Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution

Bill Potapchuk is President and founder of the Community Building Institute (CBI), an organization created to strengthen the capacity of communities and organizations work collaboratively, inclusively, and equitably healthy, sustainable futures.

Peace and Conflict Resolution scholars and foreign affairs practitioners convened at the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School’s Point of View research and retreat facility in Mason Neck, Virginia issued the following appeal to the conflicting parties in Ukraine.

Helsing has taught a broad range of subjects, including conflict resolution, analysis of war and peace, negotiations, human rights and conflict, and international relations theory. Prior to joining the Carter School, he spent 23 years at the United States Institute of Peace, including as head of USIP’s Education and Training Department.

Charles Chavis, an assistant professor of conflict resolution and history, and director of African and African American studies, talks about his new book that explores the lynching of a young Black man in Salisbury, Md, and how understanding his story and the Black experience can help find the right ways to fight anti-Black violence today.

As a junior and senior at Annandale High School in Virginia, Emily Sample spent her summers as a docent at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. She was a teenager who had just lost a friend to police violence, she said, and joining the museum’s Young Ambassadors Program resonated with her.

“I was fascinated and continue to be fascinated by this highly illogical idea of genocide,” said Sample, a PhD candidate at George Mason University’s Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution.

To support Afghan refugees needing to relaunch their careers in the United States, George Mason University is inviting scholars and researchers who have recently left Afghanistan to request an academic appointment as visiting scholars.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo has not seen peace for more than three decades, but in November 2021, George Mason University’s Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution helped the country take a leap in a hopeful direction.

In the province of South Kivu, the school gathered representatives from 21 armed groups, the Congolese government, military, police, intelligence services, religious leaders, civil society groups, and peace advocates. Not only did everyone discuss a path toward peacebuilding, but they also signed a peace accord to solidify it.

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.”

A cultural immersion trip in 2008 brought Charles Davidson (PhD ’19) inside the walls of San Pedro prison in La Paz, Bolivia. What he saw there not only changed his life, he said, but ignited a spark of inspiration that led to peacebuilding efforts around the world.