The Peace Corps then nation building on Peace & Justice, at 9am Wednesday, Sept. 8

Our first guest on the Peace & Justice Report this Wednesday, Sept. 8 at 9am will be Taylor Majher. Taylor is the Peace Corps regional recruiter for universities and community organizations in the greater Miami, South Florida area. She served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the agricultural sector in Guatemala from 2018—2020. While in service, she worked with community members to help plant school and home gardens and co-facilitated a fruit tree training program. Moreover, she coordinated English classes for two different communities, teaching more than 50 people to learn basic English.

Our second guest will be author and professor Phllip W. Travis. This summer Phil presented some new and original research at a conference hosted by Cardiff University and the Imperial War Museums, and he’ll talk about a community lecture he’s putting together this Fall: A Century of American Interventionism from Nicaragua to Afghanistan: Why US Occupations Fail.

Phil says “The talk will first explain a rarely remembered intervention of American marines into Nicaragua between 1927 and 1933. This early military operation can be used as a lens to then understand the approaches and failures of later Vietnam and most recently Afghanistan. It is the story of a country that possesses overwhelming military capability, but continually fails to understand the people and the place, which causes an inability to nation build and eventually a deterioration of the public will in the United States. It is a theme repeated over and over again, and a lesson not yet learned as evidenced by the final failure of the effort in Afghanistan.”