Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution

Graduating senior Nicole Herman said Mason made the world her campus.

Growing up in the slums of Cameroon, Joseph Sany said he witnessed urban violence and police oppression regularly. He heard about genocide in Rwanda, and he saw more violence firsthand when he worked with NGOs and visited countries like Liberia and Sierra Leone during civil war.

A few days after Khalid Noor was born in Takhar, Afghanistan, the Taliban seized the province, and his family had to escape to another region on foot.

“We were constantly moving from city to another city,” he said. “When one district was taken or collapsed, we had to move to another.”

It wasn’t an ideal life, but Noor is motivated to change that for future generations—and he’s negotiating with the Taliban to do so.

George Mason University’s Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution will host its Spring 2021 Peace Week virtually March 22-26, focusing on how to foster anti-racism approaches in the field of conflict resolution in the United States and around the world.

The eastern region of Ukraine has been an intense battleground since 2014, when Russia controversially annexed the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea and invaded the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine. Though a ceasefire was called, it has been violated daily. More than 10,000 people have died and roughly 1.6 million are registered as internally displaced people (IDP).

But a step toward hope and peace may be on the horizon, thanks to George Mason University’s Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, and their new project funded by a $50,000 grant from the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine.

A new tradition at the Carter School brings scholars, researcher, practitioners, students, and the public together to discuss new directions in the search for peace and justice.

For the Carter School's graduating bachelor's students, CONF 490 offers the chance to conduct capstone research and present at the semesterly Undergraduate Research Symposium. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, this fall's symposium went entirely virtual for the first time.

Of the more than 4,000 lynchings of Black Americans that took place in the United States between 1865 and 1950, at least 43 cases occurred in Maryland.
George Mason University’s John Mitchell Jr. Program (JMJP), housed within the Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, has been helping research several of these cases since 2019 to support the Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In October, they received news that they will be taking their research to the next level, thanks to a $300,000 Department of Justice grant they helped secure for the commission.

The Peacebuilding concentration will give M.S. students the practical and professional skills they need to start their careers as peacebuilding practitioners.

George Mason University anticipates reporting more than $200 million in sponsored research expenditures for fiscal year 2020, which would be an all-time high for the university and shows significant progress toward the university’s strategic goal of $225 million by 2024.