Natalie Unwin-Kuruneri is the Associate Director of Education at the Earth Institute. She is an alumni of Columbia University’s Master of Public Administration program. Please tell us about your background. I did my undergraduate studies in sociology and psychology at George Washington University in D.C., and have always wanted to do something that would help people… read more
Job Description The Project Assistant will provide a wide range of administrative support and some desk research assistance for the development of a program proposal on women, peace, and security to be housed at the Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict and Complexity (AC4) at Columbia University. The program aims to create educational offerings intended to… read more
Every five years, the city of Boise, Idaho, welcomes tens of thousands of visitors to the Jaialdi celebration, one of the largest Basque festivals anywhere in the world. At this year’s Jaialdi festival, held from July 28 to August 2, members of the global Basque diaspora gathered in Boise to engage with Basque history, culture,… read more
In March this year, members of Fundacion Puerta Abierta (FPA), Wilmar Valencia, Rafael Agudelo, and Jerson Marulanda, visited Washington D.C. and New York. In Washington, AC4’s Urban Violence team organized meetings between the FPA and the officials from the U.S. State Department, the World Bank, U.S. Institute for Peace, and Center for International Policy. The… read more
From The Times of Israel: How does your identity as an Israeli impact your interest in conflict resolution? As you might imagine, conflict is rather ubiquitous when you’re growing up in Israel. It’s not just the macro conflicts. We Israelis are a quarrelsome bunch, and conflict regularly emerges in many day-to-day interactions. So one of… read more
From the State of the Planet Blog: By Peter T. Coleman & Chris Straw A few years ago, our research team at Columbia was asked to work on addressing a problem of ongoing gang violence in a public school in the South Bronx. The school had been faced with recurring patterns of vandalism, theft and… read more
By Kyong Mazzaro, Saad Saad and Peter T. Coleman Throughout history, conflict resolution in the Arab world has been infused with Arab and Islamic culture, albeit shaped by differences in ethnic and political regimes and policies. However, over the last two decades, the peace-building and conflict resolution efforts undertaken by civil society and non-governmental organizations… read more
Environmental issues know no boundaries – these problems transcend national borders and the solution to them lies in a collaborative approach to the management of shared natural resources. During the 5th-17th of June, a joint group of students from the Porter School of Environmental Studies at Tel Aviv University and from Columbia University went on… read more
At the end of June, the 28th Annual International Association for Conflict Management (IACM) Conference took place in Clearwater Beach, Florida. This year’s conference brought together over 200 practitioners, university faculty and graduate students from around the world, including many from Columbia University and AC4. The conference spanned three days and focused on conflict management at individual, family,… read more
Columbia University’s Séverine Autesserre has received the Best Book of the Year award from the International Studies Association for her latest book, Peaceland. Autesserre was awarded two AC4 research grants in 2010 and 2011 to conduct ethnographic work conducted in the Congo, Burundi, and Sudan, to assess the extent to which national, professional, and organizational cultures… read more