OU Center for Peace and Development Awarded Carnegie Grant

The Center for Peace and Development at the University of Oklahoma has received a $175,000 grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York to support the center’s research mission and collaborative activities.

The two-year Carnegie grant will help develop projects under the thematic title “Peace, Conflict, and International Political Economy.” These projects will explore transnational processes, including militarism, capital accumulation and financialization, and geo-economics and human development in conflict and post-conflict societies to understand their impact on the production of (in)security on societies in the global South.

Professor Firat Demir from the CPD and Department of Economics in the College of Arts and Sciences is the principal investigator and project director for this grant. “This grant from one of the country’s most prestigious foundations is an endorsement of the CPD’s success,” Demir said.

The center’s co-directors and co-PIs of the project, professors John Harris and Sally Beach, called the award “a major step toward making CPD an important leader in community-based research.”

Since its founding in 2017, the CPD, housed in the David L. Boren College of International Studies, has been committed to knowledge creation and community-based participatory action in post-conflict societies. Its overarching goal is to play a meaningful role in transformative peacebuilding and confronting race, gender and class oppressions in conflict-affected communities.

The project will run alongside parallel grants to the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the University of California-Santa Barbara in partnership with the Security in Context Network, which brings together centers and individuals from around the world in a North-South dialogue around questions of peace and conflict, (in)security, militarism and geopolitics.

The grant allows for collaboration with other partners around three modes of intervention: collaborative research and pedagogical projects; mentorship of junior scholars/graduate students; and public engagement and discussion around project themes. The overarching goal is to challenge dominant paradigms, produce alternative knowledge on (in)security-related topics and consolidate and expand network scholars inside and outside of academia interested in these topics.

CPD will use the grant to host events and activities at OU, as well as support continued discourse and collaborative research with scholars and activists, resource generation and sharing within the Security in Context Network and multimedia productions. The CPD will also select four Security in Context research fellows from among OU graduate students to be provided with mentorship to develop their research projects on project-relevant themes.

The center, together with its partners at UMass-Amherst and UC-Santa Barbara, is planning a public launch event by webinar for the Carnegie project this month. The CPD and Professor Demir express their gratitude for the support of the College of International Studies, the Office of Research Services and the Security in Context Network, which made this achievement possible.