Previous Scholars in Residence
2021-23
Aref Dostyar is former Consul General of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan in Los Angeles. Previously he worked in Afghanistan’s Office of the National Security Council, serving as the Director General for International Relations and Regional Cooperation and Director of Peace and Reconciliation Affairs. In these leadership positions, he provided regular policy insight to the President of Afghanistan and his team and served as liaison to global foreign policy directors. Dostyar's writing can be found in the New York Times, the BBC, In Search of Peace for Afghanistan (Kakar History Foundation Press, 2021), Strategic Journal (Routledge, 2016), and other publications. Through a Fulbright Scholarship, Dostyar earned a Master's in International Peace Studies from the University of Notre Dame's Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies.
2019-2020
Nassim AbiGhanem is a Ph.D. student in International Relations at Central European University in Budapest and Vienna, where he also is a teacher assistant for M.A. courses, ethnic conflict management, nationalism and populism, foreign policy analysis, and macro and micro economics for public policy. Nassim received his M.A. in International Politics - International Relations from the University of Manchester, focusing on US foreign policy in Lebanon. Nassim's research interests focus on non-governmental political organizations, civil society organizations (CSOs) and informal political social networks.
Josefina Echavarría Alvarez is Co-Director of the Research Centre for Peace and Conflict and Senior Lecturer at the University of Innsbruck and Senior Lecturer. While at the Kroc Institute, she worked on her project, “Territorial peacebuilding in Colombia: An elicitive map of peace, reconciliation and conflict transformation,” and established research and academic collaboration between the University of Innsbruck and the Kroc Institute.
Janna L. Hunter-Bowman is Assistant Professor of Peace Studies and Christian Social Ethics and Director of Peace Studies at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary, as well as a member of the Advisory Board of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. While at the Kroc Institute, she worked on writing a book about theological peacebuilding rooted in 16 years of fieldwork and engaged research in Colombia.
Sawsan Malla Hussein is an Assistant Professor of English at Abdelmalek Essaadi University, Tetouan, Morocco. She was on a three-month long Fulbright post-doc at the Kroc Institute working on developing her doctoral dissertation into a book. Her dissertation is entitled, “Toward a Peace Studies Approach to Literature: An Alternative Perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.”
2018-2019
David Lanz is the Co-Head of the Mediation Program at swisspeace and a lecturer at the University of Basel. While the Kroc Institute, Lanz worked on a book project based on his dissertation and examined the role of the Responsibility to Protect norm in relation to the Darfur conflict. The book traces Darfur’s trajectory from a forgotten conflict to one of the most prominent global causes and its return to forgotten status in recent years.
Ahmet Erdi Öztürk is a Fellow at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO) at Linköping University. He is also the Turkey correspondent for EUREL (Sociological and Legal Data on Religions in Europe and Beyond). While at the Kroc Institute, Öztürk worked on revisions of his book manuscript and on published articles at the Journal of Southeast European and Black Sea Studies and International Spectator.
Arin Savran recently completed her Ph.D. in Peace Studies at the University of Bradford, United Kingdom. While at the Kroc Institute, she worked with Professor Caroline Hughes on developing her 2018 doctoral dissertation into a book manuscript.
Christoph Trinn holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Heidelberg University, Germany. While at the Kroc Institute, he worked on an article on the role of trigger events in the escalation of intrastate conflicts. The analysis showed how individual incidents can spark propagating chain reactions. It highlighted the challenges of forecasting dynamics in, and intervening into, complex social systems.