book was for the civil rights movement, A Manual for Direct Action, co-authored with fellow sociologist Martin Oppenheimer.