January/February 2001

ICAR professor Tamra Pearson d’Estrée, middle, hosted Ukrainian delegates Oleg Gabrielyan and Carina Korostelina when they visited last year.

ICAR Partners with Ukrainian University By Kate Passin What started off as a dream for Carina Korostelina, a professor at the National Taurida Vernadsky University (NTVU) in Simferopol, Crimea, Ukraine, is fast becoming a reality. Already familiar with the U.S. Institute of Peace, Korostelina thought a similar organization in the Ukraine would help resolve growing ethnic and other political and historical tensions there. Korostelina’s first step in this undertaking was to find an organization to help her meet her goal. Through the Internet, she discovered George Mason’s Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (ICAR). So when Korostelina came to the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute in Washington, D.C., as a regional exchange scholar for six months in 1999, she lost no time approaching the people at ICAR with her idea. Tamra Pearson d’Estrée, an ICAR associate professor who was involved in a previous ICAR partnership, was immediately interested in the opportunity. “I was also intrigued by Carina’s social psychological research on the ethnic stereotyping [in Crimea] and how that connected with some of my research,” says d’Estrée. In August 2000, D’Estrée and Korostelina received a three-year U.S. State Department grant to set up not only the Crimean Institute of Peace, but also a student-run dispute resolution center similar to George Mason’s University Dispute Resolution Project (UDRP). The grant also provides funding for development of a new conflict resolution curriculum at NTVU. The Crimean Institute of Peace will be the first of its kind in the former Soviet Union. This past fall, NTVU faculty members and administrators, including Korostelina, spent several weeks at Mason, conducting research and meeting with faculty from different departments. They also sat in on some UDRP training sessions to get some ideas for NTVU’s student center. In addition, they visited many peace-keeping organizations in the area, including the U.S. Institute of Peace. In March, d’Estrée and other ICAR faculty and students will visit NTVU in part to share ICAR’s conflict resolution experience with the NTVU community and Crimea’s teachers and ethnic leaders, says Korostelina. Faculty members from both universities will continue to make alternating visits every semester throughout the grant period. In addition, for the next three years, an ICAR advanced doctoral student will spend the spring semester at NTVU, and someone from NTVU will spend the fall semester at Mason. Representatives from both universities will also hold conflict resolution training institutes each summer.