Louisville, Kentucky, United States
I'm Senior Lecturer in the Department of International Relations at Webster University-Thailand, and offer consulting services related to conflict, development, gender, race/ethnicity, mass atrocities, peacebuilding, etc. I adopt an interdisciplinary approach to human rights crises and complex humanitarian emergencies, with emphasis on prevention, early warning, and transformation. I pioneered a new approach to conflict early warning that addresses both structural and direct causes of crisis and conflict. I bring a rich theoretical grounding and years of experience to the practice of human protection, conflict and post-conflict analysis and transformation. Of particular concern is the prevention of, response to, and rebuilding from mass atrocity that prioritizes classical vulnerabilities such as race/ethnicity, class, age, gender, and disability.
Sectors of experience: Conflict, Development, peacebuilding, Gender, Human Rights, Democratization, Programme & Resource Management, Research, Decentralization & Local Development
The CCR2P is an independent, non-partisan, and non-profit research organization, which promotes scholarly engagement and political implementation of the R2P principle.
Dr. O’Bannon earned his Ph.D. in Political Science (Comparative Politics/International Relations with an African Studies certificate) from Indiana University in 2004. His dissertation focused on the local conflict management implications of liberal political and economic reform in Senegal, West Africa. Subsequently his work has focused on larger scale conflicts and the mass atrocity crimes to which they often give rise. His current emphasis is on the normative and operational status of the mass atrocity norm known as the Responsibility to Protect, for which he was named Senior Fellow at the Canadian Centre for the Responsibility to Protect.
In 2009, I assumed the directorship of what was an essentially moribund Conflict Studies Program. But when I stepped down 6 years later, the renamed Peace and Conflict Studies (PACS) program offered a significantly redesigned curriculum, profited from strategic hiring and tenure decisions, controlled a yearly revenue of about $90,000 generated from two grants to the program, hosted a new annual speaker series bringing such high profile personalities as Nobel Laureate Jodi Williams, actor, artist and notable civil rights leader Harry Belafonte, labor and human rights activist and co-founder with Cesar Chavez of the American Farm Workers Union Dolores Huerta, and ICISS sponsor and former Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy. It was by then unquestionably the university’s premier interdisciplinary program, boasting the highest numbers of course enrollments, majors and graduates, surpassing even some of the oldest, best established departments such as Classics and Physics. PACS at DePauw is now ranked by various sources as among the best colleges in the United States for peace studies and conflict resolution majors.
I was tenured and promoted in my home department of Political Science, but I contributed to three interdisciplinary programs: Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies; Africana Studies; and directed for six years the Peace and Conflict Studies program. My research while at DePauw morphed from an original emphasis on local scale conflict management in West Africa, to conflicts of higher scale and intensity, including those which gives rise to mass atrocity crimes. This led to my present emphasis on the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) norm.
I mapped the post-conflict environment, exploring the consequences of 10 years of conflict for women and children, in order to suggest ways UNICEF can contribute to the UN's peacebuilding effort.