New resources published by Kroc Institute Scholar in Residence Josefina Echavarría Alvarez provide tools to equip scholar-practitioners and academics to teach courses in peace studies, conflict transformation, and peacebuilding. Echavarría is co-director of the Research Centre for Peace and Conflict at the University of Innsbruck in Austria.
Scholars in Residence and Visiting Research Fellows spend a semester to a full academic year conducting research on the University of Notre Dame campus. Scholars in Residence are invited by a core member of the Kroc Institute faculty, and have the chance to engage with members of the Institute’s academic community.
In each of the publications produced while at the Kroc Institute, Echavarría draws on the theory of elicitive conflict transformation, a school of thought that emphasizes the role of local groups, individuals, or conflict parties as the most important resources for moving away from violence and resolving conflicts.
While in residence at the Institute, Echavarría has:
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published a chapter on peacebuilding education as a tool that can help to reduce violence in the ways data is interpreted to target marginalized groups (known as epistemic violence). The chapter appears in the book Teaching Peace and War: Pedagogy and Curricula, edited by Annick T.R. Wibben and Amanda E. Donahoe;
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co-authored an article in the Journal of Peace Education focused on the iPEACES program, an elicitive conflict transformation program meant to help build peace in rural territories in Colombia most affected by the country’s long-term armed conflict;
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co-edited a special issue on mediation and elicitive conflict transformation for the the journal perspektive mediation (in German).
In addition to these scholarly publications, Echavarría published Elicitive Curricular Development: A Manual for Scholar-Practitioners Developing Courses in International Peace and Conflict Studies. The manual is co-authored with Echavarría’s Innsbruck colleagues, Adham Hamed and Noah B. Taylor.
“With the appearance of this Elicitive Curricular Development Manual (ECDM), the Innsbruck team of scholar-practitioners have woven a seamless quilt among practitioner best practices, the formation and teaching of these core concepts and skills directly in local realities, and the imperative melding of both to design effective and adaptive university peacebuilding programs in violence affected zone,” wrote George A. Lopez, the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C., Professor Emeritus of Peace Studies, in his forward to the manual.
The manual is available online for free.
Learn more about the Kroc Institute’s Visiting Research Fellows and Scholars in Residence programs. Applications for the 2020-21 academic year are due by January 1, 2020.
Originally published by at kroc.nd.edu on December 16, 2019.