May 2009, Volume 3, Issue 3.

On Saturday, April 25th, approximately 60 conflict resolution scholars, students, and practitioners descended upon the George Mason Arlington campus, as ICAR hosted the 3rd Annual Innovations in Student Leadership Conference, “Conflict Resolution and Governance Today.” The conference is the main event for OneStudentry, a grassroots assembly of students from the Washington Consortium of Universities, aimed at enhancing and promoting collaboration in the conflict resolution field. Students from Catholic University, George Washington’s Elliot School of International Affairs, American University, and St. John’s College in Annapolis joined ICAR students for an afternoon of intervention simulations, panel discussions, and an address by keynote speaker Lorelei Kelly.

ICAR M.S. student Lane Salter facilitated a workshop featuring Dr. Cobb’s Narrative...

Last summer, a subcommittee of the Point of View Academic Program Committee met following an April conference which addressed the state-of-the-art of problem solving workshops The group consisted of Rice Professor Nadim Rouhana, Professor Ron Fisher from American University, Emeritus Professor Chris Mitchell, and ICAR Masters student Monica Flores. The focus of the subcommittee’s discussion was how to press on with a “Program on Problem Solving” at Point of View—a program that would involve faculty and students from both universities and would help to revive both the understanding and practice of problem solving and dialogical interventions pioneered by scholar-practitioners such as Herb Kelman, Hal Saunders,...

ICAR’s 21st Annual Lynch Lecture was held April 9th at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., with the Honorable H. E. Jan Eliasson treating the audience to a provocative and reflective evening—challenging them to envision a new agenda for the alliance between the United States and Europe. While serving as Sweden’s Ambassador to the U.S. in 2005, Eliasson was elected President of the United Nations' 60th General Assembly. In 2006, he was assigned by the U.N. as Special Envoy to Darfur, to deal with spiraling humanitarian and security crises and to facilitate negotiations between rebel groups and the Khartoum government in Sudan. Drawing on four decades of experience in relief services and mediation, including work in...

Surrendering to Utopia
Stanford University Press
 

"Surrendering to Utopia is a critical and wide-ranging study of anthropology's contributions to human rights. Providing a unique window into the underlying political and intellectual currents that have shaped human rights in the postwar period, this ambitious work opens up new opportunities for research, analysis, and political action. At the book's core, the author describes a "well-tempered human rights"—an orientation to human rights in the twenty-first century that is shaped by a sense of humility, an appreciation for the disorienting fact of multiplicity, and...