Building peace, one soap opera at a time
John Marks is an original.
He is a world leading pioneer of radio and TV soap operas building peace around the world. His production, The Team, ranks among the Top 10 most popular TV programs in Kenya.
The Team is a 26-part TV serial drama about seven young Kenyan soccer players from different tribes who must overcome their mutual distrust so their team has a chance to win an international tournament.
Introduced in the wake of Kenya’s post-election violence, which killed more than 800 people in 2008, The Team dramatizes co-operative ways of handling ethnic and socio-economic divisions, and the desire of Kenyans to live together in harmony.
Cooperation, respect and tolerance are the values it promotes, and it deftly weaves a message of reconciliation into entertaining stories that have captured an audience estimated at 3.5 million Kenyans. Week after week, the multi-ethnic members of The Team confront real issues that Kenyans address daily, including poverty, corruption, rape, mob justice and drug use.
Outreach initiatives emerging from The Team include peace groups in major towns, and the organization of sports and peace events by young Kenyans. Mobile screenings throughout rural Kenya generate discussions led by trained facilitators and members of the program’s cast.
Marks, founder and president of Search for Common Ground, a non-profit organization based in Washington, D.C. that focuses on international conflict management programming, will present an illustrated public lecture sponsored by Concordia’s Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies (MIGS).
His topic? Building Peace, One Soap Opera at a Time.
When: Thursday, November 17 at 6 p.m.
Where: Alumni Auditorium (Room H110), Henry F. Hall Building (1455 De Maisonneuve Blvd. W.), Sir George Williams Campus
John Marks is also presenting a MIGS workshop on Common Ground’s Societal Approach to Violence Prevention in the Department of History’s seminar room.
When: Friday, November 18 at 10:30 a.m.
Where: Rudé Seminar Room (LB-1014), J.W. McConnell Library Building (1400 De Maisonneuve Blvd. W.), Sir George Williams Campus.
The public is welcome, admission is free of charge.
More on John Marks
Some Concordia faculty and students also know John Marks as the author of the 1974 whistle-blowing book, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. Others remember him for his exposé of the CIA’s mind-control and chemical interrogation projects in The Search for the Manchurian Candidate (1979), a study which highlighted the role in behaviour modification and mind-control experiments of Dr. Ewen Cameron at McGill University’s Allan Memorial Institute as part of the CIA’s Project MKULTRA of the 1950s.
In an earlier incarnation, John Marks served as executive assistant to U.S. Senator Clifford Case (Republican — New Jersey) and was responsible for passage of the Case-Church amendment which eventually cut off funding for the Vietnam War.
A graduate of Cornell University, Marks is a Fellow of Harvard’s Institute of Politics and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School. His numerous awards include an honorary doctorate from the United Nation’s University for Peace.
MIGS
The institute’s primary goals are peace and conflict resolution. It seeks not only to uncover the underlying reasons for genocide and other crimes against humanity, but also to put forth concrete policy recommendations to resolve conflicts before they intensify and spiral into mass atrocity crimes.
Related links:
• MIGS
• The Team site
• Search for Common Ground