Susan Benesch is the founding director of the Dangerous Speech Project. In this role she has helped to create a set of guidelines that helps policy makers and observers deduce the conditions under which inflammatory public rhetoric crosses the line to become a catalyst for major violence. We kick off discussing what those criteria are have a broader conversation about the role of language in inspiring violence.
Susan had a career as a journalist, covering conflict in Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s and then, after experiencing some profound physical and emotional turbulence, she switched careers and became a human rights lawyer, working among other places at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.
This episode is a great exploration of the role of speech in catalyzing violence, and an interesting exploration of a career path that started in journalism and moved to law.
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