Guide to Specialists

Jennifer Schirmer
Senior Fellow, Jennings Randolph Fellowship Program
November 2006-July 2007

Project Focus:
Training the Armed Actors for Peace in Colombia

ARCHIVED SPECIALIST PROFILE

Jennifer Schirmer is a senior researcher at the Centre for Development and the Environment at the University of Oslo. In 1996–2004, she was a fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, the School of Public Health, a Henry Luce Fellow at Harvard Divinity School, and an associate of the Program on Non-Violent Sanctions and Cultural Survival at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Focusing on dialogue and peacebuilding, she has worked on developing new approaches to changing attitudes among armed actors about conflict resolution and human rights. Schirmer has had firsthand experience with both armed actors and victims of violence in Guatemala, South Africa, Argentina, Chile, and Colombia.

She has received grants from the MacArthur Foundation, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, Radcliffe College, the Norwegian Foreign Ministry, the Swedish Foreign Ministry, and the U.S. Institute of Peace. Schirmer’s book The Guatemalan Military Project: A Violence Called Democracy won the PIOOM award for best human rights book from the Dutch Interdisciplinary Research Program on Root Causes of Human Rights Violations. She holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis.

Publications:

• "Building Dialogue, Building Peace: Conversatorios among the Armed Forces, Civil Society, and Ex-Guerrilleros in Colombia," in Peace Initiatives in Colombia, edited by Virginia Bouvier (USIP Press, forthcoming).
• "Whose Testimony? Whose Truth? Where are the Armed Actors in the Stoll-Menchú Controversy?" Human Rights Quarterly (Vol. 25, No. 1, 2003).
• The Guatemalan Military Project: A Violence Called Democracy, (Human Rights Series, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000).