Engage in this exciting webinar, Our Brains at War: The Neuroscience of Conflict and Peacebuilding. Led by Mari Fitzduff, this webinar title suggests that we need a radical change in how we think about war, leadership, and politics. Most of us, political scientists included, fail to appreciate the extent to which instincts and emotions, rather than logic, factor into our societal politics and international wars. Many of our physiological and genetic tendencies, of which we are mostly unaware, can all too easily fuel our antipathy towards other groups, make us choose ‘strong’ leaders over more mindful leaders, assist recruitment for illegal militias, and facilitate even the most gentle of us to inflict violence on others. Drawing upon the latest research from emerging areas such as behavioural genetics, biopsychology, and social and cognitive neuroscience, this book identifies the sources of compelling instincts and emotions, and how we can acknowledge and better manage them so as to develop international and societal peace more effectively.

This 90-minute conversation event will be on March 22th, 2022, at 2:00 pm EDT (UTC -4) | 6:00pm UK Time (GMT). Please use the Time Zone Converter to determine when this engaging conversation will be in your time zone. 

Register here!

Speaker Bio

Mari Fitzduff

Mari Fitzduff is Professor Emerita, and founding director of the Masters professional programs in Conflict Resolution and Coexistence at Brandeis University http://heller.brandeis.edu/coexistence/. Previously she was Chair of Conflict Studies at Ulster University in Northern Ireland where she was Director of UNU/INCORE, a research body examining the many ways in which conflicts can be ended, and peaceful diversity sustained in divided societies http://www.incore.ulst.ac.uk/ . From 1990-97 she was the founding Chief Executive of the Northern Ireland Community Relations Council, a semi-public body that funded and helped develop conflict resolution programs with government, statutory bodies, trade unions, churches, community groups, security groups, paramilitaries, prisoners, businesses, and politicians https://www.community-relations.org.uk/ .   In 1988 she was a founding member of the Mediation Northern Ireland https://mediationnorthernireland.org/ which undertook much of the community and political mediation processes in Northern Ireland.
Fitzduff has worked on conflicts in the  Northern Ireland, Basque Country, the Caucasus, Sri Lanka, Middle East, Russia, Peru, Columbia, etc.  Her books include Fitzduff, M:  ‘Beyond Violence’ – Conflict Resolution Processes in Northern Ireland, United Nations Press, Fitzduff, M and Stout, C: The Psychology of Resolving Global Conflicts: From War to Peace. 3 Vols. Praeger Press, and Fitzduff, M: Public Policies in Shared Societies Palgrave MacMillan. In 2017 she edited a book called  ‘Why Irrational Politics Appeals: Understanding the Allure of Trump’ (2017) In 2019, along with Sue Williams, she published a book  ‘Dialogue in Divided Societies: Skills for Working with Groups in Conflict’. Her latest book is ‘Our Brains at War: The Neuroscience of Conflict and Peacebuilding published by Oxford University Press, in 2021.