Kevin Avruch

Kevin Avruch has been Dean of S-CAR since 2013. Avruch is also the Henry Hart Rice Professor of Conflict Resolution and Professor of Anthropology in the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, and faculty and senior fellow in the Peace Operations Policy Program (School of Public Policy), at George Mason University. He received his A.B. from the University of Chicago and M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California at San Diego. He has taught at UCSD, the University of Illinois at Chicago and, since 1980, at GMU, where he served as Coordinator of the Anthropology Program in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology from 1990-1996. From 2005-2008 he served as Associate Director of S-CAR.

Professor Avruch has published more than sixty-five articles and essays and is author or editor of seven books, including Critical Essays on Israeli Society, Religion, and Government (1997), Culture and Conflict Resolution (1998) Information Campaigns for Peace Operations (2000), Context and Pretext in Conflict Resolution: Culture, Identity, Power and Practice (2012), and Conflict Resolution and Human Needs: Linking Theory and Practice (2013, with C.R. Mitchell). His other writings include articles and essays on culture theory and conflict analysis and resolution, theorizing power and practice, third party processes, cross-cultural negotiation, nationalist and ethnoreligious social movements, human rights, and politics and society in contemporary Israel. Professor Avruch has lectured widely in the United States and abroad. He spent the 1996-1997 academic year as senior fellow in the Jennings Randolph Program for International Peace at the United States Institute for Peace. He was the Joan B. Kroc Peace Scholar at the Kroc School of Peace Studies, University of San Diego in Spring 2009, and he was a Fulbright Specialist at the Malaviya Peace Research Centre, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, India, in December 2011.

Professor Avruch is currently working on projects investigating sources of political violence in protracted conflicts, the role of human rights and truth and reconciliation commissions in post conflict peace building, and theorizing power in asymmetric conflicts and conflict resolution.