I. Love. Harry Potter.
I first started reading the books on my 11th birthday when my mom gave me the first book for my birthday. We read the first two books together, but then they got so good that I didn’t have the patience to only reading them for one hour a night together and would devour each one in turn on my own. Each new book was released in the summertime, right around my birthday and I had such fun going to the midnight book releases, especially back when midnight was waaay past my bedtime.
So of course I did my best to attend the midnight movie releases as well. My timing was just a bit off this summer, though, and I found myself on a plane to La Paz, Bolivia, during the US film release. I cannot tell you how excited I was when on day 2 of our Bolivian experience, we visited the mall and cinema and I saw that the 8th and final Harry Potter movie was showing – either dubbed in Spanish or in English with Spanish subtitles! [I really was having an amazing cultural experience too, but those blog-posts-to-be are floating around in a journal that I think I left in the US, so the rest of the story will have to wait.] My uncle Jim saw my excitement and agreed to take me to see the show a few evenings later. Then the altitude sickness hit and my dreams of seeing Harry Potter with Spanish subtitles in Bolivia (seriously, how cool would that be?!) quickly disappeared.
Fast forward six months and over Christmas break, I finally got to see the double feature of Harry Potter and Deathly Hallows, Parts 1 & 2, cuddled up on the couch with my cousins in Switzerland – I’m going to say that’s just as cool. But why the Harry Potter references you ask?
Well, some pretty intelligent minds put together a fantastic article published in Foreign Policy Magazine called Post-Conflict Potter, about the road to recovery for the magical world in a post-Voldemort society. The three authors write very insightfully about post-conflict transitional justice, reconciliation, governance reform, and international security, and it makes for a great introduction to a major facet of international peace studies in a very accessible and easy-to-relate way (for those of us raised alongside Harry Potter anyway, or anyone who’s read the books or seen the movies). Seriously, it’s well worth the read – check it out: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/08/11/post_conflict_potter.
As for me, I’ll return to my paper on the ethics of whether the international community should focus more on promoting reconciliation or accountability in post-conflict societies – and figuring out how to incorporate quotes from this article in the process.
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