Welcome
I am an Associate Professor of Practice in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution and Senior Fellow at the Center for Justice at Columbia University. I received my PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2015.
Research
The importance of engaging local communities to address big social problems is well established. My research asks what the local means and why it does—or does not—make a difference toward peace and justice. Currently, I am researching transitional justice processes in Colombia and criminal justice in Oakland and New York City. I have received support from Columbia University, the National Science Foundation, United State Institute of Peace, Inter-American Foundation, Humanity United and UC Berkeley Possibility Lab for this work. You can find more information about my research and writing on this site.
engagement
I also collaborate with diverse organizations, always with the goal of making my research useful for addressing social problems and respectful of the communities who these problems ultimately affect. I have written more about this engagement and the organizations I try to support here.
➤ contact
Master of Science in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution
School of Professional Studies
Columbia University
New York, NY
peter.dixon@columbia.edu
@LinkedIn
recent activity
Dr. Geraldine Downey, Director of Columbia’s Center for Justice, and I received a Societal Impact Seed Grant to pursue our work in New York City on identifying how and why local voice matters for public safety and criminal justice policy.
I presented my work on safety and coexistence in the US and Colombia at a webinar for the Negotiation and Conflict Resolution program at Columbia University.
I presented at a USIP-sponsored seminar on local engagement for monitoring, evaluation and learning, organized for US field missions participating in the US Strategy to Prevent Conflict and Promote Stability, funded through the Global Fragility Act.
I’ve been working with the Salzburg Seminar program on Youth Violence. We recently drafted and released this Statement, bringing together voices from the US and dozens of other countries.
I returned to Middlebury College (my alma mater) on May 1 to give a talk on Everyday Peace around the World, part of Midd’s exciting new center on Conflict Transformation.
I was recently in Salzburg, Austria for the Salzburg Global Seminar’s multi-year series on building a whole-system approach to addressing youth experiences of violence, with insight from diverse activists, practitioners, officials, and researchers on best practices from their countries and contexts.
Affiliations
I am a member of the Advisory Board of the Kathryn Wasserman Davis Collaborative in Conflict Transformation, which seeks to learn lessons from this vast community that can be adapted to the issues and questions that are most pressing for Middlebury College.
I’m a Board Member at Everyday Peace Indicators (EPI), a peacebuilding and research NGO that connects scholars and practitioners interested in elevating the everyday lived reality of communities to inform policy solutions.
I am a Faculty Affiliate at Possibility Lab at US Berkeley, which works to bring data-driven solutions to complex social problems.
I am a Fellow of the Salzburg Global Seminar program on Global Innovations on Youth Violence, Safety and Justice, which brings together diverse stakeholders to address the legal, economic, and social weaknesses and inefficiencies of judicial and custodial systems.
“Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.”
Banner Photo: Peter Dixon, Oakland, California