The 2011 Peace and Conflict Studies conference will focus the attention of our discipline at the community level of analysis; it contends that local-level considerations are vital to the reduction of structural violence. With the community as the foundation to the conference, we will survey the contours of six sub-topics: Education; Justice; Media; Memorialization; Infrastructure; and Psychological Trauma in a series of panel discussions. These will be united by an opening keynote event with three keynote speeches. By concentrating on the community level, we ensure that the lessons from our conference have a wide scope of applicability, whether a community of interest exists in East Timor or Israel, Chechnya or Puntland, São Paulo or Toronto. Based on our subthemes, we expect there to be interest from students of Aboriginal Studies, Architecture, Canadian Studies, Criminology, Education, Engineering, Geography, Global Health, History, International Relations, Law, Political Science, Psychology, Public Policy, Sociology, and Urban Studies, inter alia.
History
The Peace and Conflict Studies conference was instantiated in 2006 by students at the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies and addressed The Challenges of Peacebuilding: Rebuilding Shattered Societies. It has occurred three times since: 2007’s Before The Crisis Breaks concerned conflict prevention, crisis management, and preventive diplomacy; 2008’s Coordinating Chaos focused on the experience of conflict itself; and 2009’s Redefining Central Asia concentrated on security considerations in that region. These conferences welcomed renowned speakers such as Michael Ignatieff; Major-General Michael Smith, former deputy force commander for the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor; Justice Richard Goldstone; The Honourable Gareth Evans; Ambassador Alvaro de Soto, UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process; Omar Samad, former Ambassador of Afghanistan to Canada; and Christopher Alexander, former Canadian Ambassador to Afghanistan.
