On Monday 21 October Rotaract had a special guest speaker in The Local:
Laura Schuurmans gave a talk on the unresolved Kashmir dispute where three nuclear giants have laid their claims: India, Pakistan, and China. After more than six decades, the Kashmir conflict has yet to be resolved, and which has become, in the words of former US President Bill Clinton, ‘the most dangerous place on earth’.
Laura Schuurmans recently returned from Kashmir and the de facto border that divides India and Pakistan, after conducting on-site research for three months. She has been actively working on the Kashmir dispute since 2007, with the Kashmir Solidarity Forum in Jakarta publishing her work ‘Kashmir: Paradise on Earth or a Nuclear Flashpoint’ in an exclusive full color edition in 2010. In September, 2012 she presented her research at a seminar held in the European Parliament in Brussels.
As China has started playing a more pro-active role on the world stage, Laura has been a post-graduate research fellow at Peking University where she has concentrated on China’s relations with its neighboring countries, and has contributed to books on its relations with India and Pakistan, as well as completing extensive research on Chinese-Iranian relations. In 2012 she completed her research on nuclear geopolitics and Iran’s nuclear activities, and she contributed a book chapter on “The Future of the Sino-Iran Entente”. In 2013 she wrote her final book chapter on nuclear nonproliferation in the region in which she presented three different case studies of Iran, North Korea and nuclear proliferation of India and Pakistan. Much of her published work can be found on her website: www.lauraschuurmans.com.
The talk was well attended and we were all impressed by Laura’s deep knowledge.
