To explore and better understand the means to prevent warfare within states, Dean Joseph S. Nye Jr. of the Kennedy School of Government announced recently that the World Peace Foundation has established the Program on Intrastate Conflict, Conflict Prevention, and Conflict Resolution within the Kennedy School's Belfer Center of Science and International Affairs.

The Program results from a newly formalized association between the Kennedy School and the World Peace Foundation, an 89- year-old research and policy organization founded by Edwin Ginn, the Boston publisher, and A. Lawrence Lowell, then Harvard's president. Robert I. Rotberg, who teaches at the Kennedy School and is president of the World Peace Foundation, will become director of the new Program on Intrastate Conflict within the Belfer Center. Rotberg taught political science and history at M.I.T., was academic vice president at Tufts University and president of Lafayette College, and is the author of numerous books and articles on African, Asian, and Caribbean politics and history.

The World Peace Foundation and the new program in the Belfer Center will jointly focus on the prevention and resolution of intrastate conflict. Rotberg and his associates are concerned with the consequences of the global proliferation of light weapons, with the vulnerability of weak states, with peace-building and peace enforcement capabilities in Africa, and with the role of truth commissions in conflict prevention and conflict resolution. Rotberg has recently been active in understanding prospects for peace in Sri Lanka and democracy in Burma. He and his associates are also involved in a major peace-building project concerning the future of Cyprus.

Graham Allison, director of the Belfer Center, said that the new Program on Intrastate Conflict, Conflict Prevention, and Conflict Resolution adds significantly to the Belfer Center's capability to undertake research and teaching on issues of vital concern to global order at the end of the 20th century. The new program, said Allison, complements the Belfer Center's existing work on international security and human rights. "The potential synergies are many and exciting," he said. Founded in 1978, the Center is also home to the International Security Program, the Environment and Natural Resources Program, the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program, and the Strengthening Democratic Institutions Project.

Nye said that the establishment of the program strengthens the Kennedy School's ability to teach and do research in an area of public policy that has become much more critical in this final decade of the 20th century.