Pamina Firchow, Ph.D.

pamina.firchow@gmail.com


Associate Professor

Brandeis University

Year of PhD: 2009

Country: United States (Massachusetts)

About Me:

I am Associate Professor of Conflict Resolution and Coexistence at Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management where I teach graduate students. Currently, I am a Visiting Professor and Fulbright Fellow at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia. My research interests include political violence, transitional justice (especially victim reparations), reconciliation and peacebuilding. In particular, I am interested in the study of the international accompaniment of local communities affected by mass violence. My specific focus is on the role of concept formation in the measurement and evaluation of external interventions and how local people can be included in these processes. Therefore, my work supports efforts that promote participatory numbers and mixed method research, such as theEveryday Peace Indicators.For more information, see https://paminafirchow.org/

Research Interests

Foreign Aid

Human Rights

Latin American And Caribbean Politics

Research Methods & Research Design

Peace And Conflict

Transitional Justice

Post-Conflict Peacebuilding

Monitoring & Evaluation

Colombian Peace Process

Reparations

Peace Agreements

Women, Peace, Security

Local Peacebuilding

Peace Research/Studies

Peacebuilding

Measurement

Countries of Interest

Colombia

Uganda

Sri Lanka

Bosnia-Herzegovina

South Africa

Argentina

My Research:

I am Associate Professor of Conflict Resolution and Coexistence at Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management where I teach graduate students. My research interests include political violence, transitional justice (especially victim reparations), reconciliation and peacebuilding. In particular, I am interested in the study of the international accompaniment of local communities affected by mass violence. My specific focus is on the role of concept formation in the measurement and evaluation of external interventions and how local people can be included in these processes. Therefore, my work supports efforts that promote participatory numbers and mixed method research, such as the focus of the Everyday Peace Indicators Project, for which I am the founding Director and CEO.For more information, see https://paminafirchow.org/

Publications:

Books Written:

(2018) Reclaiming Everyday Peace: Local Voices in Measurement and Evaluation after War, Cambridge University Press

Bringing armed conflicts to an end is difficult; restoring a lasting peace can be considerably harder. Reclaiming Everyday Peace addresses the effectiveness and impact of local level interventions on communities affected by war. Using an innovative methodology to generate participatory numbers, Pamina Firchow finds that communities saturated with external interventions after war do not have substantive higher levels of peacefulness according to community-defined indicators of peace than those with lower levels of interventions. These findings suggest that current international peacebuilding efforts are not very effective at achieving peace by local standards because disproportionate attention is paid to reconstruction, governance and development assistance with little attention paid to community ties and healing. Firchow argues that a more bottom up approach to measuring the effectiveness of peacebuilding is required. By finding ways to effectively communicate local community needs and priorities to the international community, efforts to create an atmosphere for an enduring peace are possible.