Peace Studies

"Let us beat Swords into Plow Shares." Sculpture outside of UN Headquarters, New York.

Photo courtesy of Dr. Janie Leatherman.

This website is a non-profit organization established in February 1999, that aims to promote conflict transformation and peace building in the US and worldwide. The Alliance for Conflict Transformation (ACT) offers a subscriber service (for a subscription fee) for those interested in jobs, fellowships and internships. It maintains seven different listservs that both individuals seeking jobs and organizations recruiting candidate may use. ACT reports that Over 100 organizations and universities throughout the world currently use the lists to recruit advanced professional and academic candidates in the fields of conflict resolution, peace studies, development, human rights, women's rights, civil society development, microfinance and similar fields.

The Center for Applied Conflict Management (CACM) was one of the first programs of its kind in the country and has contributed to the development of the dynamic and emerging field of conflict studies. Formerly the Center for Peaceful Change, the Center was established in 1971 as a living memorial to the events of May 4, 1970, when Ohio National Guardsmen killed four and injured nine Kent State University students during a student protest against the Vietnam War. The mission of the Center for Applied Conflict Management is to conduct research, develop theory, and offer education, training, and public service in the field of conflict management. As an applied center, the Center's research, teaching, and public service activities are integrally connected. The public service projects provide a setting for research data collection, theory building, and testing. In turn, the knowledge and experience gleaned through research and service inform the teaching component of the Center. In addition to offering an undergraduate major and minor in Applied Conflict Management, the Center provides professional development workshops to the public in conflict management, mediation, and violence prevention skills.

The Conflict Research Consortium is a multidisciplinary program of research, teaching, and application, focused on finding more constructive ways of addressing difficult, long- term, and intractable conflicts, and getting that information to the people involved in these conflicts so that they can approach them in a more constructive way. A joint university-community program, the Consortium unites researchers, educators, and practitioners from many fields for the purposes of theory-building, testing, disseminating, and applying new conflict management techniques. These efforts are designed to lead to an improved understanding of conflict dynamics, along with better methods for confronting and managing intractable conflicts and reaching good decisions.

Since 1915, The Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) has carried on programs and educational projects concerned with domestic and international peace and justice, nonviolent alternatives to conflict, and the rights of conscience. A Nonviolent, Interfaith, tax exempt organization, The FOR promotes nonviolence and has members from many religious and ethnic traditions. It is a part of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR), which has affiliates in over 40 countries FOR seeks to replace violence, war, racism, and economic injustice with nonviolence, peace, and justice. We are an interfaith organization committed to active nonviolence as a transforming way of life and as a means of radical change. We educate, train, build coalitions, and engage in nonviolent and compassionate actions locally, nationally, and globally.

The Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School is an applied research center committed to improving the theory and practice of negotiation and dispute resolution. Put most simply, the Program on Negotiation is working to change the way people, organizations, and nations resolve their disputes-shifting the process from "win-lose" outcomes to "all-gain" solutions. The Program is an interuniversity consortium involving faculty, graduate students, and administrative staff from a range of disciplines and professional schools at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tufts University and other Boston-area schools. Major goals of the Program on Negotiation are to: design, implement, and evaluate better dispute resolution practices; promote collaboration and communication among practitioners and scholars; develop educational programs and materials for instruction in negotiation and dispute resolution; and increase public awareness and understanding of successful conflict resolution efforts.