An Integral Peace Leadership Reflection on the Scheidt Family Seminar on Genocide Studies and Prevention
By Sevana Karagoulian
Sevana Karagoulian is a PhD in Education student at Chapman University in Orange, California. Her research explores how college students from genocide-affected diasporas navigate identity, agency, and intergenerational trauma in their decision-making. She is interested in the role of education in genocide prevention, peacebuilding, and supporting communities shaped by collective violence.
Led by renowned human rights scholar James Waller, the five-day Scheidt Family Seminar on Genocide Studies and Prevention at the University of Connecticut brings together scholars and practitioners who are committed to preventing future mass atrocities. Genocide, legally defined in Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention and first conceptualized by Raphael Lemkin (1944), refers to acts committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.
Throughout the week, conversations with researchers, practitioners, and survivors revealed that genocide prevention is not confined to diplomacy. It is embedded in the daily practices of listening, remembering, teaching, and building relationships. Although I arrived hoping to learn genocide prevention strategies, I left realizing that I had experienced the lived practice of Integral Peace Leadership (IPL).
On the first day, participants listed their social identities and gradually removed the ones they considered least important until only one remained. The exercise was challenging because every identity felt meaningful. It demonstrated how perpetrators of genocide reduce people to a single, unwanted identity, erasing the complexity of their humanity. That exercise became a catalyst for understanding the seminar through the lens of IPL. McIntyre Miller’s (2026) IPL framework encourages leaders to work across four interconnected areas: Inner work cultivates self-awareness and growth; Knowledge develops the skills to apply peace in relationships; Community emphasizes repairing harm and strengthening connection; and Environment addresses the systems that shape peace on a global scale. As I reflected on my seminar experience, I found evidence of each domain woven throughout the week.
Innerwork
Genocide prevention work requires us to examine how history lives within us and how our experiences shape our approach to peace. Throughout the seminar, the concept of memory as both a moral and instrumental force weighed heavily on me. As a great-grandchild of Armenian Genocide survivors, I carry an inherited understanding of both loss and resilience. The ongoing struggle for recognition of the genocide has reinforced that the consequences of atrocity do not end when the violence stops. They continue across generations, shaping cultural memory, identity, and a collective commitment to justice.
Initially, I attempted to separate my personal experiences from my academic engagement with the content. I wanted my contributions to sound scholarly rather than emotional. The result was the opposite of what I intended. I struggled to make meaningful connections to the material. I could not think of insightful questions to ask, and I found myself observing rather than participating. By the end of the second day, sitting alone in my hotel room, I felt frustrated and angry with myself. After taking time for reflection and self-compassion, I realized the source of that frustration: I was denying an important part of who I was.
Emotion was not interfering with my engagement; it was the reason I was there. As an Armenian woman whose family survived the 1915 Armenian Genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire,, my personal history is what led me toward peace work. The following day, I stopped treating the personal and the academic as competing approaches and began seeing them as complementary. Once I allowed both to coexist, the seminar became far more meaningful. Through that process, I experienced the Inner work domain of IPL firsthand: self-awareness enabled a deeper connection to both my purpose and the learning before me.
Knowledge
One of the seminar’s most valuable lessons emerged from its interdisciplinary nature. As a doctoral student in higher education, I felt out of place among historians, political scientists, anthropologists, lawyers, activists, and established genocide scholars. I wondered what contribution I could possibly make to conversations about preventing some of humanity’’s darkest crimes. As the week progressed, however, I came to understand that genocide prevention cannot be approached through a single disciplinary lens. For example, historians explain how atrocities unfold, while lawyers pursue accountability. Each perspective contributes a crucial piece of a much larger puzzle. The same is true for educators.
Prevention is not only about responding to violence; it is also about shaping environments where critical thinking, empathy, historical understanding, and civic responsibility can flourish. As a future educator, my role is to help students make meaning of difficult histories and engage thoughtfully with difference. I am committed to advancing genocide education and, in my future research, exploring how descendants of genocide in diasporic communities navigate identity and agency. The Knowledge dimension of IPL reminded me that peace leadership depends not only on what we know but on how we apply that knowledge in service of others.
Community
If genocide seeks to fracture communities, then community rebuilding becomes a form of prevention. Yet rebuilding a community is never the work of one individual. It requires networks of people who are committed to human dignity and willing to work together despite differences in expertise and perspective. The seminar itself was an example of this principle in action. Participants came from different countries, disciplines, and professional backgrounds, yet we were united by a shared commitment to preventing mass atrocity. Throughout the week, people offered insights, challenged assumptions, shared resources, and formed connections that extended beyond the classroom.
Those relationships may prove just as valuable as the knowledge gained during the seminar. I am aware of the areas where my own expertise are limited, but I now have a community of colleagues I can reach out to for advice, collaboration, or challenging dialogue. The WhatsApp group that continues to connect us serves as a reminder that peace leadership is fundamentally relational. Communities built on curiosity and mutual respect create possibilities that no individual can achieve alone.
Environment
Before attending the seminar, I often thought of genocide prevention as both abstract and distant, something that happened primarily through international institutions, tribunals, and United Nations resolutions. The seminar challenged that assumption. Violence does not emerge in isolation. It develops within social, political, cultural, educational, and ecological systems. Similarly, prevention depends on cultivating environments that promote inclusion, ethical leadership, critical thinking, ecological sustainability, and respect for human dignity.
As a higher education professional, this realization felt especially significant. Universities are more than places where knowledge is gained. They are environments where students learn how to engage with disagreement and navigate complexity. Everyday interactions, institutional policies, and classroom discussions all contribute to the culture we create. Peaceful environments are not built only during moments of crisis. They are cultivated through countless daily choices that foster belonging, empathy, and respect long before violence has the opportunity to take root.
Moving Forward
Genocide prevention may sound like work reserved for diplomats, policymakers, or international organizations. The seminar showed me that it is also the work of educators, researchers, community leaders, parents, and anyone committed to creating spaces of acceptance, connection, and care. Participating in the seminar gave me hope. People from different disciplines, countries, and generations spent a week together learning from one another and imagining a more peaceful future. Through that experience, I came to understand genocide prevention not merely as a field of study but as a form of peace leadership.
The challenge now is not simply to remember what I learned but to practice it. Integral Peace Leadership reminds us that peace begins with how we know ourselves, how we learn, how we build community, and how we shape our environments. Every interaction offers an opportunity to strengthen those practices. In that sense, peace is not a destination, but a daily practice of intentional leadership.
References
Lemkin, R. (1944). Axis rule in occupied Europe: Laws of occupation, analysis of government, proposals for redress. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
McIntyre Miller, W. (2026). Chapter 2 excerpts. Integral peace leadership: Theory and practice for creating peaceful change. Routledge.
United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, December 9, 1948, https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-prevention-and-punishment-crime-genocide
Cover Photo: Participants of the Summer Seminar for Genocide Studies and Prevention engage in discussion during a session in Bousfield Building on June 13, 2024. (Sydney Herdle/UConn Photo)
