Research Projects Move to POV
The Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (ICAR) is moving its research to Point of View (PoV) now that the Lynch House on the site has been reconfigured to include a small conference room, seminar rooms, and offices for the faculty and for visitors. One of the first to make the move from ICAR's Arlington offices is the "Local Zones of Peace" (ZoPs) project (photos below), which maintains its focus on local peace communities and the "Laboratories of Peace" in Colombia, and on the zones of peace on Mindanao in the Philippines.
The ZoPs Working Group has held several "brainstorming" meetings down at Point of View and it is planned to move all the research material for the project down to the Lynch House during this summer. Members of the Group are currently working on a number of new articles intended for publication in a special issue of the Journal of Conflict Studies, an issue that will include articles on women's roles in local peacebuilding, the use of peace zones along disputed national borders, and a reconsideration of the Colombian peace communities in the context of the Colombian Government's strategy of "democratic security".
The second project to make the move is the "Parents of the Field" project which has been conducted over the past five years by ICAR Emeritus Professor Christopher Mitchell and Professor Jannie Botes of the University of Baltimore. The project has involved interviewing and videotaping over 40 "pioneers" of the field of conflict and peace research in North America, Britain, and Scandinavia, who were asked to look back and talk about the origins of the field in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.
The resultant transcripts of the interviews will be available for consultation down at Point of View, while a number of the video interviews will be available for viewing on the ICAR and University of Baltimore websites, as well as on the website run as part of their "Beyond Intractability" Project by Drs. Guy and Heidi Burgess at the University of Colorado in Denver.
Lastly, preparations are currently under way at Point of View for the housing of a "PoV Archive", which will contain records of a variety of real world, historical "Track Two" peacemaking interventions carried out by scholar-practitioners active in the field in the last decades of the 20th Century. The archive already contains documents pertaining to some of the peacemaking and peacebuilding work carried out by practitioners such as James Laue, John Burton, and Christopher Mitchell, while others such as Hal Sanders and Joseph Montville have indicated that they intend to deposit their own records at PoV.
Hopefully, more practitioners will prove willing to donate their records to the Archive, which will thus prove a rich resource for research into the practice of "Track Two" peacemaking in recent decades.
Local Zones of Peace: Colombia and the Philippines
Photos, left and below, are from the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution's work with the "Local Zones of Peace" project, which is focused on local peace communities and the "Laboratories of Peace" in Colombia, and on the zones of peace on Mindanao in the Philippines