Ideas

My Second Mountain

I've done a lot of thinking about aging, milestones, and accomplishments lately. I just sent off what may well be my last book. I'm helping plan my fiftieth college reunion. I used to be the youngest person in the room when I started teaching; now, I'm often the oldest one when I'm in a meeting.At the same time, I'm no where near ready to retire. I have too much energy and the world has too many problems for me to hang it up and go play shuffleboard and go on cruises. So, here are some thoughts

My Second Mountain2019-04-22T14:32:47+00:00

Writing an Unusual, Interesting, Challenging, and Empowering Book

Doug Irvin-Erickson and I are in the home stretch of writing our peace and conflict studies textbook. That means that we have two challenges. Finishing the few topics we haven’t fully covered yet. Pulling the whole thing together so that in a way that grabs the attention of its readers. Although we had planned to focus on the former for the next few weeks, our bosses (aka our editors) asked us to do the latter. In the end, we realized we have been writing an unusual book because we felt the need to make it interesting, challenging, and empowering. Unusual, interesting, challenging, and empowering are rarely words one associates with textbook, so I thought it would be useful to spell out why we are doing so in a blog post that will, in turn, help us polish the final draft of the all-important first chapter.

Writing an Unusual, Interesting, Challenging, and Empowering Book2018-11-19T13:57:29+00:00

Gender and Peacebuilding

Ten days ago, I attended the Northeastern meeting of the International Studies Association to give a paper. Afterward, I stayed long enough to attend one more panel. I chose one on gender because I knew I would be writing about its role in peacebuilding in my textbook sometime in the next few weeks. It was a great choice because a number of the presentation forced me to (re)think about the role of gender in international relations in general and how we peacebuilders have (and haven’t) dealt with it. Three issues stood out, all of which will appear in expanded form in the book.

Gender and Peacebuilding2018-11-12T17:06:08+00:00

AfP’s PeaceCon 2018

The Alliance for Peacebuilding held its annual conference last week. With more than 600 attendees at an open day at the United States Institute of Peace and more than 300 at two more days for our members, it was by far the largest such event we’ve ever put on. We also learned more than we have in any other year. Some of that came in larger sessions, some of which had keynote speakers. These will appear on the AfP web site sooner rather than later.

AfP’s PeaceCon 20182018-10-29T16:11:43+00:00