Monday, September 20th, 2021, marked the official start of Peace Week Fall 2021 at the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace & Conflict Resolution.

Peace Week serves as an opportunity to engage in conversations regarding the ever-changing field of peacebuilding in an ever-changing world. The pandemic shed light on a number of ongoing issues within the global society; the pandemic also gave us a chance to step back, take a deep dive into issues of injustice and inequity, and decide how we want to move forward as a world. The theme of this year’s Peace Week is “Recovering Better for an Equitable and Sustainable World”. MHCR will have multiple team members participating in this fall’s Peace Week.

The first of our presentations featured MHCR Associate Director and Carter School Ph.D. Candidate, Nick Sherwood, as a presenter on Professor Dan Rothbart’s panel featuring his new Peace Lab: “Transforming the Mind for Peace”. This panel began with a presentation of Mari Fitzduff’s (Professor Emerita of Brandeis University) newest book, “Our Brains at War”, the first book to combine insights of neuroscience with peacebuilding. Then, team leaders from the Transforming the Mind for Peace presented on their respective research projects, including Nick and MHCR’s Insider Reconcilers study.

Insider Reconcilers (a derivative of John Paul Lederach’s term ‘insider partials’) are defined as individuals who are native to a given conflict context and actively facilitating reconciliation efforts within this context. Nick and other researchers at MHCR’s Transformation and Reconciliation Lab (TRL) are currently in the process of interviewing insider reconcilers to better understand these reconcilers’ (a) conceptualizations of reconciliation, (b) experiences during reconciliation processes, and (c) wellbeing has been shaped by their reconciliation work.

If you’d like to learn more about this study, or find out ways to get involved in MHCR’s research, please reach out to MHCR@gmu.edu! And make sure to check out other Carter School events: https://carterschool.gmu.edu/news-events/carter-school-peace-week/fall-2021-peace-week

You can view Nick’s presentation here.