The International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution (ICCCR) is an innovative center committed to developing knowledge and practice to promote constructive conflict resolution, effective cooperation, and social justice. We partner with individuals, groups, organizations, and communities to learn to resolve conflicts constructively so they may develop just and peaceful relationships. We work with sensitivity to cultural differences and emphasize the links between theory, research, and practice.
ICCCR News
6th Annual
Morton Deutsch Awards for Social Justice
**** Call for Student Papers ****
November 2009
The International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution (ICCCR) at Teachers College, Columbia University, is sponsoring the sixth annual Morton Deutsch Award for an Outstanding Graduate Student Paper on Social Justice. Morton Deutsch, one of the world’s most eminent psychologists, has made significant contributions over the many years of his career in the areas of conflict resolution and social justice. The Morton Deutsch Award is meant to stimulate and recognize innovation in scholarship and practice in the area of social justice. The trophy award, plus $500.00, will be given to a graduate student within the Columbia University system for an outstanding paper related to social justice.
The paper may address the issue of social justice in any context with a clear conceptual framework, and from any disciplinary perspective. Papers will be evaluated on:
• degree of innovative thinking and sound analysis
• recommendations for remedying identified situations
• contribution to scholarship, practice or policy.
Papers will be judged by a faculty panel with representatives from various schools at Columbia, chaired by Dr. Claudia E. Cohen, the Associate Director of the ICCCR. Student papers should be between 20-30 pages in length (double-spaced with 1 inch margins, using Times New Roman 12 pt. font.)
Papers are due February 1, 2010. Papers should be emailed as an attachment to dewolfe@tc.edu; receipt will be confirmed by February 15, 2010.
The recipient of the student award will attend the presentation and award ceremony and be invited to give a 20-minute presentation on his or her paper. The logistical information is as follows:
Event: Morton Deutsch Awards Ceremony & Presentation
Date: Thursday, April 8, 2010
Time: 5:00-7:00 pm
Location: TBA
Followed by a wine and cheese reception….
For further information, contact Juliette de Wolfe at 212-678-3402
Coleman Joins UN Fact-Finding Team in Haiti! ICCCR Director Peter T. Coleman, who recently accepted a joint-appointment on the faculty at Columbia University's Earth Institute, traveled to Haiti this Summer as a member of a delegation led by Jeffrey Sachs, EI Director and Special Advisor to the UN General Secretary on the Millennium Development Goals. While there, the delegation met with Haitian President Rene Preval, Prime Minister Michele Pierre-Louis, the Ministerial Cabinet, various UN and UN agency officials, and several donor-nation representatives in Port-au-Prince. They also traveled into the hills to one of the many poverty-ravaged villages there, Thomonde, the site of Haiti’s first Millennium Village Project. Dr. Coleman, a psychologist and a specialist in peace and conflict, was part of an international advisory group composed of agronomists, community health physicians, economists, business and development experts invited to Haiti to consult on their strategy for sustainable development.
AC4 is Launched at CU!
Based on the increasing complexity and volatility associated with contemporary forms of geopolitical conflict and violence, and on Columbia University’s rich tradition of research and development in conflict resolution theory and practice, the Advanced Consortium on Cooperation, Conflict, and Complexity (AC4) has been established at Columbia University. AC4 supports innovative, inter-disciplinary, scholar-practitioner activities that address difficult, unresolved issues in the areas of violence prevention, conflict resolution, and sustainable development and peace.
Situated at The Earth Institute at Columbia University, AC4 was created in collaboration with several Columbia conflict resolution entities such as the International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution (ICCCR) at Teachers College, the Center for International Conflict Resolution (CICR) and the United Nations Studies Program at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, the Mediation Clinic at Columbia Law School, and the MS Program on Negotiation and Conflict Resolution at Columbia’s School of Continuing Education. Today, AC4 is primed for interdisciplinary collaboration with leading scholars, practitioners and policy-makers in the US and abroad. AC4’s activities are funded through a profit-sharing agreement with the MS Program on Negotiation and Conflict Resolution at Columbia’s School of Continuing Education and through external grants and donations. AC4 is a new consortium of existing programs, centers, institutes, and faculty at Columbia, not a new center. The rationale for this is that although there is excellent work being conducted on conflict, violence, development and peace at the University from various disciplinary perspectives, there is very little interdisciplinary work being conducted at Columbia in these areas. Furthermore, issues of critical resource scarcity, territory, environmental degradation, and development, particularly when they are framed in zero-sum terms, are central to many of the more violent and protracted conflicts around the globe today. Some of these conflicts escalate and result in genocide and other mass atrocities. The study of these perplexing problems, and the roles played by scarcity and development today, requires an approach to research that moves beyond the traditionally siloed disciplines of economics, political science, climate studies and psychology, and that brings them together in a manner that reflects the complexity of the problems we seek to understand and rectify. This is the primary objective of AC4.
The Arabic Translation of our Handbook of Conflict Resolution goes Online! The International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution
is pleased to announce the online presentation of selected
Arabic-translated chapters from The Handbook of Conflict Resolution:
Theory and Practice, edited by Morton Deutsch, Peter T. Coleman, and
Eric Marcus. The translation is being supervised by Naira Musallam,
ICCCR Research Coordinator, and is currently being distributed at no
cost to professionals in community-based organizations,
non-governmental organizations, and in academic settings across the
Arab world. The translated chapter of the book can be found in the Publications
section of our website. The translation and distribution of the
chapters from the handbook has been supported by a generous gift from
TC Trustee Marla Schaefer, and future work on the translation is
currently up for a challenge-grant from an anonymous doner. Please
donate today! New chapters from the book will be translated and made
available as funding allows.
ICCCR Research Team Goes to Kyoto!Several
students and faculty members working on research at the ICCCR had
papers accepted for presentation at this year's conference of the
International Association of Conflict Management (IACM), held in Kyoto, Japan this June. Several PhD students including
Naira Musallam, Katharina Kugler, Adam Mitchinson, and Christine Chung traveled to Japan to present their work. Also presenting were ICCCR faculty members including Peter T. Coleman and Beth Fisher-Yoshida.
The
presentations included: Adaptation, Integration, and Learning: The Three Legs of the Steady Stool of Conflict Resolution In Asymmetrical Power Relations (Peter T. Coleman, Adam Mitchinson, and Katharina Kugler). Attribution and Conflict: A Vicious Cycle Driven by Complexity (Adam Mitchinson and Peter T. Coleman) Moral Conflict and Complexity: The Dynamics of Constructive versus Destructive Discussions over Polarizing Issues (Katharina Kugler and Peter T. Coleman) Perspective Shift in Moral Conflict: The Terry Schiavo Case (Beth Fisher-Yoshida) The Diffusion of Constructive Processes in Destructive Settings: A Dynamical Systems Perspective (Naira Musallam) Surveying Attractor Landscapes for Conflict: Investigating the Relationship between Conflict, Culture, and Complexity (Peter T. Coleman, Andrea Bartoli, Christine Chung, Rafi Nets, and Michele Gelfand). From Crude law to Civil relations: The Dynamics and Potential Resolution of Intractable Conflict (Andrzej Nowak, Morton Deutsch, and Wojciech Bartkowski) Workshop on Taking a Communication Perspective: The Application of Coordinated Management of meaning (CMM) to Conflict (Beth Fisher-Yoshida) The Nature of Adaptivity: A Theoretical Discussion. (Adam Mitchinson, Peter T. Coleman, lan Bui-Wrzosinska, and Andrzej Nowak). Understanding the Spread of malignant Conflict: A Dynamical Systems Perspective (Naira Musallam, Peter T. Coleman, Andrzej Nowak)
ICCCR Conducts Comprehensive Multi-Cultural Audit of Core Courses: The
2008-2009 Dean’s Fellowship Program for Teaching and Diversity at TC is
currently funding Mekayla Castro, an advanced Social-Organizational
Psychology PhD candidate and former Educational Coordinator at the
ICCCR, to conduct a multicultural audit of the Center’s core courses.
The International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution is
committed to working with sensitivity to cultural differences at the
interface of theory, research, and practice. The purpose of this
project is to enhance the multicultural competencies of the ICCCR core
curriculum. Although aspects of our curriculum have been designed to
address diversity and multicultural issues, we feel there is a need to
integrate these themes more centrally into our core-level courses,
thereby providing continuity across courses and enhancing the
multicultural thread inherent in the curriculum. The current project
involves a thorough assessment of the following core courses: ORLJ
5340: Basic Practicum in Conflict Resolution, ORLJ 6040: Fundamentals
of Cooperation, Conflict Resolution & Mediation in Different
Institutional Contexts, and ORLJ 5148: Managing Conflict in
Organizations. These are our 3 entry-level core courses, which are
attended by approximately 300 students a year.
Sister Elaine Roulet Receives the 2009 Morton Deutsch Scholar-Practitioner Award for Social Justice. On
Thursday, April 2nd 2009 Sister Elaine Roulet was honored as the award
recipient for the annual Deutsch Awards. Sister Elaine is a
long-standing advocate for the rights of women in prison and their
children. She devoted her life to bringing mothers in prison and their
children together, and during the ceremony she was honored by many of
the women and children she helped during her time with Bedford Hills
Correctional Facility. The event was truly magical and left everyone
with a sense of hope for the future and an awareness of the great power
of social justice. A link to the video of the 2009 Deutsch Awards will
be available on our website soon. Stay tuned!
Ashley Benner Wins the Student Paper Competition for the 2009 Morton Deutsch Awards for Social Justice.
Ashley Benner, a master's student at The School of International and
Public Affairs at Columbia University won the student award for her
paper titled, Turning Promise into Practice: The Challenges of and Next
Steps for Implementing the Responsibility to Protect. Please click here to read Ms. Benner's paper, or here to view the PowerPoint presentation she gave at the Deutsch Awards Ceremony. Congratulations, Ashley!
Columbia's Earth Institute and ICCCR Host Strategic Meeting on Sustainable Peace. The
Earth Institute at Columbia University and ICCCR hosted a strategic
meeting in March which brought together a wide variety of experts in
conflict and peace with two main objectives: To engage in an
exploration of the current state of understanding and practice of
sustainable peace across disciplines, and to mobilize an initiative or
forum to enhance holistic, multi-disciplinary, scholar-practitioner
work on sustainable peace worldwide. This initiative builds on three
current trends in the field of conflict, violence, and peace studies:
1) a reorientation away from the study of conflict (problems) to the
study of peace (solutions), 2) movement away from simple, linear
theoretical models of cause-and-effect interventions toward more
complex models of peace and conflict situated within constellations of
bio-psycho-social-structural forces, and 3) a shift in emphasis away
from achieving peace agreements and outcomes and toward establishing
the conditions for sustainable peace dynamics in communities. The Earth
Institute’s leadership and expertise on fostering sustainable
development uniquely positions it to contribute to the refocusing of
conflict work toward building sustainable peace. This work will employ
systems-analytic tools and complex behavioral models, and will require
generation of new networks for research and development; ones that
include those working in sustainable development, as well as new
linkages between scholars. The objectives for this one-day meeting were
primarily strategic and organizational. More specifically, we
identified ways the Earth Institute and ICCCR can be leveraged as a
sponsor or advocate for building a forum and network for sustainable
peace-building.
