“We live in an increasingly interdependent world that demands mutual understanding - - our goal is to establish a beacon of knowledge about Persian culture and create an environment where both our nation as a whole and the Persian community are enabled to learn from this rich, ancient culture.”

(from Today@UCI, “Creating the UCI Center on Persian Studies and Culture”, April 21, 2005)

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Faculty and Student Fellowships

The Shirin Ebadi Faculty and Graduate Student Fellowships in Citizen Peacebuilding To honor Nobel Peace Prize laureate and CCPB Peace Award winner Shirin Ebadi, Dr. Fariborz Maseeh was instrumental in the establishment of the Shirin Ebadi Faculty and Graduate Student Fellowships in Citizen Peacebuilding. These fellowships were made possible through the generous support of Dr. Fariborz Maseeh, founder and president of the Massiah Foundation, Mr. Larry and Mrs. Dulcie Kugelman, and Coventry Healthcare, Inc.

The Malawi Project Daniel Wehrenfennig CCPB Fellow   The Kugelman Peacebuilding Fellowship Program The Kugelman Peacebuilding Fellowship program is made possible through the generous support of Mr. Larry and Mrs. Dulcie Kugelman and Coventry Healthcare, Inc.

The Kugelman 07/08 Citizen Peacebuilding Research Fellowship Awardees Graduate Fellowships Nevin T. Aiken Overcoming Intractability:  Transitional Justice and Intercommunal Reconciliation in South Africa and Northern Ireland. Chih-Chieh Chen To Socialize a Rising Power: How Have International Norms Changed China and Vice Versa. Bruce Hemmer Putting the ‘Up’ in Bottom-Up Peacebuilding: Mobilizing Peace Constituencies in Democratizing Societies. Morgan Kronberger  The Invisible Children Movement:  The Domestic and International Impact of a Western NGO. Katherine Mack Fostering Rhetorical Reconciliation: Lessons from the Public Hearings of South Africa.s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Saba Senses Ozyurt Islamic Institutions in the West: Bridge Builders or Boundary Markers between Muslim Immigrants and their Host Societies. Katherine Quick Peacebuilding at the Frontier of Democratization in Indonesia. Daniel Wehrenfennig Dialogue Revisited: Learning from Northern Ireland and Israel/Palestine. UCI History Project Themes in World History Institute:  Building Peace in the Modern World. Faculty Fellowships Raul Lejano and Helen Ingram Spirit of .86:  Analyzing People Power Movements for Peaceful Change in the Pacific Rim. Richard Matthew Microfinance, Human Security and Sustainable Development.   The Kugelman 06/07 Citizen Peacebuilding Research Fellowship Awardees Daniel Wehrenfennig The Malawi Project: Moments of Truth, A documentary film on peaceful political change in Malawi, 1992-1994. ($2200) Jennifer Luchesi-Long Circus Citizen Peacebuilders: An International Youth Exchange Project ($2000)

The Shirin Ebadi Fall 05 Student Fellowship Awardees Andres Salcedo Reinventing the Community: Transformation Within Displaced Colombian groups. ($8118) Department of Anthropology, School of Social Sciences Daniel Wehrenfennig Dialogue and Citizen Peacebuilding: New Opportunities and Challenges in the Network Society. ($3500) Department of Political Science, Ph.D. Candidate. The Shirin Ebadi Spring 06 Student Fellowship Awardees B. Remy Cross The Path of the Radical: Narrative and Relation Effects on Organizational Transition in Movements. ($2000) Sociology, 4th year graduate student, School of Social Sciences, Advisor: David Snow Heather Goldsworthy Road to freedom or Faustian deal?: The environmental consequences of micro-finance. ($2000) Planning, Policy and Design, 5th year graduate student, School of Social Ecology, Advisor: Richard Matthew Bruce Hemmer Putting the "Up" in Bottom-Up Peacebuilding: Mobilizing Peace Constituencies in Democratizing Societies. ($2000) Political Science, 6th year, Ph.D. Candidate, Advisor: Prof. Russell Dalton Laurent Tambayong Historical City Network. ($2000) Mathematical Behavioral Sciences, 3rd year graduate student, Advisor: Douglas R. White Omar Yousef Urban Morphologies of Conflict: A Study of Urban Space, Attitudes and Behavior in Palestinian East Jerusalem. ($2000) Planning, Policy and Design, 3rd year Ph.D., School of Social Ecology, Advisor: Professor Scott Bollens  The Shirin Ebadi Spring 06 Faculty Fellowship Awardees Alison Brysk January 07 conference “The Human Face of Peace: Human Rights vs. Human Security Approaches.” ($5000) Professor of Political Science/International Studies Kristen Monroe Peace Building: A Comparative Analysis of Successful Reconciliation. ($2050) UCI Interdisciplinary Center for the Scientific Study of Ethics and Morality.

Faculty and Student Fellowship Abstracts

Jennifer Luchesi-Long
Circus Citizen Peacebuilders: An International Youth Exchange Project

The “Circus Citizen Peacebuilders” study intends to provide a program evaluation of the “Circus Citizen Peacebuilders” International Youth Exchange Project, which is a joint peacebuilding effort by the Scarlet Sisters Circus and the Center for Citizen Peacebuilding at The University of California, Irvine.  The goal of the research is to provide concrete evidence of the peacebuilding process that is taking place as a result of the “Circus Citizen Peacebuilders” project, the impact that it has on its participants, and to provide appropriate next steps for developing this project into a larger endeavor.  The methodology includes both interviews and participant observation.  Presently, interviews with the youth participants of the 2006 Cirque du O.C. circus camp, several parents, the WAVE Youth Leader, and many members of the Center for Citizen Peacebuilding have been conducted, revealing  several significant preliminary findings.  Several parent interviews still need to take place, as well as interviews with one or two more CCPB members in order to complete the planned interviews.  However, information regarding the impact of the program on the Northern Irish youth participants is currently based on secondary interviews.  No primary interviews with the Northern Irish youth participants have yet been conducted, yet such follow-up interviews would be critically important to understanding the full impact of the program on the Northern Irish participants over an extended period of time and will soon follow pending permission from the participants themselves.  The results of this research are expected to show how circus methodology can take the peace process from the individual to the collective level and what particular stages of personal transition occur during the peace process.  This research is intended to be readily applicable to any conflicted area and should provide concrete guidelines for grassroots citizen peacebuilding through circus methodology. (back)

Andres Salcedo
Reinventing the Community: Transformation Within Displaced Colombian groups.

This research addresses the various ways in which displaced Colombian citizens reinvent communities despite terror and devastating personal losses. My study thus addresses displacement not only as a process of rupture, bereavement, and captivity but also as a process of possible reconstruction. It examines the difficulties these communities face when they negotiate social spaces in the margins of the city and how they build peace through community efforts in the face of insecurity and social disruption.
Between 2002 and 2004, I carried out anthropological field work research in Colombia to analyze the particular ways in which displaced Andean, Afro-Colombian, and Indigenous groups resettle, organize and cope with human rights violations. My research addresses three main dilemmas concerning these communities’ process of social and political transformation.  First, it asks: how are identities played out and reshaped in processes of resettlement, impoverishment, and persecution? Second, as communities are cut off from access to land and resources, do they suffer from `irreversible´ and `inevitable´ cultural loss? Third, what are the implications of shifts in identity for possible reconciliation and peace? (back)

Daniel Wehrenfennig
Dialogue and Citizen Peacebuilding: New Opportunities and Challenges in the Network Society.

Since the end of the Cold War, half of all conflicts have been brought to an end through dialogue and peace talks between the conflict parties, whereas 100 years ago roughly one in five was resolved through negotiation (Sisk). Working dialogue is, however, not just a means to end conflicts but the absence of it is also one of the main reasons that conflicts arise in the first place. In particular, missing or dysfunctional dialogue on the citizen level (grassroots level) and between citizens and decision-makers is one of the catalysts for injustice and conflict. However, if systematically applied, dialogue could be a main force in building and sustaining peace and even aid in addressing many other challenges in human interaction. The modern “network society” offers new opportunities and challenges for this kind of communication to effectively take place. (back)

B. Remy Cross
The Path of the Radical:  Narrative and Relation Effects on Organizational Transition in Movements

This project seeks to explore the extant literature and combine it with ethnographic work and in depth interviews with current and former activists in global justice movements to find out how activists started out and the journey they took to arrive as a member of a violent or radical social movement organization.  Additionally I hope to explore the types of relationships that exist between violent and non-violent organizations, and between the people they call their members.  I will draw on current activists, their social networks of co-activists and the embedded networks of organizations that they all work within. (back)

Heather Goldsworthy
Road to freedom or Faustian deal?: The environmental consequences of microfinance

In recent years microfinance has garnered growing attention in the government, banking, and non-governmental arenas as an alternative to largely unsuccessful state-run and multilateral development and aid programs.  Proponents of microfinance suggest the industry is well-equipped to assist many of the world’s over four billion poor.  However, there are still many questions about the impact of microfinance on the quality of life for the poor, and much debate about what “solid” evidence there is to support it.  The lack of in-depth research on impacts must be resolved in order to fully understand the economic and social consequences of microfinance services as well as under what conditions they will succeed.  This project aims to begin filling the research gap by examining one component of community sustainability and quality of life that is inextricably linked to poverty: the natural environment.  Environmental conditions are of paramount importance to many of the world’s poor due to their reliance on natural resources for both subsistence and income, yet seem to be absent in microfinance literature.  This project will examine the silence on the part of the microfinance community, vis-à-vis the conditions of the natural environment, in an effort to understand what role nature plays in the implementation of microfinance services and what potential impacts these finance-based intermediations may have on the local resource base.  The research questions will be addressed using three modes of inquiry, designed to triangulate data: interviews with microfinance project managers, review and analysis of project case files, and field site visits. (back)

Bruce Hemmer
Putting the "Up" in Bottom-Up Peacebuilding: Mobilizing Peace Constituencies in Democratizing Societies
 
This research will expand upon a dataset collected with previous Center for Citizen Peacebuilding funding.  This dataset contains the organizational traits and peacebuilding projects of 30 peacebuilding NGOs and includes interviews of NGO leaders in Bosnia over the 2003to 2004 time period. The expansion of this data will cover (at least) the early post-war period of 1995 to 1998,and the later period of 2003 to 20005. These findings will be compared to data being collected in Northern Ireland as part of another funded project. This project will investigate the factors leading these NGOs to engage in public political peacebuilding projects designed to guide or motivate political leaders towards more effective policymaking to support peace. (back)

Laurent Tambayong
Historical City Network

The objective of this research is to investigate a topology of multiconnected trade networks with multiple alternatives of buyers and sellers, creating a potential for market pricing equilibrium.   It is presumed that equilibrium can take variety of forms in either regional or global market system.  The shift of topology is presumed to occur when there are disruptions in the trade network such as produced by wars and in turn cause prolonged geographical disconnections and create cut-points in the network that alter the distribution and nature of multiconnectivities.  A major interest is to see if the various forms of topology of cities' trade network are stable and the equilibrium is sustainable, resulting in peace through fair trade. (back)

Omar Yousef
Urban Morphologies of Conflict: A Study of Urban Space, Attitudes and Behavior in Palestinian East Jerusalem

In the last fifteen years, inhabitants of East Jerusalem experienced a dramatic change due to the Israeli planning and security policies, which were culminated by the building of the wall through the Palestinian neighborhoods. This work assumes a dynamic interactive relationship between spatial urban reality, resulting behavioral patterns and political attitudes of the population. The main focus will be on the normal inhabitants called the “anonymous heroes” by De Certeau and their “web of anti-disciplines”, and the “practices of the daily life” as conceptualized by Lefebvre. The methodology will be interpretive/phenomenological using observations, semi-structured interviews, mental mapping and the study of available data and archival documents.

Accordingly, the dissertation objectives will be to examine, describe and map the latest spatial changes in the urban morphology (1990-2006), the dynamics of Israeli/Palestinian contact and interaction between the people. It will also evaluate the resulting urban behavioral patterns in satisfying the needs of daily life and the attitudes and perceptions of Palestinian inhabitants towards the peace process. Exploring the concept of somoud-steadfastness between Palestinians, it will identify aspects of adaptation and peaceful resistance in the daily life. As a final goal the study will use its findings to provide policy recommendations for activities of conflict resolution, sustainable peace building and inter-group understanding towards the normalization of the city of Jerusalem. (back)

Alison Brysk
The Human Face of Peace

How, when, and where are human rights or human security approaches more effective in building peace--and how can they be made to complement each other?  This workshop will combine conceptual analysis with policy-oriented case studies tracking almost a decade of co-existing efforts in areas such as conflict resolution, the human impact of environmental destruction, and public health. We will bring together international academics, UC doctoral students, and policy participants to address this question in February 2007 at UC Irvine. In addition to the CCPB, UC Irvine's Center for Unconventional Security, UCSD's program in International, Comparative, and Area Studies, and the UC system-wide Institute on Global Cooperation and Conflict will participate in this project. (back)

Kristen Monroe
Conflict and Peacebuilding: a Workshop on the Neuroscience Underlying the Moral Identity

What causes ethical action? Recent work suggests the value for ethics of deciphering the boundaries of our sense of self, both as the embodied complex adaptive system emergent from the brain and as the symbol-laden concatenation of social roles, labels, and narratives. To this end, the UCI Interdisciplinary Center for the Scientific Study of Ethics and Morality is working with Citizen Peace Builders and the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies to present a workshop highlighting recent work on the political psychology surrounding the shifts in boundaries of the self, especially those shifts that influence the actor’s sense of ontological security. Our underlying hypothesis is that it is the sense of security or threat that accounts for individual variation in treatment of others, with a heightened sense of security fostering ethical behaviors (such as altruism, helping, cooperating, or rescuing those in need) and a sense of vulnerability and threat encouraging acts designed to preserve the sense of self, even at the expense of another’s well being. We will explore the ethical implications of how the boundaries of the self shift in response to changing events.

Plans are under way to bring a few of the top scholars in this area to UCI, during the Winter and/or Spring term of 2007, in conjunction with the UCI Interdisciplinary Center for the Scientific Study of Ethics and Morality, the Center for Citizen Peacebuilding, and the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies.  Subject to availability, we would invite the following critical scholars, in a number of key disciplines to talk about the following topics:

Work for the conference will be organized by Kristen Monroe, with the assistance of Sandra Cushman (Center Program Manager) and Adam Martin and Maria Theresa Martinez (Center Interns). Interested participants should contact Sandra Cushman at scushman@uci.edu or 949-824-3344.

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