Community members share their reflections on how the built environment and street art interact with concepts of peace building, conflict, and resilience.

A new professional certificate program at Columbia University will address the linkages between environment and security, aimed at practitioners with responsibility for providing assessments and warnings regarding environment-security risks or for designing programs to manage such risks.

In 2005, colleagues working in conflict resolution and peace-building in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Palestine and Syria approached Columbia University’s International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution with a request for science-based resources on constructive engagement made available in Arabic.

Intractable conflicts such as the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East or long-term civil wars in central Africa are among the world’s most destructive social ills, and the most difficult to solve. Over the past decade, Peter Coleman, director of the Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution at Columbia University, has been developing an innovative way of understanding intractable conflicts — and potentially resolving them.

An understanding of the issues that influence conflict in Myanmar is necessary to think about how sustainable peace might be reached. But our research instead focuses on identifying “latent peace capacities” that already exist in and outside of the country, while also exploring means of transforming the underlying structures that give rise to conflict.