Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution

The ongoing war in Ukraine is unique from other conflicts, and the international community can take five actions to control the situation, said Karina Korostelina, professor and director of the Program for the Prevention of Mass Violence at George Mason University’s Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution.

Korostelina shared her perspective over Zoom:

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.

George Mason University scholars have teamed up to create an online exhibit highlighting and acknowledging the hidden history of enslaved naturalists.

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.

Arturo Barrera is receiving his bachelor’s in conflict analysis and resolution. He said Mason supported him before he was a freshman.

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.

The Taliban’s reign in Afghanistan is not feasible long-term, said Charles Davidson, executive director of the Political Leadership Academy at George Mason University’s Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution.

Can enemy groups learn to develop compassion for one another? That was the question Carter School professor Daniel Rothbart set out to answer in his research at Rondine, a two-year “laboratory for peace.” Now, the results are in.

“This is the first in-depth case study of compassion among civilians who live in conflict zones,” said Rothbart, who collaborated with George Mason University professors Thalia Goldstein, Marc Gopin and Karina Korostelina. “We hope this is a model that can help create new practices for peacebuilders to cultivate compassion.”