Building Peace from Chaos — Around the World with Dr. Mari Fitzduff
In 2006, I had the pleasure of collaborating with Dr. Mari Fitzduff as we co-edited The Psychology of War, Conflict Resolution and Peace, a three-volume series that was published by Praeger Press. Our mutual publisher, Debbie Carvalko, acted as a matchmaker to pair us up, and I’m honored that she did. I knew of Dr. Fitzduff by reputation as a Professor and Director at Brandeis University, where she founded the Master of Arts Program in Conflict and Coexistence — which to date has graduates hailing from over 70 countries. I also knew that she was an Irish-American educator, writer, and academic, and had helped to set up the first university courses in conflict resolution in Northern Ireland. In 1988, she wrote a training book called Community Conflict Skills, which was used particularly in the Northern Ireland conflict. Since its original publication, it has been translated into Indonesian, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, and a number of other languages to help countries dealing with ethnic strife.
What I didn’t know was her origin story. Here are some highlights:
She was a nun for 18 months, after which she started protesting in university. In 1968/69 the university was closed, and Mari was influenced by Vietnam, Marxism, and radical ecumenism. She met Gaddafi in Libya in 1973, and then met and married a man from Northern Ireland who she met on the revolutionary committee in the university. For their honeymoon they traveled around the world for two years on a budget of about a dollar a day each, visiting community projects around the world.
They spent a year in South America, traveling in what turned out to be a pirate’s boat from Panama to Columbia — illegally of course. They were briefly arrested in Argentina for spending time cleaning the sewers in a barrio with some liberation theology-priest-friends who were subsequently imprisoned for a number of years. That was followed by a year in Asia. They went to Petra and slept outside in a car with some friends working with refugees as there were no hotels…
