Aldo Civico co-founded the institute with Academy Award-winning actor Forest Whitaker in 2010
Professor Aldo Civico brings a journalist’s acumen to his work as a cultural anthropologist specializing in urban political violence. That’s hardly surprising. He cut his teeth as an intrepid reporter in his home country, Italy, for many years before moving into academia.
His flair for combining the two approaches to grasp the nature of violent conflicts, as well as the potential for peace building, has resulted in a unique brand of research, and an International Institute for Peace that is just getting off the ground at Rutgers-Newark.
“Our focus will be on urban violence and youth-violence prevention around the world,” says Civico, “as well as the role of women in peace building.”
Civico began his career as a freelance correspondent for Vatican Radio at the ripe old age of 18. He had enrolled at the University of Trento to study sociology around the same time, but a college degree would have to wait: Civico the journalist was taken with the burgeoning anti-mafia movement in Sicily, at the other end of the country.
He parlayed an interview with the movement’s leader, Leoluca Orlando, into a job in Sicily that lasted three years and gave him a front-row seat to the historic changes taking place: As La Casa Nostra intensified its assassination campaign of state officials, the Sicilian populace took to the streets en masse for nonviolent protests, a sign that public opinion had finally shifted against the mafia.
“To see the capacity of a social movement to bring about change was a very valuable lesson for me,” says Civico, “as was having the opportunity to work with extraordinary individuals who put their life on the line for the common good.”
Civico moved on from his job with Orlando in 1993 and, for the rest of the decade, worked as a journalist while finishing his studies.
In 2000, he moved to New York City to study international affairs at Columbia University. He met an Italian professor who ran the Center for International Conflict Resolution on campus, and began working there, designing peace-building trainings for religious leaders who had survived the 1990s Balkan Wars, then conflict-resolution workshops for victims of violence in Medellin, Colombia.
He had found his calling.
He completed his doctorate at Columbia in applied anthropology and, from 2003 to 2007, spent every spare moment doing his dissertation field work in Colombia, interviewing survivors of that country’s long- simmering civil war, then venturing into the mountains to land a rare interview with a paramilitary leader who had massacred those victims’ families. He ended up getting the leader’s life story, plus that of 12 other group members.
“I figured it would be interesting to do field work among victimizers,” says Civico. “This is difficult, challenging, unusual research that I thought I could offer insights on.”
Civico then scored another plum interview: this one with an insurgency [ELN] leader residing in a high-security prison cell. Visits continued over the course of months, with Civico looking on at one point as the first conversations of peace talks occurred between the ELN leader and government officials.
Civico went on to facilitate discussions between the Colombian government and the guerilla group, organized workshops for the negotiating team, and worked as a communications channel between parties and the U.S. ambassador in the 2005-2008 peace talks, which broke down, unfortunately.
Upon returning from Colombia, he became CIRR’s director and shepherded the center through three years of expansion before coming to Rutgers-Newark in 2010. The idea for the International Institute for Peace, “a think-tank/do-tank bridging theory and practice,” as Civico describes it, came about in discussions with deans and colleagues in the sociology and anthropology department.
The institute will work in synergy with the newly created master's program in conflict resolution, giving students and faculty the opportunity to produce cutting-edge research while engaging in peace-building projects around the world.
Civico co-founded the institute with Academy Award-winning actor Forest Whitaker, who’d heard Civico speak about the project at this spring’s Newark Peace Education Summit. Whitaker, having grown up in South Central Los Angeles, has been working to curb youth violence for years and is a goodwill ambassador for UNESCO. A partnership between that U.N. organization and the Institute is in the works.
For Civico, it’s been a very fulfilling life.
“I love to interact with students and be out in the field changing the lives of folks caught in challenging conditions,” says Civico. “I’m not sure you can ask for more in a lifetime.”