Tomorrow morning, I begin my journey to Cochabamba, Bolivia, where I’ll be studying Globalization, Multiculturalism and Social Change through the School for International Training until mid-May. My workload, the details of my living situation and my ability to connect to the internet are all still up in the air, so the frequency of my blogging may be affected. Hopefully my experiences in Bolivia will give me good fodder for future posts.
With all of that said, I do want to sketch out a project that I’ve been thinking about for awhile. For my senior thesis, for which I will start research this summer, I plan to write on nonviolent responses to mass atrocities. I’ve written before on civilian peacekeepers, and how they could one day be one way to respond to mass atrocities. In my thesis, I’m hoping to expand beyond just civilian peacekeepers, and create a more comprehensive study that looks at how international diplomacy, local power dynamics, and early warning systems could be used to prevent and respond to mass atrocities without the use of violence. I plan to build on some of the theories presented by Maria Stephan and Erica Chenoweth in Why Civil Resistance on how non-state actors can nonviolently leverage power, even when faced with significant state violence. In my research so far, however, I’ve found written material on this topic really light, and have used texts only tangentially related. Therefore, if any readers of TWL have book recommendations, they would be greatly appreciated.
With that said, I’m off to finish packing.
The Widening Lens 
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