Spring-Summer 2015: “Local Peace-building Working Group” [LPWG]
Between 2000 and 2011 there existed at ICAR/S-CAR a continuing Working Group consisting of faculty, students and alums, focused on researching local peace communities who were trying to find a way of surviving peacefully in countries wracked by insurgencies and civil wars – places like the Philippines, Colombia, Northern Ireland or Aceh. Many graduates found topics for their thesis or dissertation by working with a cohort of researchers with similar or parallel interests, and several others published their first academic article from work that was done in the Local Zones of Peace Working Group.
[If you would like to see some of the results of this work, look up the ZoPs web site on the current S-CAR site, or look through the two books edited by Landon Hancock and myself Zones of Peace [Kumarian Press 2007] or Local Peace-building and National Peace [Continuum, 2012]. Most of the articles in both were written by then S-CAR Masters or Doctoral students .]
For the coming Spring semester, 2015 – and probably carrying on through the summer - I would like to revive this Working Group, under a new title and with a broader focus. The objective would be to produce a new set of papers to form the chapters in a third book, this time focused on the interaction [helpful or harmful] between local level peace-building efforts and national level efforts to achieve an end to insurgencies or separatist movements which, of course, always have terrible effects at both national and local levels. As Willy Torres poses the question:”What are the links, if any, between peace writ small and peace writ large ?”
There are a huge number of issues that could be looked at, either individually or jointly; “Children as “zones of peace”, “Women’s roles in local peace-building” , “Peace corridors for pastoralists”, “Peaceful borderlands and peace parks”, “Zones of Peace in Africa, or in….” Members of the WG would make themselves responsible to choosing a topic – “Religious Sites as Peace Zones”, “ Markets as ZoPs - or Targets ?“ - researching it, reporting back to the group and then drafting a chapter for the book. [Landon Hancock, now teaching at Kent State U, already has some ideas about where we might be able to publish.].
Ideally, the WG would be about 16 strong [I already have some interest from 4 faculty members] and we would plan to meet for an hour once every 2 weeks, probably on Wednesdays between 3.00 and 4.00. If anyone would be interested, please e-mail me [address below] and say what topic you might be interested in and why you think it would fit with the Group’s theme.
If anyone would like to become part of the group as a 1-credit Directed Reading course, I would be willing to talk this over with Julie and see what might be arranged – although I really would rather people joined out of interest rather than because they needed the credit !
Chris Mitchell [email protected]
January, 2015