Aldo Civico is an Associate Research Scholar at the Center for International Conflict Resolution (CICR) and an Affiliate of the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University.  Currently, he is the founder and the director of the International Institute for Peace at Rutgers University, Newark.

An anthropologist, he has been conducting fieldwork in Colombia since 2001, focusing on internally displaced people and the paramilitary.  Since 2003, Civico has worked to facilitate the country’s peace efforts with the National Liberation Army, or the ELN guerrilla.  For the CICR, he designed and conducted several conflict resolution workshops in Colombia and Haiti.

Civico’s research interests include democracy, state, sovereignty, political violence, human rights, conflict, refugees, resistance, and civil society.  He teaches courses in anthropology (of political violence, human rights, and religion) at the New School University of New York and at the William Paterson University in New Jersey.  He also leads conflict resolution seminars organized by the Universidad de Antioquia in Medellín and in Turbo.

Civico has worked as a consultant for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and for post-conflict assessment in the Balkans region, and is a contributor to the UNDP Colombian magazine Hechos de Callejón.  With the president of the Sicilian Renaissance Institute Leoluca Orlando, Civico consulted the Secretaría de Seguridad Pública of Mexico City on issues related to civil society and the fight against organized crime.  He is a member of the Club of Madrid working group “Dealing with Violence” and was among the scholars who participated in the International Conference on Democracy and Terrorism in March 2005 in Madrid.

Mr. Civico has been a columnist for the Italian newspaper L’Unità and an author for the newspaper Il Corriere della Sera. He has been a guest on Radio Rai, the Italian Public Radio, and has been writing articles for the newspapers Der Tagesspiegel, Die Woche, Die Weltwoche. He has been invited to speak at numerous forum and conferences around the world, including Boston College, the Universidad de Antioquia (Colombia), the Universidad Bolivariana (Colombia), the Universidade de São Paolo (Brazil), the American Anthropological Association, the Latin American Studies Association, the Universidad Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (Peru) and Columbia University.  He collaborated with the Woodrow Wilson Center in the organization of the June 2004 conference on the demobilization process of the paramilitary in Colombia. He contributed with chapters on the Colombian conflict in two forthcoming volumes edited by anthropologist Victoria Sanford.

Mr. Civico earned a laurea in Political Science from the University of Bologna, Italy as well as a doctoral candidate in Applied Anthropology at Teachers College-Columbia University of New York.