Rochelle Arms most recently served as the Restorative Justice Coordinator of the New York Peace Institute. While there, she managed mediation and restorative justice initiatives with the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office, Juvenile Justice Courts, schools, and community agencies in Brooklyn and Manhattan.
In the last 12 years, she has worked both in the U.S. and abroad in collaborative processes and restorative justice projects, with a variety of groups, including civil society organizations in India, indigenous peoples in Argentina, immigrants and refugees, and homicide offenders and victim survivors in Kentucky.
Rochelle has a B.A. in Religion and Peace Studies from Swarthmore College, and a Masters Degree in International Relations through a Rotary Peace Fellowship in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She is interested in the transference of mediation and restorative practices to different cultural settings, especially as related to marginalized groups in her native Panama and in other parts of the world.
Margaret Chasara graduated Suma cum laude from Taylor University in Indiana, in 2011, with BA degrees in International Relations (Economics concentration) and Psychology; she also had a double minor in Political Science and Developmental Economics. She went on to receive a Master of International Development Policy (specializing in Applied Economics) from Duke University in 2013.
Margaret has lived, studied and worked in a variety of countries in North and South America, Europe, Asia and Africa. She has worked for Amnesty International in Zimbabwe and various international schools around the world. Her interests include: capacity building and management of sustainable development projects in fragile and transitioning states, post-conflict economic and social reconstruction, collaborative resource management for effective environmental conflict resolution in the context of regions undergoing rapid economic growth. Last but not least, she is also interested in the design of effective and democratic land tenure management systems in Africa.
Beth Eck is a native Washingtonian and graduate of Georgetown University, where she majored in Japanese language and culture. During her undergraduate career, she studied at Nanzan University in Nagoya, Japan; she returned to work as a cross-cultural educator for a southern Japanese municipal government. She then earned a master's degree with merit from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, where she focused on gender socialization in Japanese primary schools. After taking the long way home via Asia and Europe, Beth spent five years working in international education, advising international students and study abroad students going to programs in Asia and Africa. She has mediation experience in a higher education setting, and comes to S-CAR wanting explore the construction of history and how it contributes to conflict, concentrating on Japan and its relationship with Asian neighbors in a post-WWII context.
Mariam Kurtz is an author and co-editor of a two-volume project on Women, War and Violence to be published in 2014 by Praeger. Among Mariam’s publications are articles on nationalism as well as religion and social conflict. She has presented a paper at the American Sociological Association on “Transmigration and West Papua: Human Rights versus Economic Policies” looking at the conflict between indigenous Papuans and other stakeholders of the gold mining industry in West Papua.
She holds a Masters of Science degree in Conflict Analysis and Resolution from George Mason University, has a BA in communication from St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas, and an Associates degree in journalism from the Tanzania School of Journalism, University of Dar-es-Salaam.
As a journalist she worked with newspapers as well as radio and television networks in Tanzania and the USA. Mariam wrote on a corruption scandal involving top officials of the Tanzanian government. She also interviewed child solders abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and produced a radio program aired on the Voice of America Swahili Service. Among other programs aired by VOA include rape in the DRC and Southern Sudan’s transition as a new nation.
She also worked with the Tanzania Media Women’s Association, and Mtanzania, Rai and Dimba newspapers where she published many news stories addressing inequality and injustice, elections and corruption in Tanzania.
Edi Jurkovic graduated from the Technical High School in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina, in 1994. He received his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Defense in Belgrade, Serbia, in 1998. He spent 13 years as commissioned officer in the Armed Forces of Bosnia and Herzegovina, serving in a multitude of positions, including basic duty as a platoon leader, second in command armor battalion and of a training center for conscripts, and a course developer and liaison officer in an international training center for peace support operations.
He was involved in the negotiation of merging two formerly warring armed forces in Bosnia, and subsequently he aided in the training and education of Bosnian’s international staff regarding civil-military cooperation, ethics, staff procedures, integrity, and gender rights. In 2011 he was honorably discharged from the Armed Forces, at his request, and moved to the United States. He is pursuing a Master’s degree at the University of Banja Luka in the field of diplomatic and consular law as well as a PhD in conflict analysis and resolution at George Mason University (GMU). He is fellow at Center for Infrastructure Protection and Homeland Security.
Oded Adomi Leshem holds a BA in Education and an MA in Conflict Resolution and Mediation from the Tel-Aviv University, where he also worked as a project director. He also graduated the Sam Spiegel Film and School in Jerusalem and worked for a decade as I freelance documentary filmmaker and cameraman until he decided to focus on peace building in his region. Since then, Adomi has directed Israeli-Palestinian partnership projects for various organizations and participated in nonviolent activism and humanitarian initiatives. He is also a certified mediator in Israel.
In recent years, Adomi has been repeatedly invited to lecture in leading universities in North America about his documentary film "Voices from El-Sayed" depicting the lives of the members of the largest deaf community in the world which resides in a Bedouin Village in the Negev Desert. He also lectures about the research and initiatives he is involved with concerning the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
His current research interests are: social psychological aspects of conflict, militarism and pacifism, human rights, nonviolent struggles and youth in conflict zones.
Oded was born in Jerusalem in 1972 and was nicknamed Adomi when he was 10. He is husband to charming Jasmin and father to amazing kids, Aviv, Ma'ayan and Nadav.
Alexandra Schaerrer was born and raised in Zurich Switzerland, and attended Washington and Lee University in Lexington Virginia, graduating summa cum laude with a BA in Political Science and German Literature. In 2006 I earned my first Masters from the Swiss Polytechnic Institute of Zurich (ETH) in Comparative and International Studies. My thesis examined the causal mechanisms leading to ethno-nationalist conflict in the Great Lakes Region of Africa, and in particular delved into the necessary and sufficient variables present or absent in varying stages of stability and violent escalation.
After taking the United Nations exam I decided instead to accept a position with a grass-root NGO in Tanzania in order to better bridge the gap between theoretical approaches to conflict and development and the practical application of such frameworks on the ground. I spent three years in Tanzania and Mozambique working with various projects focusing primarily on conservation, education, gender, health and sustainability.
In 2011 I felt ready to return to the theoretical table, and joined the double Masters program via The University of Malta’s MEDAC program on Mediterranean Security Studies and George Mason University’s S-CAR program on Conflict Analysis and Resolution. Conflict mapping in Eastern and Central Africa remains the primary focus of my academic and research interest, especially as pertains to perceived regional outlier cases and the added value that potentially unexplored and/or omitted variables exposed by comparative case studies may add to the theoretical frameworks employed by policy makers.
Wilfredo Magno Torres III is an anthropologist with 12 years of experience in peace and development work. He has managed The Asia Foundation’s conflict management program in the Philippines. In this capacity, he designed, supported, and coordinated conflict management projects in close collaboration with the Foundation’s partners. Prior to his work with the Foundation, he served in Sulu as faculty and director for research and extension of the Notre Dame of Jolo College. He did several studies in Sulu, Philippines and in Sabah, Malaysia, on topics that deal with sea tenure, household adaptive strategies, gender relations, ethnicity, leadership, and conflict resolution mechanisms. He edited and co-authored “Rido: Clan Feuding and Conflict Management in Mindanao.” Recently, he has designed and managed programs that helped improve relations between communities and security forces, and facilitated engagements between the religious sector in Sulu and Basilan with security and development actors. He is a recipient of a Chevening Fellowship and is an Asian Public Intellectual Fellow of the Nippon Foundation. He was trained in people-centered development under the Institute of Philippine Culture and received his M.A. in Anthropology from the Ateneo de Manila University under a fellowship from the Ford Foundation.
Carissa Western holds a BA in Political Science and International Relations from the University of California San Diego (UCSD), and an MA in Peace and Justice from the Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies at the University of San Diego (USD). Carissa has worked in Kenya’s Southern Rift Valley developing and implementing sustainable development and conflict aversion programs with Nomadic Pastoralist communities. She has also worked for The Carter Center’s Conflict Resolution Program, primarily focusing on the implementation of Access to Justice projects in Liberia. Carissa currently works as a consultant for the Office of the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman (CAO), the independent recourse mechanism for the private sector arms of the World Bank, which exists to address the concerns of vulnerable communities. Raised in Kenya, Carissa is a fluent Swahili speaker, and through her studies at S-CAR will look more deeply at gender dynamics in community level conflict resolution in the Horn of Africa.