The 2021 fall of Kabul to the Taliban has led both scholars and practitioners to question what is really known about international statebuilding. For almost three decades, international statebuilding has been one of the dominant forms of international engagement with conflict-affected states. Scholars have studied it extensively, although from often-dispersed disciplinary and epistemological perspectives. As …

Panel Discussion: The State of the Art on Statebuilding (FB18) Read More »

The Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development is pleased to announce a special Sadat Book Chat in collaboration with CIDCM and MAIR, inviting Dr. Mareike Schomerus, Vice President of the Busara Center, to discuss her new book Lives Amid Violence: Transforming Development in the Wake of Conflict. The Sadat Book Chat is a book conversation …

Special Sadat Book Chat in Collaboration with CIDCM and MAIR, University of Maryland at College Park Read More »

Mental Models in International Conflict Engagement International engagement in situations of violent conflict—or in the presumed aftermath—sets these situations up for a never-ending violent path. The most recent and painful examples of this are events in Myanmar and Sudan, with the situation rapidly deteriorating in other places, for example Tunisia. That international engagement has a …

Workshop: Changing Mental Models in International Conflict Engagement Read More »

Conflict Research Society Conference 2023 Panel 4F – S3.30 Rethinking the Process: New Approaches to Peacebuilding Chair: Meredith Carbonell ● Paper 1: Ali Altiok, Artificial Intelligence and Peacemaking ● Paper 2: Meredith Carbonell, Mediation After Mass Atrocities ● Paper 3: Isabel Philips, Dispute, the state and commercial actors: Mandating mediation for others vs using it …

The problem with bricks: Statebuilding and mental models Read More »

On 30 November 2023, the Rift Valley Forum, in collaboarion with the British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA) and the French Institute for Research in Africa (IFRA) in Nairobi, will launch a book by Mareike Schomerus, titled Lives Amid Violence: Transforming Development in the Wake of Conflict. Drawing on a decade of research across eight countries …

Book Launch Nairobi: Lives Amid Violence Transforming Development in the Wake of Conflict Read More »

International engagement in situations of violent conflict—or in the presumed aftermath—sets these situations up for a never-ending violent path. This is a bold claim, but one that a decade of a major research consortium (the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium), which conducted longitudinal empirical multi-method work in eight conflict-affected countries, supports. In Lives Amid Violence: Transforming …

Lives Amid Violence: Transforming Development in the Wake of Conflict Read More »