WILLIAMS, JODY

born Oct. 9, 1950 American activist who helped found the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and oversaw its worldwide efforts to ban the production, transfer, and deployment of antipersonnel land mines and to effect their removal. In 1997 she and the campaign were named corecipients of the Nobel Prize for Peace. In 1984 Williams received a master's degree in international studies at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md. She was an advocate for influencing U.S. foreign policy in Central America for more than a decade as coordinator of the Nicaragua-Honduras Education Project and as associate director of Medical Aid to El Salvador. By 1991 these interests brought her in contact with the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, which, along with the German-based group Medico International, launched the International Campaign to Ban Landmines in 1992, naming Williams as the campaign coordinator. In five years under her leadership, the campaign expanded into a coalition of about 1,000 nongovernmental organizations from more than 50 nations. During this time Williams lectured widely on the dangers of land mines, publicizing the presence of about 110 million unexploded land mines in about 68 nations and the minefield casualty rate of some 26,000 people a year, primarily civilians. One of the highlights of her tenure came in September 1997 in Oslo, Nor., when 89 nations adopted a comprehensive treaty banning antipersonnel land mines. The treaty, which was estimated to become effective by the end of the century, called for the banning of the development, trade, and use of the weapons, as well as for the destruction of active land mines and existing stockpiles. Williams is coauthor, with Shawn Roberts, of After the Guns Fall Silent: The Enduring Legacy of Landmines (1995), which attempts to stigmatize the use of antipersonnel land mines in international warfare for their indiscriminate and continuing capacity for destruction. The book argues that because land mines are inexpensive to purchase and deploy but extremely costly to detect and defuse, they continue to terrorize civilians after the conclusion of wars by randomly causing deaths and injuries and by rendering land unusable.