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Shannon Lecture #3: The Transnational Making of United Nations Peacekeeping

Monday, October 20, 2025 from 7:00 pm to 8:30 pm

Description: Canada has played a prominent role in the military history of United Nations peacekeeping. This lecture explores how Canada has shaped the course and conduct of peacekeeping beyond its commitments to individual peacekeeping missions. By discussing how Canadian soldiers, diplomats, and scholars contributed to a transnational network of similarly minded thinkers and practitioners from around the world, this presentation ultimately shows not only that Canada’s role in peacekeeping has been broader than typically understood, but also widens our perspective on what constitutes “military history.”

Biography: Brian Drohan is Associate Professor of History at the U.S. Military Academy – West Point and a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army. He led an armored platoon in Iraq with the 1st Infantry Division, worked at the U.S. Embassy to Sri Lanka and the Maldives, and served as a strategist at Eighth Army headquarters in South Korea. He is the author of Brutality in an Age of Human Rights: Activism and Counterinsurgency at the End of the British Empire (Cornell University Press 2018) and earned his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.