Students have established and will participate in a local chapter of the Peace Action New York State organization at Syracuse University starting this semester.

The group’s mission is to educate students on issues currently threatening world peace, which include topics such as military buildups, nuclear arsenals and unjust systems like the prison-industrial complex. This semester will be the first full semester that the Peace Action chapter at SU will be operating.

The SU chapter began to take shape in the fall of 2014, when Peace Action New York State student outreach coordinator Lindsay Monin reached out statewide in an attempt to foster more chapters of the organization. With the help of Tess Slater, an academic adviser in the political science department of the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, a chapter was soon founded and a leader was selected.

Felicia Romain, a junior political science major, assumed the role of chapter president after a round of interviews.

During her upbringing in Brooklyn, New York, Romain’s father was engaged in community activism, she said.

“My father always taught me to be informed, and not just to believe everything I saw on CNN, MSNBC and so on,” she said.

By her estimation, Romain said she currently presides over roughly 20–30 members, eight of which work closely with her on the chapter’s board. Romain said she intends on making the organization much bigger. The goal, she said, is to establish a committed, involved base comparable to that to a group like the New York Public Interest Research Group.

The club plans to host several forums to address such issues over the next year, the first of which is expected to take place on March 26.

The March forum, which will tackle the subjects of mass incarceration and the prison-industrial complex, will feature a panel discussion that may feature Joseph Shanley, a Department of Public Safety officer, and Rick Trunfio, an adjunct political science professor and former Onondaga County prosecutor, Romain said.

Collaborating with other organizations is also a priority, Romain said.

The March forum is being put on in collaboration with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s SU chapter, as well as the SU chapter of the national organization Democracy Matters.

Alexis Rinck, a sophomore political science and sociology dual major and a contributing writer for The Daily Orange, has been working on preparations for the March forum on mass incarceration as both the Peace Action chapter’s chair of programming and the president of the Democracy Matters SU chapter.

“Because of things going on in the world, I feel like there will be a pushback against policies that promote violence and injustice,” said Rinck, who is also planning a Democracy Matters panel discussion of money in politics with NYPIRG and SUNY-ESF’s Green Campus Initiative on March 31.

“It’s really about educating yourself about issues,” added John Burdick, chair of the SU anthropology department and former co-chair of Peace Action Central New York. “It’s very important to develop alternatives to mainstream views on foreign and domestic policy.”

Burdick emphasized that the Peace Action organization is not a pacifist organization, though some groups with similar focuses are.

“We obviously don’t think that America shouldn’t have gone to war with the Nazis, for example,” Burdick said. “But we think that military might is overused, and non-militarized solutions need to be discussed.”

Published on February 16, 2015 at 12:01 am

Contact Thomas: tjbeckle@syr.edu