KROC PEACE MAGAZINE 2016
A
NEW ERA in
SOCIAL IMPACT
p. 4
TWO COWS (0R FOUR GOATS) FOR A GUN
p. 7 WHY ARE JOURNALISTS KILLED IN MEXICO? LESSONS FROM VERACRUZ
p. 10
p. 12
HOW DO WE DEFY EXTREMISM? THE KEY MAY BE IDENTITY
p. 14
FROM COOKIE-CUTTER TO BESPOKE JUSTICE
MODERN-DAY SLAVEHOLDERS
OUR TIMES: SECULAR AGE OR GOD'S CENTURY?
p. 20 THE REFUGEE CRISIS: ALUMNI RESPOND
p. 22 p. 17
COMMUNITY RESILIENCE TO VIOLENCE: INSIGHTS FROM BAGHDAD AND OTHER COMPLEX SYSTEMS
p. 46
THE PROMISE OF INTERGENERATIONAL PARTNERSHIPS IN PEACEBUILDING
HOW CAN WE DO BETTER? HOW CAN WE DO MORE?
p. 44
IN THIS ISSUE: HELP WANTED: PEACE ACTORS AND MUSICIANS (AND GRAFFITI ARTISTS AND ...)
A COMMITMENT TO SOCIAL INNOVATION
p. 42
p. 39
TWENTY YEARS p. 27 AND STILL LEARNING
PEACE EDUCATION ON THE BORDER
p. 33 p. 30 A FRESH-AIR MOMENT IN STRATEGIC PEACEBUILDING
In the span of 15 years — 2000 to 2015 — the world experienced a reduction in extreme poverty, made inroads in addressing hunger and various diseases, and improved gender equality, among other issues. The global community came a long way in achieving the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. These successes are to be celebrated; many lessons have been learned. Yet, persistent social and environmental issues remain unresolved or simply ignored. In recent years we have faced horrific humanitarian crises, most strikingly evidenced in the millions of refugees and displaced people fleeing conflict and poverty, simply trying to find a safe home. Countries like Haiti still experience the well-known combination of natural disasters, disease, extreme poverty and widespread corruption. In September 2015, the United Nations launched a new global call to action: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals, emphasizing the tetra-bottom-line achievements involving people, planet, prosperity and peace. In contrast to the previous set of development goals, the new
call recognizes in Goal 16 that achieving sustainable, systemic change is inextricably linked to building peace, justice and strong institutions. At the Kroc School, we agree that the work for peace and social justice is vital and must go on with new force and the best talent. With important successes and challenges ahead of us, the Kroc School ends 2016 fully committed to what it takes to train effective changemakers and generate knowledge on what works to build peace and justice. The United Nations’ global agenda fuels us to create a fearless academia that contributes to solving humanity’s most intractable problems. How are we committed to the overarching goal of shaping a better world? Our mission and vision — and a commitment to not only talk about peace, but practice peace — guide us. We are a school with a multidisciplinary agenda in which scholarship, teaching and practice are rooted in deep engagement with the realities of local communities. In understanding violence and conflict, as well as poverty alleviation and development, we serve humanity in all its diversity and complexity.
Our goal is to develop problem solvers through learning experiences that involve individuals and organizations implementing effective solutions in San Diego and abroad.
We believe changemaking involves focusing on the transformative power of individuals and groups everywhere. For students and graduates to solve problems of the world, they must first refine their own capability to make a difference. We want them to gain knowledge and competencies to harness the power of the collective around them through sustainable initiatives and business models. Through experiences inside and outside the classroom, Kroc School professors and students unpack the root causes of violence, injustice and oppression. Our goal is to develop problem solvers through learning experiences that involve individuals and organizations implementing effective solutions in San Diego and abroad. To do this we must constantly innovate. The Kroc School believes that humanity’s current challenges require new ways of understanding complex situations and a different kind of imagination for what is possible. We cannot be agents of change while maintaining the same behaviors, sticking to the same models and holding onto the familiar perspectives of the past. We are embracing new concepts and looking for different models, building on what is working and discarding what is not. We present the 2016 Kroc Peace Magazine to share different ways in which our commitment to the world manifests in the type of research, pedagogy and practice we follow. The articles written by the school’s faculty and staff reveal what we have been doing and discovering this past year, even when our work might have started years ago. The stories convey the broad spectrum of areas in which we lead change. The year 2017 will mark the Kroc School’s first decade of existence. We hope these pages provide you with ideas of what we have done since the foundation of the school in 2007 through the generosity of philanthropist Joan B. Kroc, and where we are headed.
Just this past year we have created several academic initiatives. At the undergraduate level, we have a minor in peacebuilding and social innovation, featuring new courses such as “War, Gender & Peacebuilding,” in which four Women PeaceMakers visiting from various countries teach about transforming communities in crisis and work alongside students to envision solutions to some of their challenges. At the graduate level we have launched a new master’s degree in social innovation for people seeking to be more effective changemakers as they operate in all kinds of organizations — from start-ups to government to business. In collaboration with the University of San Diego Law School, we now offer a dual JD-MA in peace and justice. Teaching continues to move beyond our walls and across borders. One example is the Diplomado program in cities in Mexico. Through human-centered design involving students, faculty and activists from both sides of the border, we create modules in civic engagement, activist leadership and social innovation. We invite you to go to our new website to learn more about all these programs. Each contributor to the magazine focused on a particular area of research and practice. For anyone who wants to learn about peacebuilding and social justice, these contributions reveal the depth and breadth of the field. We invite you to share the Kroc Peace Magazine and the nature of our work with others. After you read it, give this magazine to another person; forward the link to those who prefer the virtual space; or tell others about what you have learned. We seek a two-way engagement: tell us what you are doing to shape a better world. The Kroc School is always on the lookout to connect and collaborate with curious learners, changemakers, peacebuilders, storytellers and funders. Our doors are open. These are the most difficult and important problems of our time. They demand our best talent and best efforts.
PATRICIA MÁRQUEZ, PHD Dean, Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies
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2016 | p 3
TWO COWS (OR FOUR GOATS)
FOR A GUN by Topher McDougal
Contrary to one popular and resilient myth of small arms availability in the developing world, you can’t, in fact, buy an AK in exchange for a chicken. On Kenya’s black market, you can buy an M4 with launcher for 15 cows, or a .303 rifle for just 1-2 cows (or 4 goats). AK ammunition there costs 1 pint of local beer per round. In next-door Ethiopia, a WASR-10 goes for “4 torch bulbs filled with gold.” In Colombia, 1 Kalashnikov is worth 1 kilogram of cocaine, a 7.62x51mm machine gun costs 3 kilograms, and a .50 caliber machine gun 5 to 6 kilograms. Of course, most illicit small arms transactions take place in some monetary currency. Taken together, all of these prices tell a larger story. They are indicative of the global illicit supplies of small arms and ammunition commonly thought to be destabilizing factors in many areas of the world, making violent conflict potentially more likely, longer lasting and more intense. Some areas of Mexico, a quick 15-minute drive from San Diego, are a testament to this fact. And Mexico’s small arms problem pales in comparison with those of some other countries. But where are the largest illicit arms flows? How will we know if we are successful at reducing them? There is currently no good way of detecting and quantifying
FIGURE 1.
Ours is the first effort I know of to quantify illicit global flows of small arms, and it seeks to do so without relying on problematic proxies like numbers of arms seized by authorities.
international illicit arms trades. Obviously, participants have incentives to shield their activities from public scrutiny. This being the case, the seizures of illicit small arms have become the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime’s major metric for inferring volumes of illicit arms flows. But such statistics are highly flawed. Cross-country comparisons may be flawed due to divergent capacities or corruption levels, for instance. And even comparisons between time periods within one jurisdiction may not hold if regulators’ priorities change. These problems lead to a kind of reverse moral hazard: countries may actually be discouraged from intercepting illicit arms and ammunition flows for fear that the increase in official seizures will be interpreted as a real rise in illicit flows. Convinced that detecting and quantifying illicit small arms flows will lead to greater awareness and better policy, some colleagues and I — collectively
Illicit transactions of small arms by type and price, 1965-2015.
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2016 | p 5
FIGURE 2.
Small arms price indices in four countries.
founders of a research consortium called the Small Arms Data Observatory — have proposed a new method for doing so: testing econometrically for price changes on the black market. Ours is the first effort I know of to quantify illicit global flows of small arms, and it seeks to do so without relying on problematic proxies like numbers of arms seized by authorities. Our idea, in a nutshell, is a statement of simple microeconomic theory: if demand factors — homicide rates, per capita income and ongoing violent conflicts, to name a few — and licit supply can be perfectly controlled for in a given market and time period, negative and positive deviations from predicted prices will respectively indicate net illicit imports to, and net illicit exports from, that market. That is, if we can determine that prices in a particular country are improbably low, given what we know about demand and above-board supply, then we can state with some confidence that there is a second, illicit source of supply. We have now created beta versions of two pioneering datasets on illicit small arms prices. The first compiles thousands of individual transactions from dozens of countries around the world, culled from media outlets, reports and journal articles (see Figure 1). Encouragingly, we’ve found that small arms prices show great variation from place to place, and year to year. The second dataset derives from the first, but is generalized to the country level, in theory allowing for analyses that will yield net illicit arms flows. We’re not there yet. But in the meanwhile, we can tell a few interesting stories with price signals. Let’s take a few examples from our Southern neighbors. Prices for small arms rose steeply in Haiti following the re-instatement of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1994, dropped for about a decade, then spiked again in the wake of the United Nations Stabilization Mission (MINUSTAH) from 2004 onward. Colombia saw a sharp rise in prices for assault rifles following a 2004 government-initiated amnesty/buy-back program for paramilitaries and guerrillas.
Very generally, where prices are low there is likely a surfeit of weapons: in economic terms, gun supply exceeds consumer demand. But low prices can translate into lethal consequences. In Brazil, after a long period of generally high prices, costs started dropping in the mid-1990s. The county now has on average 42,000 gun homicides a year. In Mexico, there has been a gradual decline in prices over the past 25 years, likely owing to a lively traffic in arms across the U.S.-Mexico border. The country has experienced over 138,000 homicides since 2006, 95 percent of which have been committed by firearms. In 2015, the United Nations unanimously adopted a set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for the next 15 years. Target 16.4 of the SDGs states that in order to secure more peaceful and just societies by 2030, we must “significantly reduce illicit […] arms flows”. Accompanied by data on illicit arms seizures, our approach has the potential to rate the effectiveness of countries at intercepting illicit small arms trades. Even more promisingly, our research may also be able to identify the most flagrant violators of international laws such as the United Nations 2014 Arms Trade Treaty, and staunch these deadly flows.
TOPHER MCDOUGAL, PHD is an economist and associate professor at the Kroc School of Peace Studies. His forthcoming book from Oxford University Press is The Political Economy of Rural-Urban Conflict: Predation, Production, and Peripheries.
WHY ARE
JOURNALISTS KILLED
IN MEXICO? Lessons from Veracruz
by Michael Lettieri
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2016 | p 7
On July 20, 2016, Pedro Tamayo Rosas was shot to death in Tierra Blanca, in the Mexican state of Veracruz. He became the 76th journalist killed in Mexico since 2004, and the 25th killed in the state of Veracruz since 2010. Those numbers make plain a painful truth: Veracruz is the most dangerous place for journalists in a country that, over the past decade, has been the deadliest worldwide for members of the fourth estate. What is not clear is why this is happening. How do we explain the constant threats Mexico’s journalists face? At the Trans-Border Institute (TBI), I have been involved with a research project examining that question since 2015. There are two reasons why the answer to that question matters, and why the extinction of independent journalist voices represents a serious threat. First, in light of the country’s fragile democratic institutions, investigative reporters have created public accountability for acts of corruption, helping to support civil society in a push for greater transparency. Second, as Mexico continues to experience alarming levels of violence brought on by the war on drugs, reporters have borne witness to human rights violations, creating singularly important testimonial accounts of victims’ experiences.
Since 2000, only Iraq and Syria have been more deadly for journalists than Mexico, and neither country has experienced the same sustained levels of violence against reporters. Yet Mexico is not a war zone. It has a democratically elected government, functioning institutions, and is the United States’ third most important trading partner. How then do we understand the unique conditions of this violence against the media? The standard perception of attacks on journalists in Mexico is that they are targeted for writing about organized crime and that those responsible for the violence are principally cartel operatives. While this is partly true, a detailed examination of attacks on freedom of expression in Veracruz shows that the situation is not so simple and we must not assume that reducing the power of drug cartels will automatically create a freer press in Mexico. TBI’s research on the situation reveals four key insights. First, attacks on journalists are about more than the drug war. Entire books, such as Alfredo Corchado’s Midnight in Mexico, have furthered the notion that cartels are the biggest threat to journalists. Yet, of the 186 documented attacks on journalists or media outlets in Veracruz over the past decade, in only 43 of
Journalists protest the unsolved murder of Ruben Espinosa, a photojournalist who fled the state of Veracruz in 2015 after being threatened and was killed weeks later in Mexico City. Photo Credit: AVC Noticias
AT TACKS ON JOURNALISTS FROM 2010-2016 IN VER ACRUZ
… a detailed examination of attacks on freedom of expression in Veracruz shows that … we must not assume that reducing the power of drug cartels will automatically create a freer press in Mexico.
= 19 MURDERS 9 5 H A R A SSM EN TS 1 0 FIRIN GS 2 5 D ISPL ACED 6 D ISA PPEA RED 1 7 AT TACKS
VERACRUZ those cases were the reporters working the police beat or covering organized crime. Second, those who face the greatest risk are local journalists working for small, regional publications covering corruption, social issues and politics. Just as many reporters were murdered or disappeared while covering narcotrafficking or organized crime (7) as were killed while covering other issues. There were 107 recorded instances of harassment — ranging from threats to assault — for reporters covering non-crime issues compared to only 19 instances for those covering crime of any sort. Troublingly, in 63 of the cases, police or politicians were the aggressors. Those most at risk were local reporters, such as Moises Sánchez Cerezo, whose self-published newspaper contained his own tireless investigations of corruption in Medellín del Bravo. He was murdered in 2015, reportedly by municipal police officers operating on the orders of the mayor, whose malfeasance Sánchez Cerezo had exposed. Third, when digital tools such as cellphone cameras encourage a proliferation of citizen journalists, there are likely to be more conflicts. A quarter of the documented attacks (including 7 murders) involved photojournalists or those who worked with cameras. Many of those attacks were an attempt to prevent or
destroy photography, with police and military particularly resistant to attempts to document abuses. Fourth, protecting Mexico’s journalists requires more than just shielding them from organized crime. Because the biggest threat to freedom of expression comes from state actors, anonymity is the greatest risk factor for journalists: there is a much greater cost to persecuting those reporters whose names and work are internationally known. In the short term, then, we can support Mexican journalists by reading and sharing their work. To create lasting peace, we must recognize that violence against journalists is the product not simply of a proximate drug war but a longer history of authoritarianism, and that a true solution requires creating an institutional culture that tolerates critical journalism.
MICHAEL LET TIERI, PHD is a research associate at the Kroc School’s Trans-Border Institute. He received his doctorate from the University of California, San Diego, and has been a Fulbright fellow and a visiting scholar at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies. He works on a broad range of topics connected to Mexican politics and human rights, including violence against women, freedom of the press, authoritarian rule and democratization, and urban development. K RO C S C H O O L |
2016 | p 9
C
FROM
KIE-CUTTER
TO BESPOKE JUSTICE by Dustin N. Sharp
Imagine it is the year 2021. After investigating alleged U.S. war crimes associated with the decades-long war on terror, U.N. experts have recommended that American officials be put on trial in a special war crimes tribunal based on principles and procedures drawn from Islamic Sharia law. Regardless of how Americans might feel about the abuses in question, such a proposal would undoubtedly be highly controversial. The idea might strike many as culturally alien, inappropriate and illegitimate — out of sync with Anglo-American traditions of justice. This scenario may sound far-fetched, and perhaps it is. After all, no U.N. body would ever make such a recommendation to the United States. And yet, the “international community” routinely pressures governments around the world grappling with legacies of human rights abuse to implement highly Westernized forms of justice that some find just as unfamiliar and alienating as many Americans would find judgment under Islamic jurisprudence. Justice is an elusive and contested concept, and our sense of what justice requires depends a lot on our own history, culture and values. For some, justice means retribution — putting the bad guys in jail. Others, however, point to the need for restorative justice, trying to bring some harmony to the victim and the community that has been harmed. Still others point to the need for reparations and distributive justice, making sure that communities harmed by the war have a meaningful chance to continue their lives in dignity. In different cultures, times and places, these and other dimensions of justice have been comparatively emphasized or deemphasized.
All of this helps one to appreciate just how hard the idea of “global justice” truly is. Yet we live in an era where the International Criminal Court and other global institutions are tasked with meting out justice across diverse cultures and countries. Perhaps not surprisingly, their work has often generated frictions when victims and others affected by the conflict hold different views about what it means to “do justice.” After years spent working with victims of human rights abuses around the world, I have become increasingly interested in how post-conflict justice initiatives might better manage such tensions in ways that lead to stronger feelings of legitimacy and ownership on the part of local communities. My research has shown me that if differing conceptions of justice are at times a source of friction, they might also be a source of inspiration and creativity that promote broader peacebuilding aims. For example, in the late 20th century a brutal conflict in East Timor caused the deaths of as many as a quarter of the East Timorese population, leaving an acute need for post-conflict justice and reconciliation. Westernized retributive justice orchestrated by the United Nations was an important part of the response, but was largely symbolic given the large numbers of perpetrators involved. Especially in rural areas, the reality was that most victims were going to have to live side by side with those who had wronged them. Thankfully, the need for micro-level truth-telling and reconciliation was addressed in part through an innovative Community Reconciliation Process (CRP) that provided a space for perpetrators, victims and communities to have an intimate dialogue
… tensions between local and international justice will never be eliminated. But with care and respect, frictions can also serve as an entry point for a rich cross-cultural dialogue, potentially leading to creative initiatives tailored to local needs, avoiding the imposed “cookie-cutter” global justice approaches of the past.
about the violence and lingering anger and resentment. Importantly, the CRP was anchored in traditional dispute-resolution systems of lisan — involving the unfolding of a traditional large mat, chewing of betel nut, chanting and dancing — creating a process that was more accessible, familiar and culturally resonant to many involved. Of course, local justice is no panacea, and in East Timor CRP Panels incorporated members of local women’s and youth groups to balance concerns that some traditions had historically been male-dominated and discriminatory. This brought a modern, human
rights sensibility to much older rituals. In this and other ways, the cocktail of justice initiatives implemented in East Timor might best be thought of as a global-local hybrid, drawing upon some of the strengths of both global and local justice traditions. Other experiments in using traditional justice that I have investigated — including Sierra Leone, Rwanda and Uganda — serve to illustrate further both the promises and the pitfalls of traditional justice. They show that tensions between local and international justice will never be eliminated. But with care and respect, frictions can also serve as an entry point for a rich cross-cultural dialogue, potentially leading to creative initiatives tailored to local needs, avoiding the imposed “cookie-cutter” global justice approaches of the past.
DUSTIN N. SHARP, PHD, JD is an associate professor at the Kroc School of Peace Studies and teaches classes in transitional justice and international human rights. He is currently working on a book entitled Beyond the End of History: Re-Thinking Transitional Justice in the 21st Century. A lawyer by training, Dr. Sharp formerly worked for Human Rights Watch and the U.S. Department of State.
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MODERN DAY
SLAVEHOLDERS by Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick
Slavery is in the news lately. It wasn’t always. Over the last 15 years a dedicated cadre of activists have put the issue on the front page of newspapers and at the top of foreign policy agendas. This wasn’t easy. After all, most Americans believe slavery ended “ages ago,” with the end of the Civil War. The dates are similar globally: slavery pretty much ended about 150 years ago. Except it didn’t. Millions of people still live in bondage — held against their will through violence and threats of violence, with little or no pay. While half of those living in contemporary slavery are in South Asia, no one country is blameless. Contemporary slavery is a truly global phenomenon. One of the reasons slavery persists is a toxic combination of personal avarice and governmental ambivalence to the needs of the most vulnerable. There is plenty of money to be made in less-regulated pockets of the economy. A host of middlemen and middle-women profit, but so do corporations of all sizes. Workers are forced to pick cotton in Uzbekistan, make coal in Brazil, break rock in India. The thread of exploitation, profit and accountability stretch from the men with the guns all the way up to the men with the bank accounts.
I started out as a human rights activist in urban Mumbai 15 years ago. My first assignment was to go undercover in the red light district. The goal was to enter brothels and identify minors who had been trafficked into sexual exploitation. Identify them and rescue them. The idea was that simple: Seek and save the lost. My colleagues and I had detailed plans for what we would do with the perpetrators: court cases and maximum sentences. We spent far less time figuring out what to do with survivors, hoping government shelters were sufficient. In the decade that followed I continued to work in the anti-slavery movement, but two questions nagged at me. First, what does freedom look like for survivors? Advocacy groups promote unsustainable livelihood projects best fit for illiterate and isolated survivors: making bags for sympathetic Western consumers, for example. These projects give people jobs, but prompt new questions about what freedom looks like. I attacked this puzzle in a broader project exploring a human rights approach to slavery and trafficking — or to anti-slavery and anti-trafficking projects. It is not enough to provide aftercare facilities (though those are vital) or to provide alternate livelihood projects (though those are important). Sustainable emancipation — the kind that really sticks the next time
recruiters appear — requires real economic, political and cultural rights and recognition. Being “free” isn’t enough if that freedom simply pushes people out of brothels and back to the margins. Sustainable freedom comes from broader changes: new ideas and worldviews, community mobilization and solidarity, economic development and livelihoods, infrastructure growth and the like. Not easy, but freedom never is.
Being “free” isn’t enough if that freedom simply pushes people out of brothels and back to the margins.
The second question that nagged at me in those years related to perpetrators. Who were these guys? Over the past few years I’ve set out to better understand this population. Globally, the majority of enslaved individuals live in places where old forms of exploitation have never quite disappeared. India is one such place, where important cultural and religious norms about hierarchy and duty have resulted in a persistently high number of people living in dire poverty and extreme exploitation. Interviews with perpetrators in rural India suggest that they often thought they were doing their victims a favor. By acting as an employer or lender of last resort they feel they are stepping in where society, family and government had failed. They told me — in interview after interview — that it was their duty,
and that they looked after the most marginalized as if they were family. Perhaps some of them were lying, but the simple fact remains: Nobody had ever gone and talked to these folks. They saw themselves as businessmen, farmers, contractors and go-betweens. Sometimes they were well-respected in their community, or even community leaders. They certainly didn’t see themselves as criminals, traffickers or slaveholders — terms I used freely 15 years ago. I hope both of these questions lead to larger conversations about what we owe victims and how we understand perpetrators. Victims deserve a more robust kind of freedom, and perpetrators deserve justice. Figuring out what these things — freedom, justice — look like is tough work, but exactly the kind of work required if we want to understand both peace and justice.
AUSTIN CHOI-FITZPATRICK , PHD is a political sociologist and assistant professor at the Kroc School of Peace Studies. His new book, What Slaveholders Think, will be published by Columbia University Press in early 2017. His latest project explores how social movements use new technology, especially drones.
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With so much attention on this issue, and so many groups claiming to be countering violent extremism, which voices are we not hearing?
How Do We Defy Extremism?
THE KEY MAY BE IDENTITY by Jennifer Freeman
In Bosnia in 2015, a group of over 50 experts from throughout Europe stood in contemplative silence as an interfaith prayer was read by men and women who identified as Muslims, Christians and Jews. Surrounding us were nearly 8,000 gleaming white gravestones, markers of the genocide carried out in Srebrenica nearly 20 years ago to the day. The delegation at the Potacari Memorial Center — visiting as part of the Institute for Peace and Justice’s Europe Regional Dialogue on Defying Extremism — included men and women, religious leaders and those who didn’t identify with a religion, policymakers, peacebuilders and former extremists from over a dozen countries. In a small room above what had been the U.N. compound where the forcibly displaced Muslim population from the area had gathered for protection, only to find none — our diverse group listened to the stories of survivors from the organization known as Mothers of Srebrenica. In the face of threats and persistent impunity, the women still continue to search for the bodies of their loved ones. Together, we discussed what justice might look like in the face of violent extremism. The horror of terrorist attacks and the actions and ideologies of violent extremist movements have been dominating headlines around the globe. “Countering Violent Extremism,” commonly referred to in policymaking circles as CVE, is an often used concept and acronym here in the U.S. and across the world. But it
is also controversial, as there is no agreed definition of what constitutes “violent extremism,” let alone what is entailed to “counter” it. For many Americans, the ferocity of violent extremism was manifested on 9/11. Today in the Western world, extremism is often associated with ISIS, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram and the Taliban. But extremism occurs in many other settings, is not limited to Islam, and hides under the guise of numerous religions and identities. In Sri Lanka and Myanmar, Buddhist extremist groups promote intolerance and the oppression of minorities. Muslims in Mindanao in the Philippines assert that during the more than 40-year conflict there, the government has used tactics indistinguishable from those committed by groups sometimes labeled “terrorist.” And in Europe and the United States, white supremacist movements are proliferating and have been responsible for significant violence, yet are rarely considered “violent extremism” in mainstream discourse. While debate continues on the definition of violent extremism, its effects on communities and countries is unrelenting — from Aleppo to Brussels, Tel Aviv to Istanbul, Paris to Baghdad, Quetta to Garissa, Sittwe to Orlando, San Bernardino to Zamboanga. When we started our initiative on Defying Extremism, and as I’ve traveled to Bosnia, the Philippines and Kenya to explore this topic, I have been curious:
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Again and again, I have heard extremist groups appealing to youth searching for meaning.
In all those places and communities, what is behind the extremist groups’ power? What does CVE really look like in these contexts? With so much attention on this issue, and so many groups claiming to be countering violent extremism, which voices are we not hearing? These dialogues have highlighted hundreds of perspectives. While the role of economic underdevelopment, local corruption and geopolitical conflict in fueling extremism are contributing factors, over and over again, those with the most intimate experiences of extremism discuss the importance of identity. In every context, our participants and the groups that we have met with spoke of men who feel disempowered or emasculated by poverty or conflict; of young girls feeling a lack of agency in their lives; of youth seeking redemption from “sins” or feeling tarnished as survivors of sexual violence. Again and again, I have heard extremist groups appealing to youth searching for meaning. They offer agency, a sense of belonging, the promise of divine redemption, financial incentives for themselves and possibly their families, a sense of power and adventure, a call to work for something larger than themselves. These quests for meaning, power and belonging are central to our human experience. As long as policymakers, religious leaders, families and communities are not offering a compelling alternative of belonging, extremist groups will continue to find easy recruits. However, when diverse perspectives come together — such as in our regional dialogues — to understand and grapple with how to solve the human dimensions of this complex crisis, we can begin to develop societies in which extremism has no oxygen in which to survive.
JENNIFER FREEMAN, MA is senior program officer for women, peace and security at the Kroc School’s Institute for Peace and Justice and oversees the Women PeaceMakers program and the Defying Extremism initiative, while also teaching a course on “War, Gender & Peacebuilding”. She is pursuing her PhD in leadership studies at the University of San Diego.
COMMUNITY RESILIENCE TO VIOLENCE Insights from Baghdad and Other Complex Systems
by Ami C. Carpenter
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2016 | p 17 6
After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, sectarian tensions flared between Sunni and Shia Muslims. Armed groups intentionally provoked these tensions by bombing mosques important to each community and attacking people. They wanted to start a civil war. Violence spread throughout Baghdad, but it did not spread everywhere. I studied five neighborhoods where Sunni and Shia residents successfully prevented fear and anger from dividing the people who lived there. Explaining their success — their resilience to violence — lies in learning from other complex systems that anticipate disruption, heal themselves when they are breached, and reorganize so they retain their core purpose in the face of shocks. Consider the real-time monitoring and reaction of smart electrical grids, or the way T-cells lie dormant but are activated to destroy viruses. Resilience to violence is also based on real-time monitoring and reaction by neighbors and residents — people who can spring from “dormancy” into action to intervene in crisis situations. In the Baghdad neighborhoods I studied, for example, community members acted as informal mediators in arguments that began to break out during everyday conversations. This was crucial. People can come to view violence as acceptable when others systematically disrespect their social identity. That’s just what was happening as young men (many recently unemployed after the fall of Saddam Hussein) gathered on street corners to discuss the new political situation, which had reversed power from the minority Sunni to the majority Shia sects. The climate of fear and uncertainty was such that discussion turned into arguments about the legitimacy of each group’s claim to power. Disrespecting people can quickly spiral into conflict. But just as T-cells interrupt a virus, the informal mediators in certain Baghdad neighborhoods cooled tempers and talked people out of vengeful acts. These interventions tamped down the feeling of being attacked and the gut response to attack back. The end result is that they preserved connectivity between different groups in the community — and here is where the simple information protocol at the heart of the internet (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, or TCP/IP) can teach us something else about community resilience to violence. Protocols are rules for sharing information inside a system. TCP/IP was designed for maximum connectivity: iPads can talk to robots and any other software application on the network. In conflicted communities, protocols are often based on mistrust, suspicion and projection of power. “All of us operate from a system of values and beliefs that defines what we do and what we stand for,” writes gang interventionist Aquil Basheer.1 Violent actors operate from — and aim to shift others into — a system of values and beliefs that legitimizes violence and depersonalizes other human beings into faceless enemies. Actions exchanged on this basis reinforce conflict
1
Consider the real-time monitoring and reaction of smart electrical grids, or the way T-cells lie dormant but are activated to destroy viruses. Resilience to violence is also based on real-time monitoring and reaction by neighbors and residents — people who can spring from “dormancy” into action to intervene in crisis situations.
spirals by “confirming” people’s worst fears about “the other”, and shutting parts of a whole system (groups, organizations, individuals) off from each other. In resilient communities that say “no” to organized violence, protocols are based on authenticity, connectivity and resistance to aggression. Actions exchanged on this basis reinforce social trust between groups and a security-for-all approach. The spontaneous community mediations in Baghdad were based on this protocol, and so was the more formal program by local leaders to organize young men into peace and security guards for the neighborhoods. Being a peace and security guard had the same attractive features as what sectarian militia groups offered — struggle, sacrifice and comradeship — and satisfied the quest for identity, social recognition and desire for productive engagement that can shift youth trajectories away from violent groups.
Basheer, Aquil and Christina Hoag, Peace in the Hood: Working with Gang Members to End the Violence (Alameda, CA: Hunter House, 2014).
VIOLENCE
PEACEKEEPERS
This, however, is an ongoing task that requires continuous investment by individuals, community organizations and civil society groups — supported by governments. Indeed, the return of sectarian violence to Baghdad in the last few years is a sobering reminder that there is no easy formula for resilience to violence. However, there is a model for community resilience to sectarian violence, which I developed through my research in Baghdad and have used to train represen-
tatives from Kenya, Somalia, Morocco and Tunisia through the U.S. Institute of Peace’s program on Countering Violent Extremism. My latest research project assessed the phenomenon of gang-involved sex trafficking in my own city of San Diego. Youth involvement in gangs, and gang involvement in underworld economies, are a complex and pernicious form of community violence. The resilience approach to preventing individuals from joining violent groups, such as ISIS or al-Shabab or local gangs,
means supporting communities to diagnose the threats, reject the call by violent actors, actively intervene in local conflict resolution, and address youth marginalization at the local level where recruitment occurs. In the end, everyone must be working toward the same goal — preventing the slide into violence and making communities safer, healthier, more connected places.
AMI C. C ARPENTER, PHD is an associate professor of conflict resolution at the Kroc School of Peace Studies, where she teaches courses on peace and conflict analysis, and international negotiations. Her research focuses on community resilience to violence and the criminal dimensions of political conflicts.
K RO C S C H O O L |
2016 | p 19
Our Times:
by William Headley
In a research trip to Thailand in 2012, I stood on a bridge over a small river. It flowed through one of Bangkok’s best-known Hindu monasteries. Below, on the bank of the river, a small cluster of people gathered mournfully around a prone cloth-draped body. The deceased rested on a metal stand raised a few feet from the ground. Soon, a flame was lit. The cremation began. From time immemorial, thoughtful people have pondered life’s trajectory: One is born, matures, experiences delights and disappointments along the human journey, grows old and eventually dies. Then, the haunting question, “Is this all there is to existence?” Religion is the societal institution people have traditionally turned to when confronted with such imponderables. Since the 17th and 18th centuries, with the onslaught of modernity, faith traditions have seemed gradually but assuredly to be losing their position as this grand arbiter. Famed U.S. sociologist of religion Peter Berger predicted that by “the 21st century religious believers are likely to be found only in small sects, huddled together to resist a worldwide secular culture.”2
Yes, religion is changing in our time, but not the way or with the implications that many expected.
Events have not unfolded the way Berger and others expected. Granted, the West has seen the growth of secularism. But that is not necessarily an accurate barometer for the world. This leads to several important insights about religion in our time. RELIGION’S RESURGENCE There has been a seismic change worldwide in religion during the last 40 to 50 years. According to a 2012 Pew Research Center study on “The Global Religious Landscape,” religious adherence globally has jumped from 50 percent in 1900 to 64 percent in 2000: “Worldwide, more than eight-in-ten people identify with a religious group.” Much of this growth, of course, may be attributed to demographic dynamics. POLITIC AL THEOLOGY During this growth period, religion has moved from being a private devotion to also being a motivation for public and political action. Recent years have seen religious actors move from homes and houses of worship as private devotion to social expressions in media and public fora.
TECHNOLOGIC ALLY SAVVY Modernity’s modes of transport, communication and financial transfer were expected to leave believers and their faith traditions in the dustbin of history. Instead, religious actors and religiously motivated groups have used them as effective tools for self-expression, recruitment and intimidation. The sophisticated devastation of 9/11 bore grim witness to this. Religion and religious actors are deeply entwined in the militant movements of our time. Scholars are reluctant to refer to ensuing conflicts as “religious” by nature. Nor do they want to embrace a form of reductionism that brackets out religion, attributing the causes of such violence to economic deprivation, despotic leaders or disgruntled youth. It is the work of the sub-discipline of interreligious peacebuilding to bring the enlightening tools of field research, teaching and service to situations where
As a peacebuilder, it is exciting to follow these trends and movements with the hope that they will yield new ways of advancing peace.
faith in a village gacaca (an indigenous reconciliation process) deal with humanitarian violations in their community. With the changing nature of war, the role of religiously motivated women as facilitators of peace is becoming better known. We at the Kroc School learn from examples of this annually as we gather four Women PeaceMakers from all over the world to hear of their work. Unique assets of religious leaders are becoming better understood and intentionally employed. In summary, we are coming to appreciate as never before the role and functioning of religion before, during and after violent conflict.
religion is a significant factor in a violent conflict. It will do this best if it strives to become an integral part of the parent field of peacebuilding. And if, in turn, it is welcomed as a significant contributor to the search for peace. Learnings from my personal field work, students and colleagues are rich and ever deepening. A Nigerian religious sister who works with Boko Haram spoke about the motivational force the Islamic religion can be for them. She told how her faith influenced her own peacebuilding. It was in Rwanda shortly after its genocide that I experienced people of
Yes, religion is changing in our time, but not the way or with the implications that many expected. As a peacebuilder, it is exciting to follow these trends and movements with the hope that they will yield new ways of advancing peace.
2
Quoted in Toft Duffey, Monica, Daniel Philpott, Timothy Samuel Shah, God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics (New York: W. Norton and Company, 2011) 1.
WILLIAM HEADLEY, CSSp, PHD is a professor at the Kroc School of Peace Studies. He has a joint appointment as professor of the practice at the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, where he serves with the Catholic Peacebuilding Network. A sociologist, counselor and theologian by training, Headley is an active Catholic priest and member of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit.
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2016 | p 21
Nearly 5 million refugees have fled to neighboring countries because of the war in Syria. While Western media have focused on those seeking asylum in Europe, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in June 2016, more than one in five people living in Lebanon is a Syrian refugee. Surrounding countries are struggling to support everyone fleeing the devastation in Syria.
THE REFUGEE CRISIS ALUMNI RESPOND by Diana Kutlow
DE VELOPING COMMUNITIES As Director of Donor Development for ANERA, a nonprofit organization that works in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, Skylar Lawrence (MA ‘08) recently visited its field programs to see its work on providing health, education, development and emergency response. Lawrence spent time in an informal tented settlement in the Akkar region outside Tripoli, Lebanon, where multiple families sleep on the floor of tents cobbled together out of plastic sheeting from billboards, and children walk barefoot through the mud between the rows of tents. Many of the refugees are living in the poorest rural areas of Lebanon or in the already strained urban Palestinian refugee camps. Over 40,000 Palestinians have fled Syria as refugees twice over. Local communities that were once welcoming are overwhelmed, so ANERA provides services to residents in those communities as well as the new arrivals.
Lawrence realized that it is important to look at the micro-level, where local ANERA field workers see the everyday changes they are making in individual lives. Programs like Sports for Peace entice youth into education programs and integrate health and wellness through hygiene kits and a workbook on health, water and sanitation. The interactions that Lawrence had with youth, farmers and other stakeholders convinced her that the key to creating positive, lasting change is inclusive programming. Lawrence recalls hearing this mantra over and over in her classes at the Kroc School, but says that many organizations still offer top-down solutions that do not meet local needs. “Each program has to be planned and implemented in consultation with the people impacted by the project so that local institutions become more
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2016 | p 23
The interactions that Lawrence (MA’08) had with youth, farmers and other stakeholders convinced her that the key to creating positive, lasting change is inclusive programming. Lawrence recalls hearing this mantra over and over in her classes at the Kroc School, but says that many organizations still offer top-down solutions that do not meet local needs.
self-sufficient and effective,” she says. “If we were to lose funding next year, we want the local organizations to be able to continue to serve their communities.” PROVIDING EDUC ATION Elika Dadsetan (MA ‘11) is a Global Education in Emergencies Specialist. She was in Lebanon and Jordan in April 2016 with the “No Lost Generation Initiative” which provides education and psychosocial services to Syrian refugees. What stands out for her is how much more emphasis has been put on education in emergencies. “For the first time ever, governments at the London Conference in February 2016 and the World Humanitarian Summit in May 2016 said that education is a life-saving service that we need to be funding more,” she explains. “Before, people would say, ‘Well, if you don’t have food or water, what good does education do?’ But now they realize that education is not a luxury.” Dadsetan says that with Syrian youth unable to attend school, people are realizing that lack of education doesn’t only affect the youth but also the communities in which they are living. “There is a recognition that investments need to be made, but we still haven’t seen the funding,” Dadsetan admits. “More than anything, we’re seeing a shift in thinking as people realize how well educated Syrians were before the war, and that now a lot of the youth have no access to learning.” Dadsetan sees the promise of technology, but says there is a real need for assessment of the impact of computer learning. “Recognizing context is essential,” she warns, “and we need more information about how effective it can be in different situations.”
She also echoes Lawrence’s field observations, saying, “One thing that stands out is the importance of community consultations. When programs aren’t successful, it often is due to the lack of consultation, particularly in the Syrian response.” INTERPRETING FOR THE DISPL ACED Jasmine Afshar (MA ‘15) rushed to the small island of Lesvos, Greece in January of 2016 to assist with the influx of refugees landing on the shore after perilous journeys across the Aegean Sea. Afshar's parents are Afghan refugees from the Soviet invasion, so she shared the Farsi language with many of the refugees coming from Afghanistan and Iran. “As interpreters, we were able to smooth relations and build trust between various groups at the camp (Greek police, refugees, NGO workers and other volunteers), help resolve various medical issues by communicating between patients and doctors, speed up the registration process, help reconnect family members lost in the chaos of the camp, and prevent scams targeting the new arrivals,” she explained. Although much of Afshar's research in the master’s program focused on ISIS or rebuilding the broken state of Afghanistan, the people she met at the camp gave her a clearer picture of the devastating consequences of the ongoing extremism. “I met children who witnessed ISIS behead their neighbors in Kunduz, Afghanistan; a badly beaten Syrian mother whose husband forced her to
TURKEY Nearly 5 m illion refugees have fled to neighboring countries because of the war in Syria
2,753,696 LEBANON
SYRIA
1,017,433 EGYPT
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225,455
JORDAN
655,36
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flee because he was forced to join ISIS; an Iraqi father who lost his entire family except for his severely traumatized 3-year-old in a U.S. drone strike; as well as hundreds of other heart-breaking stories,” She recalled. “The scale of human suffering from war and poverty, and the full ramifications of the international community’s failure to act were clear from the people sitting in front of me telling stories over a cup of tea.” GATHERING DATA FOR HUMAN RIGHTS PROTEC TION The war in Syria began while Kevin Turner (MA ‘03) was working as the desk officer for Israel and Palestine at the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. The scope of his work had already expanded when the Arab Spring began and his small team was called on to respond to developments in Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, and particularly in Syria. His office was tasked with collecting data for the U.N. Secretary-General about casualties. Since it was difficult to station people in Syria, the High Commissioner's Office went to Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey to gather data from refugees. “One of the huge challenges was to get credible information from Syria,” Turner said. “We couldn’t be confident in the certainty of the statistics, but the Secretary-General and the Security Council needed numbers.” So
Turner connected with a California company whose statistical modeling used various databases to track figures on people killed or disappeared. “As human rights officers, we want to be change agents and make individuals’ lives better,” he says. “There are tons of cutting-edge technologies that can be game changers, and technology companies are interested in how they can contribute. So we need to be able to engage with software development companies, researchers and people in the tech world who can help.” Recently reassigned to Colombia, which has one of the largest internally displaced populations due to its decades-long civil war, Turner sees the future of human rights work being revolutionized by technology.
DIANA KUTLOW, MA is the director of development and alumni relations at the Kroc School of Peace Studies. As an alumna of the MA program, Kutlow has a personal interest as well as professional responsibility for building a strong alumni network connected to current students for internships and mentoring, to the Kroc School and its institutes for partnerships, support and guidance, and to USD for continued career development.
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2016 | p 25
NEW SCHOLARSHIP HONORS IMMIGRANT PARENT
In 2015-16, a San Diego-based travel journalist who believes that training young peacebuilders is critically important launched The Katherine Francola Peace Scholarship at the Kroc School. The scholarship is named for her mother, the daughter of Italian immigrants to the United States, and was created to support young women who face financial challenges and who have demonstrated capacity to become peacebuilders in their communities or anywhere in the world.
of formal education, Francola became a voracious reader and easily carried on conversations with college graduates, says her daughter. When the donor met Brittney Ochira, the first recipient of the Katherine Francola Peace Scholarship,Brittney said she cried with joy upon receiving the scholarship letter. “And I cried when I read your application,” the donor replied, “because I knew I’d found the perfect recipient for the inaugural Katherine Francola Peace Scholarship. Your determination to succeed reminds me so much of my mother.”
Education was a luxury Katherine Francola couldn't afford, so she went to work instead of high school in order to help put food on the family table. However, she was determined to "make something better of herself," so she went to school at night and eventually landed an office job, where she met co-workers who lived in middle-class suburbs. Challenged by her lack
To support the future generation of peacebuilders and changemakers visit peace.sandiego.edu/giving
by Necla Tschirgi
K RO C S C H O O L |
2016 | p 27
As the Cold War ended, there was great hope that the civil wars and armed conflicts raging in regions which had become the arena for East-West rivalry would finally come to an end, leading to a concerted international effort to rebuild war-torn countries as diverse as El Salvador, Nicaragua, Cambodia, Angola and Mozambique. In 1994, I was invited to a workshop in Cartigny, Switzerland to discuss whether the international community was prepared for the task based on what we knew about rebuilding countries emerging from conflict. Only a few years before, in his groundbreaking report An Agenda for Peace, then U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali had coined a new term — post-conflict peacebuilding — to describe what awaited the international community in the post-Cold War era. The Cartigny workshop, hosted by the U.N. Institute for Research in Social Development (UNRISD), brought together researchers, policymakers and practitioners from a range of institutions working in conflict-affected countries. One of the main conclusions of that meeting was that the international community lacked the knowledge or the tools to assist countries emerging from conflict along the lines of the Marshall Plan, which helped in the reconstruction of war-torn Europe. Out of the Cartigny meeting a new action research project — the War-torn Societies project — was born under the auspices of UNRISD. It is through that project that I first got involved in the field of post-conflict peacebuilding. Twenty years later, I am still learning about the difficulties of rebuilding war-torn societies with each new case: Bosnia, Kosovo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Burundi, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya … the list goes on.
Twenty years later, I am still learning about the difficulties of rebuilding war-torn societies with each new case: Bosnia, Kosovo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Burundi, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya … the list goes on.
It is true that in the last 20 years the knowledge base of peacebuilding has grown exponentially. Both the academic and practitioners’ literature on peacebuilding is constantly growing. There are many academic programs, several professional journals and numerous research institutes dedicated to peacebuilding. Similarly, there are a wide range of governmental and nongovernmental organizations actively engaged in peacebuilding, including the Peacebuilding Commission at the United Nations. As a result, policy and practice have evolved in important ways. Yet, peacebuilding remains an ongoing challenge — seriously straining our understanding, resources, tools and instruments each time the international community gets involved in a conflict-affected country. This is not surprising. We now know that peacebuilding is not a pre-packaged social engineering project, but a difficult process of sustained engagement aiming to transform the complicated dynamics that generate conflict and violence in different contexts. As other contributions in this magazine amply demonstrate, peacebuilding is the process and not simply the product of such engagement.
We now know that peacebuilding is not a pre-packaged social engineering project, but a difficult process of sustained engagement aiming to transform the complicated dynamics that generate conflict and violence in different contexts.
What this means is that there is no single peacebuilding doctrine. Rebuilding war-torn countries has to be done on the ground, in light of the unique dynamics of a given conflict and its domestic, regional and international dimensions. Each case contributes to deepen our understanding of the complex challenges of peacebuilding; but each case is unique. That is why, as a professor of practice in human security and peacebuilding, my research focuses on international experiences with peacebuilding 20 years after the Cartigny meeting. For me it is a particular source of pride that the War-torn Societies project is now a mature international organization called Interpeace which is doing peacebuilding work in over 20 countries around the world, and since 2014 I have been serving on Interpeace’s Governing Council. It is only through the sustained commitment and the hard work on the ground of organizations like Interpeace as well as the Kroc School’s Institute for Peace and Justice that we, as academics, gain a better understanding of what works, what doesn’t work and how best to tailor international peacebuilding assistance to countries emerging from conflict.
First, peacebuilding requires a political commitment to solving problems through peaceful means to disrupt protracted cycles of conflict and violence. As we have seen in Syria, military action is rarely sufficient to bring about a decisive outcome. Second, peacebuilding requires a long-term vision and sustained engagement, as reflected in the recent peace accords in Colombia which, despite being rejected at a referendum in October 2016, are unlikely to lead to a return to war. Third, process matters, and without a credible, legitimate and inclusive process, there can be little progress toward sustainable peace. This is particularly true in the case of sectarian conflicts raging throughout the Middle East in 2016. It is all too clear that the alternative to peacebuilding is not disengagement; it is deepening conflicts and greater violence which threaten human security as well as global peace. At the Kroc School we are committed to preparing the next generation of peacebuilders who understand the importance of these basic principles and gain the tools, skills and capacity to become agents of peace in contexts where conflict and violence prevail.
3
See Necla Tschirgi, “Rebuilding War-torn Societies: A Critical Review of International Approaches” in Conflict Management and Global Governance in an Age of Awakening edited by Chester Crocker, Pamela Aall and Fen Hampson (USIP, 2015).
Elsewhere I have summarized in some detail what we have learned about peacebuilding in the last 20 years.3 Let me emphasize several key lessons that are relevant to ongoing conflicts in countries such as South Sudan, Syria and Yemen as they eventually begin to transition from war to peace.
NECL A TSCHIRGI, PHD is professor of practice in human security and peacebuilding. A political scientist by training, she has gradually migrated to peace studies after having worked on development issues in different capacities and in many countries over the years. She sees her work at the Kroc School of Peace Studies as the ideal combination of her interest in social justice, poverty eradication, human rights and conflict prevention. K RO C S C H O O L |
2016 | p 29
A FRESH-AIR MOMENT IN STRATEGIC PEACEBUILDING by Dee Aker
Seated around a table in southern Nepal, minutes from a primary border crossing with India in a region known as the Terai, were Nepali women, men and youth activists from various backgrounds – leaders of multiple splinter and traditional political parties, journalists, lawyers, academics, social workers, farmers, and business people. All had played some role in an eight-month, pretty successful blockage of goods and oil from India, intended to disrupt life in the capital. This blockade had just ended; it was April 2016. The obstruction along the long border had been part of a protest undertaken in dissent to a new constitution for Nepal, put forward in September 2015. Two relatively fair and peaceful elections for constitutional assemblies, functioning under the thumb of old political leaders, had resulted in a new constitution which was seen to be flawed. All here believed the rights of ethnic and indigenous groups living in the Terai were not assured in the freshly minted Nepal federal, democratic republic. They were still fighting for them. They saw political leadership in Kathmandu as non-responsive to the demands of the communities of Madesh, Tharu and Janajatis, peoples who had called this region of Nepal home for hundreds of years. The blockade had provided some recognition of the great discontent and discrimination in the south and far west of Nepal in both the capital, Kathmandu, and the outside world. It did not bring resolution or good-will, however. It left
Our job, critical to strategic peacebuilding, is to create safe environments where survivors, victims, adversaries and sometimes perpetrators or political trailblazers can find their way through the thickets of naysayers and old habits...
bitterness and resentment. Both regions suffered visibly and emotionally. Food and fuel shortages hit each hard. Daily life was a struggle - from finding cooking oil to getting supplies needed to rebuild after the major earthquakes just a year before. Smuggling gained momentum, corruption was being reinforced with the blockade. Nearly 60 protesters, bystanders and police had been killed since the start of the dissent. While Kathmandu evoked the seven police lost, here in the Terai, in this room, people were focused on the protesters who died, and what to do next. Some had pictures of individuals they were calling to be designated “martyrs”, some had the videos on their phones of police shootings of protesters and bystanders - all had anger. As they spoke of their hardships, others seemed to breathe less, as if there was not enough air. The Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice (IPJ) had convened this interaction at the request of our Nepali partner in the Terai, Sano Paila (A Little Step). We had been mediating, training and responding to political, security and local civil society leaders in Nepal for 15 years - through the end of the monarchy and the Maoist conflict, the challenges of disarmament and reintegration of former combatants, plus the on-going, difficult post-conflict struggle for an inclusive, democratic government. For eight of the last fifteen years of the IPJ Nepal Peace Initiative, we collaborated with Sano Paila, a youth-led, non-governmental, non-partisan organization committed to diagnosing the most complex problems at grassroots level and effectively implementing solutions spearheaded by the members of the community itself. Our peacebuilding approach to hostility and conflict, as well as recovery and reconciliation, often calls for the engagement of whole communities. We trust bringing together people from every sector to listen to each other and to explore each others’
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It signaled a fresh-air moment — citizens thinking outside their old boxes, whether those boxes were made from fear or power. experiences; it opens the capacity to see and invest in a more collaborative peace going forward. New thinking and actions outside the old boxes, about how to deal with the real, fixable challenges at hand, can emerge from within such an inclusive roundtable. We do not bring answers, we create the experiences and spaces where participants find their own way forward. Our job, critical to strategic peacebuilding, is to create safe environments where survivors, victims, adversaries and sometimes perpetrators or political trailblazers can find their way through the thickets of naysayers and old habits of convention and responses they have used in the past. Thus, in this increasingly stuffy room, after hearing various experiences, roles and perceptions of the blockade’s impact, we asked the frustrated, truculent, angry, and, yes, those a little hopeful after their winter of discontent, how to go forward. Clearly, having listened to others in the community added to their thinking. They had learned more of the life and needs of the farmer, the shopkeeper, as well as the political, professional and younger protesters blocking the border. They agreed that local and international press had been awakened to their plight. Also, clearly, all had suffered during the blockade, just like those in Kathmandu. But it was their limited view of their power, not anyone’s suffering, that came to the surface when we asked about plans of action using the attention garnered by the protests. How would they move the original agenda for respect and constitutional changes forward now? It was really stifling in there!
DEE AKER, PHD is the strategic peacebuilding advisor for the Kroc School of Peace Studies. Since the inception of the Institute for Peace and Justice (IPJ), she served as the deputy director and then director, and created the IPJ’s Nepal Peacebuilding Initiative and the Women PeaceMakers and WorldLink programs.
The loudest voices were older political protest leaders who wanted only more bandhs, more protests. More air seemed sucked out of the room as people backed into their past thinking habits. Suddenly, several younger leaders in the room began advancing ideas beyond protests. ‘How about a national youth meeting on solving Nepal’s inability to think beyond Kathmandu or old party lines -- One where we come to see and know each other? We could bring young people from across the country here - where we live and they could see us as Nepali and partners for in future.’ Soon women, others joined in with new proposals. And, in that moment, people took a collective deep breath. It signaled a fresh air moment – citizens thinking outside their old boxes, whether those boxes were made from fear or power. I first felt this 30 years ago with Nicaraguan Contras and Sandinistas convened in a safe space, where they began listening to each other and discovering alternatives that they could/would explore. These are essential moments and certainly inspire me to continue my commitment to the work we do in peacebuilding. Peacebuilding is a process that gives life, often in wonderful little breaths.
* IPJ continues to do work with with the protesters and new government leadership in summer and fall, 2016.
by Everard Meade
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2016 | p 33
The Trans-Border Institute offers certificate programs in applied peace education with local partners in Mexico, in which USD students serve as facilitators. Field-based education is essential to our mission.
The point is not that we have something to teach them, but rather to create space for exploring problems and designing solutions, using the Kroc School as infrastructure for local changemakers. Our methodology is based on several key principles which have proved invaluable in the field.
AC TIVE LISTENING Active listening is a core principle in both humanistic research and conflict resolution. Peacebuilding practitioners must be able to ask informed but open-ended questions to figure out what respondents really mean, to observe and feel their emotions, and to recap what they have said in a positive, non-judgmental manner. Of course, you can’t teach active listening and then impose your own worldview on a group of local activists. For instance, when we first went to Sinaloa in 2015, we had prepared an entire curriculum focused on the drug war and the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico. When we interviewed participants in the first seminar, however, the cases they found most pressing involved domestic and gender-based violence, most of it non-lethal. Many likely believed that drug violence was an intractable problem, beyond the scope of their local organizations. But, their prioritization of domestic and gender-based violence reflected their unique vision of a peaceful and just society. We immediately revised our curriculum to reflect this focus, and have since helped to catalyze a variety of new civic campaigns and research projects as a result. CREATING A DYNAMIC AND EGALITARIAN SPACE When you’re working in an unconventional classroom, with a group ranging in age from 19 to 74, you have to bring examples and perspectives that level the playing field. If you teach human rights predominantly by way of the international treatie and case law, for example, the lawyers in the room
will instantly assume a privileged role, and others may tune out. What’s the point of teaching various methods of combatting inequality if your pedagogy reinforces it? In our case, this meant starting with empathy and its evolutionary origins. Going all the way back to Darwin and foundational debates about human nature and its relationship to violence has created fertile ground for discussing what human rights really mean. Using studies from World War II, the Mexican Revolution and the Vietnam War, we probed the experience of violence from the perspective of both victims and perpetrators. When we asked for examples from the group, rather than citing scenes from books or movies — as in a college classroom — participants gave us firsthand accounts of murders and forced disappearances involving close friends and family, both as victims and as perpetrators. The Kroc School team learned as much as our local partners in this exchange, and the experience of sharing created lasting bonds between us. THE ART OF CONVINCING For any teaching platform to stimulate the development of solutions, not just context and criticism, it must give people the chance to experiment. In our field-based seminars, for example, our Mexican partners were very sharp and well-informed analysts, but seemed to struggle when it came to developing sustainable models to convince their fellow citizens to participate through political and market structures. Getting activists, civil servants and academics to
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2016 | p 35
design business plans and marketing strategies for their ideas is a real challenge, particularly in a place like Mexico where resources are abundant and institutions have little incentive to engage a broader segment of society. In our Mexicali program, for example, a group of students designed a media campaign to raise awareness for unaccompanied immigrant children headed for the United States. When I asked them why a radio station manager would give them any air time, they argued, “We will show him the terrible suffering of the refugee children.” I countered, “But, what if the station manager doesn’t care about the children, and he’s more interested in beer and wet t-shirt contests?” The group then argued that they would get free air time through a government grant for public awareness. I challenged, “But, what happens when the grant expires or a new administration comes into office? How will you avoid the corresponding political pressure?”
Students in the MA in Peace and Justice program work directly with local activists, artists, educators, and public officials in field-based courses on both sides of the US-Mexico border.
This exchange led us to focus more on delivery mechanisms than content, working with participants to develop incentive structures that test and strengthen the effectiveness of their advocacy. Wherever the inspiration comes from, building a more peaceful and just society across the border will require the independence, dynamism and sustainability of local organizations.
E VER ARD MEADE, PHD is director of the Kroc School’s Trans-Border Institute. For the last two decades, Meade has worked on immigration policy, developing human rights curricula, and documenting and preventing violence in Mexico and the borderlands.
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Master of Arts in Peace and Justice What is more central to our lives than peace and justice? At the Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies, we prepare students to transform into action their ideas for shaping a better world. In the Master of Arts in Peace and Justice program, we merge theory and practice to prepare peacebuilders with the conceptual insight and hands-on training so that their passion for peace and justice can be transformed into visible change. Our Master of Arts in Peace and Justice program prepares students from diverse backgrounds for careers ranging from conflict resolution and mediation to human rights, environmental justice, education, development and advocacy. Our proximity to the U.S. - Mexico border offers students unparalleled opportunities to engage in pressing peace and justice issues, in real time, on both sides of the border. We invite people with the passion and the courage to advance peace and justice in communities all around the world to join us. The world can hardly wait.
sandiego.edu/peace/mapj
The Social Innovation Challenge gave me the tools to develop a meaningful proposal from just an idea to a real business. With my success through SIC, my confidence was bolstered as I realized that the world needs this type of collaborative development.
Isidore Niyongabo was born in Burundi, where he contracted meningitis at a young age and survived to begin his journey as a deaf person. Perseverance and a passion for changemaking led him to the Kroc School. In 2013 as a graduate student in the Master of Arts in Peace and Justice, Isidore submitted a proposal to the Social Innovation Challenge to develop an education system that would support the 57 million deaf people in developing countries. He won the top award and IDEAL (International Deaf Education Advocacy and Leadership) became a reality. In 2016, Isidore has become a recognized educational leader supporting deaf students all over the world.
ISIDORE NIYONGABO 2013 SIC WINNER
UPCOMING EVENTS F EB RUARY 2017 Idea Lab: Business Model Design TU E S DAY, FE BRUA RY 7, 2017 12:15 p.m. to 2:15 p.m. | KIPJ, Room AB
APRIL 2 0 1 7 Idea Lab: Financial Sustainability (for SIC Semi-Finalists) T U ESDAY, APRIL 2 5 , 2 0 1 7 12:15 p.m. to 2:15 p.m. | KIPJ, Room HI Idea Lab: SIC Final Pitch Practice (for SIC Finalists) T U ESDAY, APRIL 2 5 , 2 0 1 7 12:15 p.m. to 2:15 p.m. | KIPJ, Room HI
M ARCH 2017 Idea Lab: Speed Coaching (for SIC Semi-Finalists) TU E S DAY, M ARC H 14, 2017 12:15 p.m. to 2:15 p.m. | KIPJ, Room ABCD
www.sandiegosocialinnovation.org
MAY 2 0 1 7 SIC Final Pitch Judging T U ESDAY, MAY 2 , 2 0 1 7 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. | KIPJ, Room HI
SIC AWARDS CEREMONY | FRIDAY, MAY 5 , 2 0 1 7 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. | Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice Theatre
A COMMITMENT TO SOCIAL INNOVATION By Patricia Mรกrquez
K RO C S C H O O L |
2016 | p 39
This year more than 500 undergraduate and graduate students — from the University of San Diego (USD); University of California, San Diego; San Diego State University; California State University, San Marcos; and CETYS University in Tijuana — were involved in seminars, workshops and bootcamps to learn and practice changemaking. In the spring, 101 proposals were submitted by students expecting to gain seed funding and incubation support for their projects. At the final ceremony, Jessica Kort, an MBA student at USD, won $10,000 to support the development of her project, the Foothold Foundation — a hub to enhance collaboration among changemakers. For Kort, participating in the various workshops takes a student “to a place where you are able to make solutions a reality and try them until they are right.” This year, the Social Innovation Challenge moved beyond the border with winners Stephanie González and Emma Martínez, both undergraduate students from CETYS Tijuana. González is launching LOTI, an interactive game to promote cognitive stimulations to low-income children in Mexico, and Martínez and her team are developing Greenest, an app for providing information on recycling opportunities in areas where recycling is not a standard practice. Why a Social Innovation Challenge? As a designated Ashoka U Changemaker Campus, USD believes that it is never too early to start changing the systems of inequity and injustice around us. With this in mind, the Center for Peace and Commerce — a joint venture between the School of Business and the Kroc School — launched the Social Innovation Challenge in 2011. The challenge is proactive — a response to students’ interest in experimenting with new approaches to solve social and environmental issues. We are part of a university ecosystem where innovative changemakers confront humanity’s urgent challenges. The experiential nature of the year-long process connects student creativity with the realities of implementation. For Erik de La Cruz, participating in the Social Innovation Challenge as a student was “a huge catalyst to my growth going forward in not just social entrepreneurship but in life skills.”
A social innovation closer to home is restorative justice programs in the San Diego school system to address conflict and bullying in transformative ways for all involved; that is, in ways where everyone can learn from and help to address the nefarious consequences of bullying.
But, what is social innovation exactly? Social innovation is applying new lenses to existing social and environmental issues, while working with communities to envision more effective ways of creating sustainable change. One example is microcredit. Lending and banking are not new. Various types of loans (including grains) existed in antiquity. What was new in the 1970s — when micro-lending began — was noticing the extreme suffering experienced by poor people whose only option to obtain working capital was through loan sharks, and imagining what could be done differently to address this issue of banking for the poor. It was the capacity to re-imagine lending, to provide a service that was significantly better than what existed before to benefit individuals and communities. A social innovation closer to home is restorative justice programs in the San Diego school system to address conflict and bullying in transformative ways for all involved; that is, in ways where everyone can learn from and help to address the nefarious consequences of bullying. Given the global need to solve intractable social problems and rising humanitarian crises, and spurred by increasing student demand, this year social innovation became a central compo-
nent of the Kroc School’s academic program. We have designed a new master of arts in social innovation (MASI) for individuals who, dissatisfied with persistent problems of poverty, inequality, violence and injustice, want to practice changemaking and alter the order of things. MASI is a one-year, hands-on program to acquire the knowledge and skills for designing and implementing innovation in a wide range of sectors and organizational settings. A quest for creative solutions, combined with a deep understanding of the causes of pressing peace and justice issues — borrowed from the peacebuilding field — distinguishes the Kroc School’s MASI program from those offered in business schools, where the predominant focus is on entrepreneurship through a business lens. This is also the first year of our new undergraduate minor in peacebuilding and social innovation. From the premise that peace means more than the absence of war, the new minor allows students to examine the underlying causes of violence, oppression and injustice, while exploring innovative processes for building peace both in our own neighborhood and around the world. In short, we see social innovation as a growing part of our mission at the Kroc School.
PATRICIA MÁRQUEZ, PHD is the dean of the Kroc School of Peace Studies. She is an academic entrepreneur leading programs to develop next generations of changemakers. Since her arrival at the University of San Diego in 2007, she has founded the Center for Peace and Commerce, the Social Innovation Challenge and the Changemaker Hub. In 2015 she did a TEDx talk sharing her views on how universities can be central to world change.
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HELP WANTED:
Peace Actors (and Musicians and Graffiti Artists and ‌) by Daniel Orth
DANIEL ORTH is program officer for strategic peacebuilding at the Kroc School’s Institute for Peace and Justice. In addition to his work exploring the role of art in transforming conflict, he works to build more peaceful communities alongside local partners in Kenya and Nepal.
As the house lights dim, the curtain rises and the stage lights burst into life in a theater in San Diego. The actors emerge and lead their audience on a journey to a distant land. Sitting in the dark you laugh, you cry, you think. The performance allows you to see life through the eyes of someone whose experience had been foreign. The actors’ struggles force you to confront questions of justice or authoritarianism or your own identity. You emerge into the evening air outside the theater deep in conversation with your fellow theater-goers, determined to return home and learn more about the place portrayed on the stage, the person whose story you just inhabited, the struggle you just witnessed. The same process plays out in a mobile-theater truck in El Alto, Bolivia; a community center in an informal settlement of Nairobi, Kenya; the market of a rural town in southern Nepal; or down the road in another venue in San Diego. The arts are powerful tools for peace, often requiring no translation, no explanation. Their ability to connect the audience to the subject of a piece — through an actor on a stage, an image on a canvas, the lyrics of a singer, the movements of a dancer — speak to something universal in our human experience. The arts allow us to step into the shoes of "the other", building connection and fostering empathy. They create the space for dialogue about subjects that would be otherwise taboo. The arts push us to think differently and to confront uncomfortable questions, but they issue this challenge in a way that makes it possible to begin the conversation.
The arts allow us to step into the shoes of "the other", building connection and fostering empathy. They create the space for dialogue about subjects that would be otherwise taboo.
By strategically using the arts, peacebuilders can transform conflict at different stages of the conflict cycle. “The Art of Peace” included work from each of these phases. To raise awareness about the issue of police violence, the theater performance On the Hill told the story of the murder of Alex Nieto by police in San Francisco. Protest songs from South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement can be used to break the cycle of violence. Many people are familiar with the therapeutic arts and their role in promoting healing from conflict, a growing field in San Diego thanks to expressive arts therapists and organizations like transcenDANCE. In the aftermath of conflict, the arts can also be used to build the capacity of affected individuals and communities. The work of Street Poets, Inc., not only encourages the personal healing of incarcerated and at-risk youth, but also builds confidence, leadership skills and opportunities for meaningful economic activities.
When the Institute for Peace and Justice (IPJ) convened “The Art of Peace” symposium over four days in November 2015, this creative power was on full display through performances, exhibits and workshops. Artists, activists and peacebuilders use art to address a range of issues. When planning “The Art of Peace”, the IPJ included art and artists confronting our most challenging contemporary issues at the local, national and international levels.
In peacebuilding, the thoughtful use of the arts as a method of raising awareness, promoting personal and societal healing, bringing communities together, teaching, and building empathy is as applicable in San Diego as it is in Nairobi, Yangon or Orlando. During “The Art of Peace”, artists and peacebuilding practitioners established connections across campus, the San Diego community and beyond, a web that continues to expand and strengthen.
The Egyptian human rights activist Hend Nafea joined us for the documentary The Trials of Spring, about her story, and explored the promise and failure of the Arab Spring in what seemed like a world away, while the Black Lives Matter workshop, “Poetry and Performance for Peaceful Protest”, confronted the issue of racism here at home. The multimedia projection “Sanctuary & Sustenance” brought to life the experience of refugees trying to escape to a better life, alongside photos of the U.S.-Mexico border that reminded us that these individuals are our neighbors here in San Diego.
This September the IPJ hosted an event in collaboration with Survivors of Torture, International, which featured spoken word poetry by some of the organization’s clients as part of their journey to healing. In December art will be on display to raise awareness about human sex trafficking. In 2016, the Kroc School, in partnership with the College of Arts and Sciences, is designing a unique minor in arts and peacebuilding for USD undergraduates seeking to create social change and transform conflict using the arts.
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THE PROMISE OF INTERGENERATIONAL PARTNERSHIPS by Debbie Martínez
“When we start having intergenerational partnerships, that’s when change happens.” I heard this notion over and over at the 60th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in March 2016, and at the first-ever CSW Youth Forum days earlier. But why and how do intergenerational partnerships lead to change? How do we move from tokenism — saying we listen to the voices of youth, simply so we can claim we are being inclusive — to really doing it? How do you harness the energy and voices of the 1.8 billion young people between the ages of 10 and 24,4 and connect them with professional experts, academ-
4
United Nations Population Fund, 2015
ics, practitioners and policymakers to make change on the issues that will affect their future? In my time working with the WorldLink program at the Kroc School’s Institute for Peace and Justice, I have found that there are three important aspects of meaningful and influential intergenerational partnerships: shared knowledge, shared experiences, and exposure to and development of new networks. An example: In January 2016, more than 800 WorldLink high school students from both sides of the U.S. and Mexico border welcomed international experts, such as Katia Gomez, to the Youth Town Meeting held here at the Kroc School and the University of San Diego. Gomez’s organization,
Educate 2 Envision International, connects young people in Honduras with experienced business leaders and educators, with the goal of developing their skills in economic development and reducing extreme poverty. For the WorldLink students, learning about an organization that uses an innovative model to alleviate poverty was eye-opening and a catalyst for their own thinking. For Gomez, hearing about the personal experiences of students from a vastly different context than those she works with in Honduras had a similar effect for her: the exchange of knowledge and experiences prompted new ideas for how to carry her organization forward. At the CSW Youth Forum in New York in March 2016, UN Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka remarked to the young people gathered, “This is a defining moment. This is your agenda. It has to be written with you and by you.”
If we listen to the voices of youth with intention, collaborate with them rather than direct them, and continue to find platforms … we move beyond tokenism and begin to see how instrumental youth can be in achieving long-lasting and meaningful change.
Like the WorldLink program, the forum was providing a platform for youth to interact with more “seasoned” experts and policymakers. At the opening session of CSW, Vanessa Anyoti of World YMCA took the stage at U.N. Headquarters to read the official statement from the Youth Forum — the first time a youth representative had addressed the opening session. If we listen to the voices of youth with intention, collaborate with them rather than direct them, and continue to find platforms such as those mentioned, we move beyond tokenism and begin to see how instrumental youth can be in achieving long-lasting and meaningful change. I echo what two of our WorldLink interns — Olivia Zaller and Leily Rezvani — have said: “It should be a worldwide priority to work closely with young people on global peacebuilding initiatives.”
DEBBIE MARTÍNEZ, MA was senior program officer for youth and peacebuilding at the Kroc School’s Institute for Peace and Justice, where she directed the WorldLink program for several years. While at the IPJ she was named one of the “25 Local Emerging Leaders in Their 20s” by the San Diego Business Journal.
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2016 | p 45
HEART and HEAD
HOW CAN WE DO BETTER? by Andrew Blum
An occupational hazard of being a program evaluator is having to ask difficult questions. Why did your program do this? Why did you think it would work? What impact is it having? And the most important one of all: How could you do it better? My background is in program design, monitoring and evaluation, so these questions come naturally to me. Before coming to the University of San Diego, I spent eight years at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) in Washington, D.C., asking these questions in order to improve that institute’s ability to monitor, evaluate and learn from its peacebuilding programs. I often said my job was simple: help USIP do more of what works, and less of what doesn’t. Since July 1, when I joined the Kroc School’s Institute for Peace and Justice (IPJ) as the new executive director, I have been asking these questions of my new institute. Many people have a misconception about program evaluation: that it consists of evaluations designed to hold program managers accountable — evaluations that ask questions like: Did your program do what you
said it would? What did it achieve? Was it cost-effective? While these kinds of questions are important, in my view they are not the most important part of program evaluation. The most important part is not an end-of-program activity but a particular mindset. This mindset is defined by a commitment to continuous reflection grounded in evidence, continuous learning and continuous improvement in the programs we implement. All three of these must go together. It does no good to reflect and learn if we don’t use that learning to improve programs. And it does no good to try to improve programs if those changes are not based on reflection and learning. What this mindset demands in the field of peacebuilding is a marrying of the heart and the head. It requires that we be inspired by our Women PeaceMakers while always asking how we can support them in a more effective way. How can the program reach more places and have more impact? It means being thankful for, and humbled by, our peacebuilding partners doing the hard work of building their society every day in Nepal. But also always asking: What is the best role we can play? What is the best use of our scarce resources in Nepal? It means feeling grateful to be able to invite amazing individuals each year to share their stories with the university and the broader San Diego community as part of our Distinguished Lecture Series. And also asking what we could be doing differently. Are there new formats, new technologies, new partners we could be using to allow those stories to reach a far greater audience?
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The opportunity the institute has been given by Mrs. Joan B. Kroc is almost without parallel in the peacebuilding field. Her endowment has given us great flexibility to choose for ourselves what will have the greatest impact in the world. The only way we can truly honor her generous gift is to constantly be asking ourselves:
When I was given the privilege of becoming the executive director of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice, expectations of me were clear: grow the stature of the institute, expand the impact of the institute. To grow the stature, we need to expand the impact. To expand the impact, we will constantly be asking ourselves those hard questions. I invite everyone who cares about the Institute for Peace and Justice to keep asking me those difficult, but important questions (although maybe not early on a Monday or late on a Friday). The opportunity the institute has been given by Mrs. Joan B. Kroc is almost without parallel in the peacebuilding field. Her endowment has given us great flexibility to choose for ourselves what will have the greatest impact in the world. The only way we can truly honor her generous gift is to constantly be asking ourselves: How can we do better? How can we do more?
HOW CAN WE DO BETTER? HOW CAN WE DO MORE?
ANDRE W BLUM, PHD is executive director of the Kroc School’s Institute for Peace and Justice, and formerly the vice president for planning, learning and evaluation at the U.S. Institute of Peace. He has research and practitioner experience in a wide variety of contexts around the world, and recently led efforts to establish RESOLVE (Researching Solutions to Violent Extremism), a global network of local researchers focused on identifying effective strategies to address violent extremism.
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GRILLO-MARXUACH FAMILY Partners with the Rotary Foundation to Support International Scholarships Dr. Antonio Grillo-López, M.D., and his wife María Marxuach-Grillo believe deeply in the power of education, not only for the sake of knowledge, but also to build peace in communities all over the world. “Education, including an understanding of history, will help people to make better personal, professional and political decisions,” says Maria. “A better educated world is more likely to veer towards peace than towards war.” As the President of the La Jolla Golden Triangle Rotary Club, Dr. Antonio Grillo-López has heard several Kroc School Rotary Scholars share their experiences with war, conflict and human rights violations in their home countries, and their determination to build peace and justice. This year, in honor of Rotary’s Centennial, the couple has decided to make a $210,000 gift over four years for scholarships supporting students from Latin America and developing countries. Being born and educated in Puerto Rico, they enjoy giving back to the region and hope to encourage more Kroc School applicants from Latin America. The Grillo-Marxuach Family Scholarships will support graduate students who want to pursue a Master of Arts in Peace and Justice or the new Master of Arts in Social Innovation. The scholarships will be matched with $105,000 in funding from The Rotary Foundation, a
long-term supporter of Kroc School students. The Grillo-Marxuach family has a long history with educational institutions founded by the Religious of the Sacred Heart, making USD a natural home for their philanthropy. Dr. Grillo-López is an innovator whose research has brought hope to thousands of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma patients with the discovery of new, more effective therapies. He has been honored with numerous awards for his achievements in cancer research and continues to serve on the Board of Trustees for Hope Funds for Cancer Research. Both he and Maria Marxuach-Grillo come from families where education was seen as essential for individual development and the betterment of society, and they have passed this philosophy on to their three sons. “We look forward to meeting the Grillo-Marxuach Family Scholars,” says Maria, “and following the impact they have after graduating from the Kroc School.”
Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world. NELSON MANDELA
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Published on Nov 29, 2016
2016 University of San Diego Kroc School of Peace Magazine
Annual magazine of the University of San Diego's Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies.
2016 University of San Diego Kroc School of Peace Magazine
Published on Nov 29, 2016
Annual magazine of the University of San Diego's Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies.