Mari Frank Interviews Paul Garb, Co-Director and Co-Founder of UC Irvine?s Center for Citizen Peacebuilding

Paula Garb is Co-Director and co-founder of UC Irvine's Center for Citizen Peacebuilding. She is a lecturer in anthropology, director of the minor in conflict resolution, and director of the minor in civic and community engagement at the University of California, Irvine. She is a facilitator and researcher of citizen peacebuilding projects. Garb spent 17 years living and working in Moscow, where she received her M.A. in anthropology from Moscow State University and later completed her doctorate in anthropology from the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Anthropology. She ultimately secured a job as a field producer for CBS News in Moscow, where she worked until she came to UCI in 1991. After returning to live and work in the U.S. she has studied the mobilization of activists around environmental problems associated with the nuclear weapons complex in Russia and the role of citizen initiatives in the ethnic conflicts of the Caucasus. Since 1995, with funding from the University of California, the JAMS Foundation, United Nations Development Programme, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the US Institute of Peace, USAID, and the Winston Foundation for World Peace, she has been promoting citizen peacebuilding activities and research. Her primary project has focused on facilitating and studying peacebuilding efforts between Abkhaz and Georgian academics, journalists, representatives of nongovernmental organizations, and politicians. In 1999 she initiated a coordination network of peacebuilding projects and organizations working in the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict, and continues to foster the network. Garb has been using her long-term and in-depth experience and research data from the Georgian-Abkhaz conflict to examine and compare how citizens are helping to resolve disputes in other conflict zones, such as Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Middle East, Cyprus, and Northern Ireland. She draws on these experiences for courses in conflict resolution that she teaches for UCI students and Los Angeles gang intervention workers. Her work has also led to a number of publications in academic and other journals. www.ccpb.org