A Canadian icon of humanitarianism urged Glendon students to “get your boots dirty” by working in a developing country and experiencing what life is like for 80 per cent of humanity, as he delivered Glendon's annual John W. Holmes Memorial Lecture.

Right: Dallaire speaks to a standing-room only crowd in Glendon's lecture hall

Lieutenant-General , former commander of the UN mission to Rwanda between 1993 and 1994 and now a Canadian senator, made the remarks in 91��ɫ Hall on Nov. 23, in a wide-ranging talk on the revolutionary changes that have taken place in warfare and international relations, including the tragic use of child soldiers in conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa.

In describing how the use of child soldiers came about, Dallaire talked of this being a revolutionary time where the status quo no longer exists. “For the last 20 years we’ve been into a whole new set of parameters in regards to security,” he said, “Where we used to have classic war for which we were prepared with all our technology and uniforms and structures and so on...that all disappeared and we have nothing to handle it.”

Dallaire said the problem of child soldiers began in Mozambique in the late 1980s and continues because leaders in the Western world are “risk averse” and reluctant to become involved in the complex and ambiguous situations that give rise to the conflicts in which they are used. “We haven’t necessarily applied all the laws to stop it,” he said, citing new legal concepts such as humanitarian space and sovereign nations’ responsibility to protect their citizens.

Above: Prof. Stanislav Kirchbaum, Appathurai scholarship winner Dona Dunea, Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire and Glendon Principal Kenneth McRoberts

Eighty per cent of humanity is living in inhuman conditions, he continued, and that poverty is the essence of it. “These massive abuses of human rights are creating the rage that is initiating the extremism that is bringing terrorism, and it’s going to continue to generate a security problem,” Dallaire said.

Child soldiers are a “weapons system”, he explained, putting the problem into military parlance. “What is the system to render them ineffective, to make them a liability to the adults so they won’t use them and then don’t recruit them? That is what we are working on now….  What you can do is join an NGO. Join the NGO community. Get involved in the NGOs because they are evolving massively in numbers and they are starting to coalesce more, they are starting to cover all the bases in humanity and they are, for you, an opportunity to get into the field and to see what is happening today with the state of humanity.

“I believe [they] will be far more the voice of humanity in the future,” Dallaire said. “They will influence public opinion and policy more than the nation states themselves because they’re without borders.

“There should be maybe a rite of passage, that what you require is a pair of dirty boots underneath your bed that have been soiled in the earth of a developing country. Where you went to see what happens to the 80 per cent of humanity. You bring that back here, where the 20 per cent are, and you significantly influence the policies and how we actually will be advancing humanity…. So get your boots dirty, get involved.

For more information on what is being done to stop the use of child soldiers, Dallaire recommended the website , the public mobilization campaign of the Child Soldiers Initiative, which he founded in 2010.

As is customary at the annual lecture, the winner of the Edward R. and Caroline Appathurai Scholarship in International Studies was announced. This year's award went to Glendon student Dona Dunea.

More about the John W. Holmes Memorial Lecture at Glendon

The annual John W. Holmes Memorial Lecture at Glendon honours the late John W. Holmes, a Canadian diplomat, writer, administrator and international relations professor at Glendon from 1971 to 1981. Holmes was a tireless promoter of Canada at home and abroad, in political, diplomatic and educational circles. He also participated in the founding of the United Nations and attended its first General Assembly in 1945.

Shortly after his death in 1988, a memorial fund was set up at Glendon under the leadership of Professor Albert Tucker, principal of Glendon from 1970 to 1975 and chair of the Department of History at the time, to create a series of annual lectures honouring Holmes, sponsored by Glendon's International Studies Program. It was launched in 1989 by the late Edward Appathurai, who established international studies at Glendon, Tucker and three Glendon graduates, Jim Dow (BA '75), Marshall Leslie (BA Comb. Hons. '75, MBA '80) and Martin Shadwick (BA '76, MA '78), who had attended Holmes’ course on Canadian foreign and defence policy.

By David Fuller, YFile contributing writer

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

The post Canadian icon talks about the tragedy of child soldiers appeared first on UAP 2026-30.

The annual prize, inaugurated in 1994 by the Association of Friends of the National Museum of Roman Art (Museo Nacional de Arte Romano), recognizes the contributions of individuals, academics and researchers who have expanded the knowledge of the historical, cultural and archeological heritage of the Roman world, in particular of the city of Mérida in Spain. It was presented to Edmondson at the museum's 25th-anniversary celebrations in September.

Above: Holding the award – a copy of a Roman bust of the Genius (Protective Spirit) of Augusta Emerita – are, from left, winner Jonathan Edmondson; María Angeles Albert León, Spain's director general of fine arts and cultural property; Trinidad Nogales Basarrate,  education and culture minister for Extremadura region; and a representative for Extremadura president José Antonio Monago Terraza.

Edmondson received the award for his research on the colony of Augusta Emerita and Roman Spain over the years while at 91��ɫ and for the fundamental contributions he made toward the study of Emeritan society and the structure of the former colony. He was also recognized for his “work in disseminating knowledge about the archeological heritage of Emerita across the world.”

Left: The awards ceremony inside the National Museum of Roman Art

“It’s really international recognition for my scholarship,” says Edmondson. “I’m the first English-speaking scholar who has won it.”

Through his research on Roman Spain, Edmondson has been instrumental in bringing the history, culture and archeology of the colony of Augusta Emerita in the region of Extremadura, one of 17 autonomous regions in Spain, to a world audience. When Edmondson first started studying Roman Spain, he was one of the few international scholars to do so. There had been much research on Roman Italy, France and Britain among others, but not Roman Spain, and not written in English.

Right: Jonathan Edmondson delivering his acceptance speech for the international prize, Protective Spirit of the Colony of Augusta Emerita, at the National Museum of Roman Art

It was the Roman province of Lusitania, overlapping both Portugal and Spain of which Augusta Emerita (modern Mérida) was the capital, that really piqued Edmondson’s attention as it had been mostly overlooked until then. He continues to be interested in the social, economic and cultural history of Mérida, from the military veterans who settled there and the city’s military importance to the study of family structures, marriage patterns, slavery and immigration.

“It’s a very rich city in terms of surviving evidence,” he says. "There are Roman houses, burial grounds, aqueducts and Roman roads – all of which were found while digging the foundations of the museum."

One of the things in his research that surprised him is that Mérida was a major centre for medical training. This Edmondson learned through a series of inscriptions about doctors, one of which told of a slave from another city (Olisipo, modern Lisbon) being sent to Mérida to be medically trained and another which detailed the slave’s journey back to Lisbon and his later importance there as a doctor.

Left: Rafael Mesa Hurtado, president of the Friends of the National Museum of Roman Art (and the first cousin of Toronto Raptor José Calderón) presents Jonathan Edmondson with a commemorative plaque

Edmondson has often been the first to publish Roman inscriptions from Mérida, of which there are more than 1,000 and still more being discovered. He began interpreting the inscriptions on tombstones and moved to study the style of funerary monuments and how they changed over time. He is now researching indigenous religion in Lusitania and the extent to which the Roman authorities allowed indigenous divinities to be worshipped.

Edmondson is the editor of Augustus (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), co-editor of Roman Dress and the Fabrics of Roman Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2008) and Flavius Jospephus and Flavian Rome (Oxford University Press, 2005), among others. His monograph, Granite Funerary Stelae from Augusta Emerita, appeared in 2007. In 2002, he was elected a corresponding member of the Real Academia de la Historia of Spain and, in 2009, was made a fellow of the Royal Historical Society in London.

As winner of the Protective Spirit prize, Edmondson is in good company. Previous winners have included Walter Trillmich, former director of the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin; José María Blázquez, former professor of Roman archaeology at the Complutense University of Madrid; Pierre Gros, former professor of Roman archaeology at the Université d'Aix-en-Provence; and Rafael Moneo Vallés, a world-renowned architect who designed the National Museum of Roman Art.

By Sandra McLean, YFile writer

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

The post Professor Jonathan Edmondson receives international prize from Spanish Museum appeared first on UAP 2026-30.