ICAR'S Annual Conference: "Zones of Peace"

This year's annual conference took as its theme the establishment and maintenance of local "Zones of Peace," and was organized by ICAR doctoral student Susan Allen Nan and ICAR Professors Christopher Mitchell and Wallace Warfield, with considerable assistance from Ambassador Walter , Stadtler and Professor David Davis or George Mason's Institute for Public Policy. The original idea had been to focus on the problems and pay-offs to local populations who manage to establish local weapons-free or violence-free "safe" zones in the midst of intense civil strife and to examine whether there are common situations that contribute to the success or failure of these zones. The conference planners also asked whether there were parallels to he drawn between local peace zones in countries such as Bosnia, El Salvador, or the Philippines and the safe zones set up in inner cities to the United States.

The subject turned out to be much wider and more interesting than they had originally envisaged, with conference presenters addressing topics as diverse as protective accompaniment, Red Cross relief corridors, UN operations in the Congo in the early 1960s, nuclear free zones, and the various efforts to establish safe zones in the former Yugoslavia.

The speakers were as varied as the topics discussed and included soldiers, such as Major General Indar Jit Rikye, commander of the UN Force in the Congo, and Colonel Peter Leentjes, only recently returned from the former Yugoslavia to the UN Department of Peacekeeping. Contributors with personal and practical experience of establishing local zones of peace in the midst of civil wars included Liam Mahony, Ramon Lopez Reyes, and Frank Sieverts of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Visiting academics included Elise Boulding, former president of the International Peace Research Association (IPRA), Ramon Lopez Reyes of the International Center for the Study of Zones of Peace in Hawaii, and Robert Gravelle, who together with ICAR faculty and students, completed the list of presenters.

As in past conferences, ICAR students acted as discussants for the presentations, which are now being revised, written up, edited, and readied for the spring 1997 publication of Peace Review.