graduate students

A collaboration between the conflict analysis and resolution and geography and geoinformation science is giving scholars access to data that shows the breadth and depth of violence of the Sudanese Civil War: a key component of achieving justice in cases of human rights violations and war crimes.

Taught by Chief Data Officer and Advanced Analytics Office Director Keith Noble, a new course brought students in front of US State Department officials to help broker peace in fragile states.

Keil Eggers, who is graduating from Mason with his PhD in Conflict Analysis and Resolution, has been a champion of complexity-informed conflict transformation, futures, and SenseMaker: a technology that applies a quantitative framework to narrative data submitted and interpreted by the subjects themselves. 

Isidore Nsengiyumva, only four years old at the time, was in the fields with his father and older brother in Burundi, when suddenly they heard the sound of motors and guns. Troops involved in the country’s civil war attacked their village, and rapidly, their lives were changed.

“We hid in a bush, and when the noise of the guns and fighting subsided, we went back and found our home burned,” Nsengiyumva said. “That’s when my dad decided it was no longer safe.”