Ending war, conflict is the work of Belfer’s WPF Fellows:

The Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs (BCSIA) is the hub of the Kennedy School of Government’s (KSG’s) research, teaching, and training in international security affairs, environmental and resource issues, science and technology policy, and intrastate conflict prevention and resolution studies.

The center provides leadership in advancing policy-relevant knowledge about international security and other critical issues where science, technology, and international affairs intersect. BCSIA pursues its mission in four complementary research programs: International Security; Environment and Natural Resources; Science, Technology, and Public Policy; and the World Peace Foundation (WPF) Program on Intrastate Conflict, Conflict Prevention, and Conflict Resolution.

The heart of the center is its resident research community of more than 150 scholars, including Harvard faculty, analysts, practitioners, and research fellows.

The WPF Program on Intrastate Conflict is an association between BCSIA and the World Peace Foundation, which was established in 1910 in Boston to advance world peace through research and study. The program has long specialized in constructively brokering dialogues between opposing communities and in developing useful methods of effective conflict resolution. By analyzing the causes of ethnic, religious, and other intercommunal conflict, the WPF program seeks to identify practical ways to prevent, limit, and resolve such conflict. The program seeks understanding of civil wars and their consequences, of the fears between peoples that give rise to violence and then to mayhem within states, and of the various civil methods that are and might be employed to avoid conflict. Several of the current fellows in the WPF Program on Intrastate Conflict serve jointly in BCSIA’s International Security Program (ISP).

The 2002-03 WPF Fellows

Roberto Belloni is a joint WPF/ISP fellow whose research focuses on peace-building strategies in Bosnia-Herzegovina, humanitarian intervention, and genocide.

Lucy Chester is a joint WPF/ISP fellow whose research interests include cartographic history, gender studies, violence and territoriality, and partition as a tool for conflict resolution.

Renske Doorenspleet is a joint WPF/ISP fellow who studies democratic transitions and consolidation, conflict resolution, Africa and Asia, and quantitative and qualitative methodology. She is currently researching democracy in divided countries.

Arman Grigorian is a joint WPF/ISP fellow whose research interests include third-party intervention, war termination, and intrastate conflict. He is currently studying the phenomenon of escalated violence in state-minority disputes in the face of third-party interventions or threats to carry them out.

Maria Koinova focuses on issues of international actors’ intervention in intrastate conflicts. She is currently studying the differing levels of ethnic violence in former communist states – Bulgaria, Macedonia, and Yugoslavia – during the past decade.

Sarah Lischer is a joint WPF/ISP fellow whose research interests include the causes of civil war, transnational security threats, forced migration, and humanitarian intervention. Currently, she is using in-depth comparisons of violent and nonviolent cases to explain the political incentives for the international spread of civil war in refugee crises.

Anna Ohanyan is examining the conditions under which different international governmental and nongovernmental organizations, often with conflicting goals and mandates, form transnational networks in the process of policy implementation. She is focusing on the microcredit sector in postconflict Bosnia and Herzegovina to understand the institutional effects that such transnational policy networks exert on the policy choices of nongovernmental organizations.

Benjamin Reilly, now serving as democratic governance adviser with the UN Development Program, works on electoral reform and other issues of democratic governance in ethnically divided societies.