Program 2016

Dr. Maciej Bartkowski (Poland) is Senior Director for Education & Research at ICNC. He joined ICNC in 2009 and prior to that he held managerial and teaching positions at Adelphi University and Bard College.

At ICNC, he directs various academic programs for students, faculty, and educators from around the world to support teaching, research, and study on civil resistance. He is also spearheading ICNC efforts to build infrastructure for and expand distance education and online learning. He is also an editor of the ICNC Monographs and special reports series.

He holds an adjunct faculty position at Krieger School of Arts and Sciences of Johns Hopkins University where he teaches strategic nonviolent resistance. In 2016, he was appointed an adjunct professor at Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

Dr. Bartkowski is a book editor of Recovering Nonviolent History. Civil Resistance in Liberation Struggles and Nation-Making published by Lynne Rienner in 2013. His selected authored and co-authored publications include:

• “Civil Resistance” in Oxford Bibliographies in International Relations. Ed. Patrick James. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, co-authored with Hardy Merriman.
• “Myopia of the Syrian Struggle and Key Lessons” in Is Authoritarianism Staging a Comeback?Atlantic Council (2015), co-authored with Julia Taleb.
• “Nonviolent Revolutions, Struggles for Political Recognition and Democratic Transition” in Hallward and Norma, Understanding Nonviolence: Contours and Context, Polity Press (2015).
• Nonviolent Civilian Defense to Counter Russian Hybrid Warfare, Critical Policy Issue Study, Johns Hopkins Krieger School (2015). Review by Dr. Brian Martin.

His articles on civil resistance appeared in HuffingtonPost, Foreign Policy, Atlantic Council, War on the Rocks, openDemocracy, The Hill and other media outlets.

Dr. Bartkowski speaks on strategic nonviolent conflict, and civil resistance at various academic and policy forums around the world. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and M.A. in International Relations and European Studies from Central European University in Budapest, completed his undergraduate work at the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. He speaks fluent English, Polish and Russian, as well as some Ukrainian and basic German.

Dr. Mary King (USA), Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies, University for Peace

Soon after graduating from Ohio Wesleyan University, Mary Elizabeth King went to work for the U.S. civil rights movement, first in Atlanta and then Mississippi, 1962–65, serving on the staff of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Uniquely among the SNCC personnel, she has built her academic specialty on the study of nonviolent civil resistance and is acclaimed a top authority on the subject. Now a professor of peace and conflict studies at the UN-affiliated University for Peace (main campus Costa Rica), she is also a Distinguished Rothermere American Institute Fellow at the University of Oxford, Britain.

Among her many works is Freedom Song: A Personal story of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, an autobiographical account of her experiences for which she received a Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award. She is the author of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr: The Power of Nonviolent Action, as well as A Quiet Revolution: The First Palestinian Intifada and Nonviolent Resistance. In a collaboration with The New York Times, King wrote a reference volume on the national nonviolent revolutions that brought about democratic transitions in the Eastern bloc. Her latest book is Gandhian Nonviolent Struggle and Untouchability in South India: The 1924–25 Vykom Satyagraha and the Mechanisms of Change, from Oxford University Press.

King served in the Carter Administration with worldwide oversight for the Peace Corps and responsibility for the domestic VISTA program and other national volunteer service programs.

For her work on the theory and practice of nonviolent action, King has been awarded the Jamnalal Bajaj International Prize, the El-Hibri Peace Education Prize, and the James Lawson Award for Nonviolent Achievement. In 2011, Ohio Wesleyan University bestowed on her the honorary doctor of laws degree and she was elected a Fellow by Aberystwyth University, in Wales, United Kingdom — their equivalent to an honorary degree — where she did her doctoral work in international politics.