Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution

As a child, Nathaniel Socks said he was restless, and could often be found tapping his hands on nearby objects. His mom enrolled him in drum lessons in second grade, he said, which led to his favorite hobby—one that taught him valuable life lessons.

“I got to see how if you put in hard work and dedicate yourself to something really hard, how cool the product can be,” the incoming George Mason University freshman said. “That was one thing that really got me into drumming—you can see the progression of practicing.”

Students and faculty from the early days of the Center for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (CCAR), the center that later became the Carter School, will undoubtedly recall Joe Camplisson, who passed away in his native Belfast on Friday, July 9, 2021, at the age of 92.

Though several public opinion polls have shown a decrease in support for the Black Lives Matter Movement year after the murder of George Floyd, the political victories gained by the movement’s earlier momentum will set the stage for what’s next, said Carter School professor Tehama Lopez Bunyasi.

“#BlackLivesMatter and the Movement for Black Lives have played critical roles in not only shaping our contemporary discourse on racism, but we have seen how those mobilized in concert with this movement have brought about important electoral victories,” Lopez Bunyasi said. “This racial justice movement endures and evolves alongside a countermovement that seeks to restrict who participates in our democracy and what stories get told about our country.”

Can enemy groups learn to develop compassion for one another? That was the question Carter School professor Daniel Rothbart set out to answer in his research at Rondine, a two-year “laboratory for peace.” Now, the results are in.

“This is the first in-depth case study of compassion among civilians who live in conflict zones,” said Rothbart, who collaborated with George Mason University professors Thalia Goldstein, Marc Gopin and Karina Korostelina. “We hope this is a model that can help create new practices for peacebuilders to cultivate compassion.”

In April, Natalia Kanos was elected Mason’s new student body president.

Illegal goods can have deadly consequences. Whether it’s a counterfeit face mask that doesn’t provide a frontline worker adequate protection from COVID-19, or a counterfeit pill laced with fentanyl (a synthetic painkiller 50-100 times more potent than morphine), millions of lives can be at risk.

A multidisciplinary team of researchers and students at George Mason University is working to stop such criminal activity. Thanks to a nearly $650,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF)—and a $16,000 grant supplement awarded to two undergraduates on the team—they will be investigating how to disrupt illicit supply chains, influence policy, and ultimately save lives.

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.

Tehama Lopez Bunyasi, assistant professor in the Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, explains how using our democratic freedoms will help overcome racism in America.

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.