News
& Media

On October 18 and 19, 2019, The University of Chicago will gather leading scholars and high-ranking political decision-makers from around the world in Berlin, Germany to discuss current global crises and conflicts at The Pearson Global Forum 2019. Hosted by the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy's Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts, the aim of the public conference, entitled "Beyond Walls | Deconstructing Conflict," is to analyze current conflicts and to derive recommendations for political action, with Berlin serving as an anchor in discussing what is possible in order to overcome both physical and symbolic walls.

I was born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, and I have always known I wanted to support my community through my work. If you asked me how I was going to achieve that goal 10 years ago, I would have said by working at a nonprofit. However, my experiences growing up in Chicago—seeing the failures of public health, education, and policing—led me to shift my focus to community organizing. I began organizing with a group called the Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100) around the firing of an off-duty police officer who killed Rekia Boyd, a 22-year-old Black woman headed to a party with friends in 2012. I wanted to hold Chicago Police accountable for misconduct and brutality, which led me to a position at the Invisible Institute, a journalism team on the South Side that investigates police misconduct. It was there that I came to understand the importance of data in organizing and social justice work, and set out to become a data scientist.

Across the Middle East and Europe, millions of uprooted Syrians are making decisions about their future. Unless the international community takes their motives and calculations seriously, ill-conceived humanitarian policies risk exacerbating, rather than preventing, future political instability. Many displaced Syrians experience tremendous suffering and yearn for an end to the conflict; the international community, and in particular Syria’s neighbor states, shoulders an incredible burden to care for the displaced. Yet when we address displacement through temporary arrangements, such as refugee camps, we make the implicit assumption that once the conflict ends most Syrians will choose to return to their original homes. History shows that this assumption is not realistic. We should expect the civil war to permanently change Syrian demographics, in particular by accelerating the process of urbanization, and policymakers need to plan postwar reconstruction for a country that will look dramatically different than it did in 2011. Failure to plan for a growing urban population will likely generate exactly those conditions — poverty, slums, unemployment, marginalization, and restive youth bulges — that caused the civil war to break out in the first place.