The main conference building is the Hesburgh Center for International Studies (HC). Additional sessions and meals will take place in Jenkins Nanovic Halls (JN), which is immediately next door (to the south) of the Hesburgh Center.
In the Hesburgh Center, sessions will take place in the Auditorium, C103, and the Great Hall. In Jenkins Nanovic Halls, meals will take place in the Forum (the main atrium, down the hall and to the left) and sessions will take place in 1050, which is adjacent to the Forum.
11:00 am – 1:00 pm
Check-In, Free Time (HC Great Hall)
Pre-registered participants and presenters should check-in at the Hospitality Desk to receive name badges and materials. Volunteers will be available to answer questions about campus or nearby eateries for those wishing to explore before the conference begins.
1:00 pm – 1:15 pm
Session 1. Welcome Remarks (HC Auditorium/Virtual)
Faiza Filali and Coby McKeown, 2026 Conference Chairs, will offer introductory remarks, share last minute announcements, and provide tips and best practices for a successful conference experience.
1:15 pm – 1:30 pm
Break
1:30 pm – 2:45 pm
Session 2. Workshop (JN 1050)
“Soothing and Moving the Social Body: Embodied Approaches for Strategic Peacebuilding in an Age of Complexity”
elizabeth lazaarre kaplan – University of Notre Dame
Peacebuilding is relational work, yet chronic stress and unresolved trauma physiologically undermine the very capacities it requires. When our nervous systems are dysregulated, we lose access to empathy, nuance, and collaborative imagination. This workshop argues that stress and trauma healing is not a supplement to peacebuilding—it is foundational to it. Drawing on eight years at The Center for Mind-Body Medicine (CMBM), I will share stories and impact data from some of the world’s largest trauma-healing programs: in Gaza, where CMBM’s trained facilitators have served hundreds of thousands of people in what remains the largest ongoing trauma-healing program in the territory (highlighting outcomes from a published Randomized Controlled Trial); on Pine Ridge Reservation, where tribal schools united across internal divisions to address youth suicide crises; in Puerto Rico and Northern California after climate disasters; and within the Veterans Administration’s largest regional network. Participants will experience CMBM’s evidence-based mind body skills approach firsthand, including diaphragmatic breathing to regulate the nervous system, active meditation to release tension, and guided imagery or drawing to access intuitive wisdom.
Session 3. Workshop (HC C103)
“Know Your Rights: ICE Resistance Training”
Siena Mann – University of Notre Dame
Every person, regardless of their immigration status, has constitutional rights. Understanding those rights, and how they are being violated, is the first step in protecting yourself, your loved ones and your community. Whether you’re at school, work, or in public, knowing how to respond to ICE enforcement in critical moments can make a difference. This practical workshop will train you on risk assessment and how to respond to ICE activity, with up-to-date information about how to plug in with immigrant rights efforts across the country.
Session 4. Panel Discussion (HC Auditorium)
“Generation Z Rising: Youth Power and Political Chance in Nepal”
Taylor Bennett, Charlie Baker, Calvin Brown, Maddy Anderson, and Joshua Adler – University of Manchester
This presentation, led by peace studies students from Manchester University who visited Nepal, explores the unprecedented role of Nepal’s Generation Z in challenging entrenched political systems and catalyzing a change of government. Drawing from on-the-ground accounts, social media campaigns, and youth-led organizing, it examines how a digitally connected, socially conscious generation transformed frustration into coordinated action. We will trace the movement’s origins, tactics, and leadership, highlight the cultural and political context that gave rise to it, and consider its implications for democratic participation, governance, and intergenerational power dynamics across South Asia and beyond.
2:45 pm – 3:00 pm
Break
3:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Session 5. Thematic Panel (HC Auditorium/Virtual)
Gender and Peacebuilding – Moderator: TBD
“Educating for Peace Beyond the Classroom: Care, Gendered Violence, and Counter-Pedagogies in Colombia”
Andrea Camila Farfan Ardila – Pontifica Universidad Javeriana
This presentation explores peace education beyond institutional curricula, focusing on how war reconfigures gendered violence, care, and everyday pedagogical practices in Colombia. Drawing on feminist and decolonial scholarship, the paper argues that contemporary armed conflict operates through what Rita Laura Segato conceptualizes as a “pedagogy of cruelty,” where violence against women and feminized bodies functions as a sovereign message inscribed on the body-territory. At the same time, women’s everyday practices of care, memory, and communal sustenance emerge as counter-pedagogical responses that sustain life amid violence. Rather than approaching peace education as a normative or policy-driven framework, this presentation conceptualizes education as a situated, relational, and often informal practice that takes place in kitchens, rituals, caregiving networks, and community organizing. Engaging with feminist political economy of care (Vega Solís), decolonial pedagogy (Walsh), and Latin American feminist thought (Cabnal, Bohórquez), the paper critically interrogates the risks of romanticizing resistance and feminizing care. It proposes an “amphibious” pedagogical approach that navigates between institutional frameworks and local, embodied knowledge, contributing to broader debates on peacebuilding, gender justice, and decolonial education.
“From Grassroots to Diplomacy: Women’s Peacebuilding in the DRC and the Impact of M23”
Pauline Shongo Omboko – American University
Despite international commitments to gender-inclusive peace processes, women’s participation in the DRC’s formal peace agreements has been limited and largely symbolic. While women play crucial roles at the local and grassroots levels, their voices are often excluded from national and regional negotiations. This presentation examines the evolution of women’s peace leadership in the DRC since 2012, when the M23 rebel group emerged. It explores how women’s roles in peace processes have shifted over time, influenced by cultural norms, newly formed networks, and interactions with armed actors. Focusing on periods of M23 activity and resurgence, the study traces changes in women’s engagement across local, national, and regional peace initiatives. Drawing on feminist scholarship and the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda, it situates women’s participation within broader conflict cycles and recurring patterns of violence. Despite efforts to promote inclusion, women’s leadership remains constrained by militarization, political exclusion, and structural inequalities. The presentation argues that sustainable peace in the DRC requires recognizing and supporting women’s leadership at all levels, ensuring it responds to the dynamics of conflict and recurrence. By highlighting the intersection of gender, peace, and security, this research underscores the necessity of meaningful female participation in peacebuilding.
Session 6. Thematic Panel (HC C103)
Peacebuilding in Colombia – Moderator: Patrick McQuestion, University of Notre Dame
“Nunca Más Re(d)clutados: A Social Media Intervention to Prevent Armed Group Recruitment in Colombia”
Kirsten Chaplin Rojas – University of San Diego
Most intrastate conflicts worldwide involve rebel or insurgent groups that take up arms against the state, many of which rely on the recruitment of minors as a core strategy to sustain their numbers and operational strength. Colombia’s six-decade conflict exemplifies this pattern. Colombian armed groups have long depended on minors to fill their ranks–a practice that continues despite the signing of the 2016 Peace Accord. Recruitment methods have shifted over time, evolving into what has now become a primary tool of mobilization: social media. To combat this phenomenon, I propose a social media intervention titled Nunca Más Re(d)clutados, integrating two complementary approaches. At the national level, Elige tu Camino provides alternative narratives and exposes the realities of life within armed groups. Through short-form videos and coordinated hashtag campaigns, this initiative aims to disrupt idealized portrayals of armed groups, strengthen identification with positive civilian identities, and reduce youth susceptibility to recruitment messaging. Internationally, Dónde Está La Paz challenges the narrative that peace was achieved in 2016 by revealing the persistence of violence and child recruitment by armed groups. This campaign seeks to mobilize international awareness and advocacy to pressure the Colombian government to strengthen prevention and protection measures.
“Multilevel Governance for Peace: Colombia’s Peace Implementation of the Rural Reform”
Sebastian Restrepo – Cornell University
This presentation examines how institutional continuity and multi-sectoral coordination at the national level have enabled and constrained the implementation of Colombia’s 2016 Peace Agreement, focusing on the social welfare dimension of Comprehensive Rural Reform (Point 1). While the Agreement created an ambitious institutional architecture to address land inequality and rural exclusion as root causes of conflict, its implementation has unfolded across three administrations with divergent political priorities. Drawing on ongoing dissertation research, this paper analyzes how coordination among national ministries, agencies, and presidential bodies has shaped the pace, coherence, and territorial reach of rural reform policies. It argues that despite formal institutional persistence, weak inter-agency coordination mechanisms, shifting political commitments, and fragmented implementation strategies have limited the state’s capacity to deliver sustained peace dividends in rural areas. By centering on national-level governance dynamics, the presentation contributes to debates on peace implementation, state capacity, and post-conflict social policy, highlighting how continuity without effective coordination can undermine transformative peacebuilding. The findings speak directly to contemporary peacebuilding challenges, where durable peace depends less on agreement design than on the institutional infrastructures that translate commitments into long-term social welfare outcomes.
4:00 pm – 4:15 pm
Break
4:15 pm – 5:30 pm
Session 7. Thematic Panel (JN 1050)
(Post-)Liberal Peacebuilding – Moderator: Melissa Baganz, University of Notre Dame
“Peace Requires Silence: Why Contemporary Peacebuilding is Structurally Incompatible with Liberation”
Catherine Chinchilla – University of North Texas
Contemporary peacebuilding is often framed as a moral and relational project oriented toward reconciliation, stability, and the gradual realization of justice. This proposal argues that peacebuilding, as it is currently practiced, is structurally incompatible with liberation because it functions as a governance project that depends on silence. Silence is not an unintended failure of peace processes but a necessary mechanism through which post-conflict order is rendered governable. Silence is a political technology produced through three interrelated processes. First, peacebuilding depoliticizes grievances to render them legible and administratively manageable, reframing structural injustice as individualized trauma or miscommunication. Second, it contains radical demands by prioritizing calm over confrontation, translating political struggle into procedural forms that neutralize disruption. Third, it preserves the legitimacy of authority by framing anger and dissent, particularly from marginalized groups, as destabilizing threats rather than political responses to ongoing violence. Liberation, by contrast, depends on politicization, disruption, and the refusal of premature reconciliation. By neutralizing conflict in the name of stability, peacebuilding forecloses the very conditions liberation requires. There is a need for alternative vocabularies as we encounter authoritarian consolidation and normalized security, and alternative frameworks grounded in liberation are necessary for confronting structural violence in post-conflict contexts.
“Deliberative Technologies as Infrastructure for Transrational Peace”
Rida Ejaz – University of Notre Dame
The profound paradigm shifts in world order is increasingly undermining the foundations of relationality and legitimacy of peace practices. New problems need new infrastructures to address the multi-layered conflicts of this era. This paper argues that transrational peace practices which emphasizes relationality requires new methods capable of upscaling and producing relationality. Drawing on transrational theory of peace, the paper conceptualizes peace as an emergent, relational process. The paper advances the claim that deliberative technologies when embedded within reflexive and embodied research practices can func>on as infrastructures for relationality. Methodologically, the study proposes and tests a transrational deliberative approach that combines auto-ethnography with a comparative deliberation process using the platform Polis. The research examines how peace is articulated, how disagreement is held, and whether relational patterns emerge across deliberative spaces within and beyond the University of Notre Dame, with particular attention to perspectives outside the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. Rather than seeking consensus or definitive outcomes, the analysis focuses on discursive and relational patterns that reveal how peace is practiced and imagined. By positioning technology as relational infrastructure rather than solution, this paper demonstrates how deliberative technologies can broaden participation, disrupt polarization, and support the emergence of transrational peace in a fragmented world.
“When There Is Still a Need: Reimagining Humanitarian NGOs in a Post-Liberal World”
Ailee Viana – Wheaton College
Caritas Cyprus, which started operating in the Republic of Cyprus in 1986, is an NGO focused on caring for the poor and vulnerable. In the 2010s and 2020s, the European refugee crisis affected Cyprus, resulting in thousands of asylum claims a month. Caritas Cyprus increasingly found itself providing essential support and services to refugees and asylum seekers arriving in Cyprus. Now, as the European Union becomes increasingly populist and isolationist, anti-immigration policies are reducing the number of asylum claims in Cyprus. Furthermore, the European Commission is heavily promoting voluntary return to decrease refugee and asylee populations. As Cyprus and the EU go through fundamental shifts in acceptance and integration of refugees and asylum seekers, Caritas Cyprus will have to grapple with how it can provide humanitarian aid to these vulnerable populations. This research project attempts to describe the decline of liberalism in international refugee law, determine the role of humanitarian NGOs in a post-liberal world, and give a possible route that Caritas Cyprus can take in the face of decreasing asylum numbers.
Session 8. Thematic Panel (HC Auditorium)
Community and Development – Moderator: TBD
“Traces of Apartheid: Housing Discrimination and Mental Health in Cape Town, South Africa”
Linnea Barron – University of Notre Dame
Inequalities and structural violence remain high in post-Apartheid South Africa. In this study, we attempt to understand the relationship between mental health and housing inequalities in two townships in Cape Town, Khayelitsha and Mitchell’s Plain. Using a large dataset (N=405) of adults, we found that individuals in Mitchell’s Plain had higher levels of stress related to access to city services. Despite this, individuals in Mitchell’s Plain were more likely to live in formal housing and have access to water, electricity, and toilets than those in Khayelitsha. A linear multiple regression analysis (R² = 0.1236; F(11, 348) = 4.46; p < 0.001) revealed that sharing a latrine, stress over services, drain overflows, house ownership, house type, housing rooms, and roof types were associated with higher levels of anxiety. A separate linear multiple regression analysis (R² = 0.1190; F(11, 372) = 4.57; p < 0.001) revealed a significant positive effect on depression scores of sharing a latrine, stress over services, drain overflows, house ownership, house type, housing rooms, and roof types. The results of this study have important implications for the ongoing effects of Apartheid in South Africa and current-day city policies.
“We’re Digging Into Deficits, and It’s Time to Put Down the Shovel: Asset-Based Community Development”
Lauren Chuhta – Cornell University
International aid is a critical space in peace-building. As a conductor of diplomacy, forum of intercultural empathy, and tool for resource distribution, international aid operates as a space for both pro- and reactivity to conflict. In this proposal, I focus on several prominent, underlying philosophies of aid and the direct impacts these approaches have on aid quality. With a focus on U.S. based initiatives, I introduce the predominant hierarchical approach to international aid and its effects on relationship building and program quality. Hierarchical aid positions the aid-giver above the aid-recipient and assumes a one-way flow of resources, generating a colonial-esque power dynamic that stifles exchange and minimizes aid quality. I discuss asset-based community development (ABCD) as an alternative aid framework to centralize local empowerment, advancing program effectiveness and fiscal efficiency. To explore the future of ABCD in U.S. international aid, I’ve designed and conducted an empirical study examining how a cross section of U.S. high schoolers, pedagogically guided by a prominent international development NGO, engage with ABCD while proposing aid programs. Preliminary findings reveal that students engage with ABCD at a minimal extent, instead focusing on hierarchical approaches. I conclude with potential pedagogical reforms.
“Community Sponsorship as Everyday Peace: Migration, Solidarity, and Peacebuilding”
Agustina Galantini – University of Notre Dame
In a global context marked by the erosion of international law, the securitization of migration, and the normalization of exclusionary narratives, peacebuilding has space to grow outside traditional institutional and diplomatic frameworks. This presentation argues that community sponsorship programs for refugees can be understood as an emergent form of peace culture, producing peace not through formal conflict resolution mechanisms, but through everyday practices of solidarity, coexistence, and shared responsibility. Drawing on the case of Argentina’s Syria Program (2014–2024), the paper analyzes community sponsorship through three complementary peace frameworks: Johan Galtung’s concept of cultural peace, Francisco Muñoz’s notion of imperfect peace, and Roger Mac Ginty’s everyday peace. While migration policies are rarely framed as peacebuilding tools, this case demonstrates how bottom-up, state- and community- supported sponsorship initiatives challenge xenophobic narratives, humanize displacement, and foster social cohesion at the local level. By examining both programmatic outcomes and societal effects, the presentation highlights how small-scale practices generate everyday peace in a world increasingly dominated by securitized responses to mobility. Community sponsorship offers a lens to rethink peacebuilding beyond traditional models, emphasizing imperfect, localized, and relational forms of peace.
Session 9. Panel Discussion (HC C103)
“Building Disaster Resilient Communities through Women’s Leadership: Lessons from Asia”
Laura Somerset, Nicole Canali de Castro, and Eyosaite Weldegabre – University of Notre Dame
Women are disproportionately affected by disasters caused by natural hazards, and they are often excluded from leading and participating in disaster preparedness and response (DPR). This compounds the impacts of gender inequality and weakens local disaster resilience, a dynamic which is increasingly exacerbated by climate change. Researchers from the Keough School of Global Affairs spent two months in Nepal and the Philippines, examining the impacts of Oxfam’s women’s empowerment programs on community disaster resilience. At this lecture they present new findings into the barriers preventing women’s leadership in DPR, and proven strategies for overcoming them so that women can bring their leadership skills to the table. They also showcase the unique ways in which women lead their communities towards disaster resilience. As communities around the world confront more frequent and severe storms, flooding, landslides and other disasters, this research highlights adaptation strategies that increase gender equality while also promoting holistic community wellbeing.
5:30 pm – 5:45 pm
Break
5:45 pm – 7:00 pm
Session 10. Keynote Talk (HC Auditorium/Virtual)
“Youth-(l)ed Futures of Peace and Security? ‘Worldbuilding’ and Creativity in a New Age of Authoritarianism”
Dr. Siobhan McEvoy-Levy – Butler University
The international system is youth-ed (just as it is gendered): it is socially constructed by age-based categories and hierarchies, by discourses about the qualities, capabilities, and liabilities of ‘youth’, and by the actions and practices of young people in and for war/peace. These processes of youth-ed war/peace are embedded within structures and systems that trivialize, ignore, instrumentalize, romanticize, and otherwise misrepresent the actual contributions young people make. Plural forms of peacebuilding are embedded in youth cultures and in young people’s ever-evolving social and relational practices, survival strategies, creative expressions, and political commitments. In this talk, I’ll engage with the concept of ‘worldbuilding’ and center young people’s roles in peace work: resisting violence, creating bridges across differences, and imagining and creating livable futures. Drawing on recent research collaborations with young scholars and on art, gaming and photography – I’ll ask us to think about how youth-(l)ed futures of peace and security are being imagined and constructed and our own related positionalities and contributions. While the focus is on youth, ‘worldbuilding’ has many applications related to peace agreements, disarmament and demilitarization processes, activism, healing after protracted conflict, and living amid authoritarian expansion.