Nir Eisikovits

 

Dr. Eisikovits, an Israeli attorney, earned his PhD in legal and political philosophy from Boston University in 2005. His research focuses on the moral and political dilemmas arising in post-conflict and transitional settings. Some of the questions he is interested in concern the possibility of sympathy between enemies, the feasibility of forgiveness in politics, and the comparative benefits of truth commissions and war crime tribunals for societies emerging from prolonged conflict. He has written numerous op-ed pieces on the Middle East conflict for American publications such as The Miami Herald, The Forward and In These Times. Before coming to Boston, he worked at the Tel Aviv District Attorney's office. In addition to his work for the ICfC, Dr. Nir Eisikovitz teaches legal and political philosophy at Suffolk University, where he directs the Graduate Program in Ethics and Public Policy.  

 

Publications:

 

• “Forget Forgiveness: On The Benefits of Sympathy for Political Reconciliation" (Theoria, 105)

• "I am the Enemy you Killed my Friend: Rethinking The Legitimacy of Truth Commissions" (Metaphilosophy, 37)

• "Moral Luck and the Criminal Law" (in Law and Social Justice, Cambell et al., eds., MIT, 2005).

• Sympathizing with the Enemy: Reconciliation, Transitional Justice, Negotiation (Martinus Nijhoff and RoL) and was the subject of a special symposium in the Review of International Affairs (http://www.suffolk.edu/files/College_Communications/RIA_No._1138-1139.pdf).

 

 

Dagmar Kusa

 

Dr. Dagmar (Dasha) Kusa currently teaches at the Bratislava International School of Liberal Arts in Bratislava, Slovakia. She has started research for a book on the narratives of historical trauma in Central Europe, which will study the topic of trauma narratives in political use (and misuse) comparatively.  Dasha is also involved with the organization Muslim Jewish Conference, which holds an annual conference for Muslim and Jewish youth.

 

Dasha received her MA degree in political science from Comenius University in her native Slovakia. She received her PhD at Boston University and at the Institute of Ethnology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. She started off in the field of human rights at the Slovak Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, dealing mostly with issues relating to Roma, Hungarian, and Ruthenian minorities in Slovakia. Her thesis focuses on the role of historic memory in perpetuation of ethnic conflict and tensions in Central European politics today. She writes for various international policy journals. Dasha joined ICfC in January 2005 as the first permanent fellow and served as the ICfC Program Director until August 2008. She has led workshops in India, Cambodia, Europe, and the U.S. She also worked at the Euroclio - European Association of History Educators - in The Hague from September 2008 to July 2009.

 

 

Jina Moore

 

Jina Moore is an award-winning journalist with an academic background in historical memory, specializing in the language and representation of historical trauma.  Prior to becoming a journalist, she spent ten years working with Holocaust survivors.  Her academic work has been recognized with a U.S. Truman Scholarship, a Jack Kent Cooke Scholarship and a Fulbright Fellowship, among other awards. As part of the fellowship, Jina is visiting Rwandan genocide memorial sites, documenting in sound how the landscapes, and the people in them, are changing as the sites become professionalized and official. She published an essay in the Columbia Journalism Review, the profession's top publication, on the ethics of trauma reporting, arguing that journalists covering tragedies and traumas need to rethink the relationship they build, through writing, with their readers.  (http://www.jinamoore.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/moore.pdf) Her journalism has been published in a variety of outlets, including Newsweek, Foreign Policy, the Christian Science Monitor and Best American Science Writing.  She is a two-time grant recipient of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and a 2009 Ochberg Fellow of the Dart Center on Journalism and Trauma.

 

 

David B. Ramsey

 

David Baharvar Ramsey is a mediator and lawyer in New York City. He is interested in how business people, lawyers and other professionals and citizens can improve understanding and peace between groups in their societies. While he regularly negotiates agreements relating to business matters, he has also been involved with various public service legal work, including mediating legal cases (employment discrimination, landlord-tenant, divorce, and small claims). At Harvard Law School, David was a teaching assistant at the negotiation workshop, a part of Harvard's Program of Instruction for Lawyers. He also taught mediation to various groups and was a research assistant to instructors at the Program on Negotiation, assisting in the editing of the Handbook Of Dispute Resolution and a book on dealing with emotions in negotiation, and he served as an Executive Editor of the Harvard Negotiation Law Review. David has also taught online negotiation courses for staff of the United Nations Development Program, through the Consensus Building Institute.

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Adam Saltsman

 

Adam holds a BA from Colby College where he graduated Magna Cum Laude with honors in his cultural anthropology major and is currently pursuing his PhD in sociology at Boston College. His research interests include post-conflict struggles over cultural space and the distortion of cultural memory, a topic for which he conducted fieldwork in Vietnam in 2004. Prior to his Fellowship with the ICFC, Adam spent time interning with Human Rights Watch where he helped lead a youth human rights advocacy program. He also worked with victims of human trafficking and political refugees being resettled in Austin, Texas. From January 2006 - July 2007, Adam served as a Fellow for the ICFC in Cambodia, bringing together former Khmer Rouge cadre members and survivors from the Cambodian genocide to develop conciliatory dialogue strategies.

 

 

Adam Saltsman is currently living in Mae Sot, Thailand, on the border with Burma where he is conducting fieldwork for his PhD in Sociology at Boston College. His work focuses on participatory approaches to migrant advocacy for labor rights and refugee rights.  As a baseline for his dissertation research, Adam is coordinating a mixed methods study for the Feinstein International Center and the International Rescue Committee on livelihoods, vulnerability, and access to justice for Burmese asylum seekers and Thai residents of this city. In recent years, Adam has also done work in the Middle East on the issue of Iraqi displacement, publishing an article in the Forced Migration Review on Iraqi refugees’ right to information.

 

 

Shanti Sattler

 

Shanti Sattler of Eureka, California graduated from the International Relations and Peace & Justice Studies Programs at Tufts University. For the past six years she has served as an advisor to several national service organizations and is the former member and current co-chair of Youth Service America's National Youth Advisory Council. During the summer of 2005, she worked with the renowned author, psychologist and former commissioner on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Dr. Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, in Cape Town, South Africa, assisting with her research on perpetrator remorse and reintegration into post-apartheid society. In 2006, she served on the international student planning committee of the second Women as Global Leaders conference in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. She wrote a senior honors thesis in peace and justice studies on war-affected youth in Northern Uganda and participated in a research trip to Gulu. Shanti joined the International Center for Conciliation in January of 2006. She has been working for the Center in Phnom Penh office, Cambodia, since July 2007.

 

Shanti Sattler is currently pursuing her M.A. in international studies and diplomacy at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).  Inspired by her time working for ICfC in Cambodia, she is focusing her dissertation on the role of victims in international war crimes tribunals.  Shanti continues to actively assist ICFC’s office in Phnom Penh as well as efforts to promote the "We Want (u) to Know" film (www.we-want-u-to-know.com) that was made in one of the villages ICFC works with in Cambodia's Takeo province.  She is also engaged with other organizations doing post-conflict reconciliation work in several African countries.

 

 

Sangeeta Isvaran

 

Sangeeta Isvaran, a frequent participants in our workshops on three continenets, studied Mathematics and Sankrit in her native town of Cennai, India. She then decided to seek training in classical Indian dance. She holds a master degree of Performing Arts in Dance. Using the traditional technique of her performing arts she has developed a unique method working with the arts in cultural diplomacy, therapy, education, empowerment and conflict resolution in some of the poorest and war-torn places in the world. For this work she was honored with some of the highest national and international awards. She spends part of each year offering dance recitals at the most prestigious performance centers in the Western world and devotes the revenues supporting her work of healing and empowerment for the vulnerable and the victimized, marginalized communities across the world, such as sex workers, street children, indigenous communities, landmine victims, victims of caste and religious conflict and so on elsewhere. She is able to annotate and elaborate upon her intricate dance movements, communicating effectively, as he does in seven languages.

 

Sangeeta writes us about the special need for 'Art for Peace' in the work of the ICfC and LAIM (the Indonesian host organization) in this "Spice Island" paradise of beauty, isolation and violence:

 

 

"Our program called ‘Art for Peace’ uses the power of different forms of art to bridge communities in conflict. Our work reflects local tensions and seeks to create opportunities for different communities to work together and learn about and from each other. The process will explore the spaces between the lines of mass movement -- what happens when you don't align yourself with the community around you, when you fall between the cracks of society, when you don't conform. During the creative process we wish to develop techniques that enable participants to reflect on the essential disjointedness of a multicultural society where widely differing communities share common physical space but exist in a completely different mental space. How do people live with difference? We want to acknowledge the things that both define us (a positive) and separate us (a negative). Through the artistic work we aim to find what it is that we can share and that can enable us to create a shared mental space.

Immigration and emigration, globalization and xenophobia, polarization and amalgamation, conflict and paralysis – these factors work, not only in Maluku but all over the world today, leading to fractured, increasingly segregated and fearful societies. The Art for Peace, as a method, strives to combat these destructive influences and create meeting grounds for people who are historically and/or acutely in conflict. We do this by discovering the silent voice within, by raising awareness on issues that are taboo. By creating personal involvement and responsibility within and across communities, by changing personal and community landscapes and perspectives and the stories we tell one another and ourselves."

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Oded Leshem Adomi

 

Oded Leshem Adomi, with degrees in and professional experience in documentary filmmaking, coordinated ICfC work with Ossim Shalom in developing communal cooperation between Israeli Jews and Israeli minority members in 2009-2011. His successes have encouraged him to do advanced work in conflict resolution at Tel Aviv University. He continues to advise us in our work to foster cooperation between Israeli, Jordanian, and Palestinian scientists, engineers, and environmentalists, in their research, policy planning, and lifesaving efforts to organize hazard risk planning and mobilization for cross border emergencies and cross border interventions.

 

 

Oded writes us:

“As I write these lines Fajr Missiles are falling a mile from my home in Tel-Aviv and Israeli F16s are destructing Gaza. At the same time, a battle is blazing on the internet where texts and images full of hostility are fanatically distributed by both Israelis and Palestinians all in the purpose of humiliating the other and building national morale.

I live in a region of conflict, a region of a protracted and an intractable violent dispute that is devastating the lives of both Arabs and Jews in the Holy Land.

 

Most of the people on both sides are frustrated and hopeless, but there are exceptions. There are people who believe that a just and comprehensive solution for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is achievable. These Palestinian and Israeli peacemakers, together with partners from all over the world, are doing their best to open the minds and hearts of the citizens of the region to the Other's pains and fears, their hopes and needs, in the long way to mutual recognition and conciliation.

I had the privilege to meet these brave people when I was chosen to be the coordinator for ICfC's "Historical Conciliation" workshops lead by ICfC and the Israeli based NGO "Ossim Shalom". In the year-and-half-long project I have worked with outstanding Arab and Jewish facilitators from "Ossim Shalom" and with the highly committed and professional staff of ICfC that were my colleagues as well as my mentors in the exciting field of peacemaking that was new for me.

 

 

Working as a project coordinator in the field of Conflict Resolution enabled me to learn a lot about the historical, cultural and political complexities of the conflict and about the depth of mutual suspicion and hostility that needs to be resolved. My successful experience with ICfC led me to continue to work in other partnership and peace projects in the region.

In these important attempts to break prejudiced attitudes and create a platform of mutual recognition, there were many moments when I thought to myself - what I see and hear now is worth researching. This is when my intellectual interests in conflicts emerged and asserted themselves as my main goals: To be a scholar-practitioner in the field of Conflict Resolution and Peacemaking."

 

I am now in my second and last year of the graduate program in Conflict Resolution and Mediation in the Tel Aviv University and am seeking a PhD in the field of Conflict Resolution and Peace Studies. No doubt, my first encounter with ICfC and its "Historical Conciliation" project was one of the main contributors to my decision to devote my attention and energy to peacemaking in my region."

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