Fall update from the World Peace Foundation

Since it moved to Fletcher a few years ago, the World Peace Foundation has become an ever more integral part of the community, creating opportunities for students to conduct research and participate in the organization of conferences, as well as creating awareness of important topics on the world scene.  Today I’m sharing a news-filled email that WPF sent us earlier this week.

The World Peace Foundation at The Fletcher School has some exciting updates this fall that we would like to share with you:

•  We hosted an annual student seminar competition, inviting Fletcher students to conceive of a two-day seminar on any topic related to peace, broadly understood.  WPF helps the winners organize the seminar, including bringing top experts to campus, and funds the entire event.  The winners this year are: Medha Basu, David Cronin, Héctor Portillo, and Sumaya Saluja (all second-year MALD students), and Bret McEvoy (PhD candidate) for the proposal, “Masculinity: Men, Violence, and Transformation.”

•  WPF is providing core funding to the Tufts Initiative on Mass Atrocities and Genocide this academic year, a financial cushion for the initiative as multi-year fundraising efforts continue.

•  We have two new book-length publications: Alex de Waal’s The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa: Money, War and The Business of Power (Polity Press 2015); and Advocacy in Conflict: Critical Perspectives on Transnational Activism (Zed Books 2015), edited by Alex de Waal with recent Fletcher graduates, Jennifer Ambrose, Casey Hogle, Trisha Taneja, and Keren Yohannes.

•  Alex de Waal’s research on mass famine released in conjunction with the Global Hunger Index recently received strong media coverage, with articles in the Washington Post, NPR, and an AP story that was picked up by The New York Times, Huffington Post and U.S. News & World Report, among others.  He also had an article in The Lancet.

•  A WPF research team led by Senior Fellow Mulugeta Gebrehiwot is working on a report requested by the African Union (AU) evaluating how the AU conceives and implements its peace missions.  The report will be released in Spring 2016, and offer recommendations to the AU on how to improve its conflict mediation, peacekeeping deployments, and post-conflict stabilization efforts.

•  In addition to our core staff, Alex de Waal, Bridget Conley-Zilkic and Lisa Avery, WPF has two Senior Fellows, Mulugeta Gebrehiwot and Dyan Mazurana; short-term fellows Sarah Nouwen (September to December) and Kenneth Nwoko (November); and has employed more than ten students this fall alone in a range of roles to help support our research projects.