Aldo Civico, anthropologist, is an assistant professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. He is also the director of the Rutgers University Center for the the Study of Genocide, Conflict Resolution and Human Rights. From July 2007 to July 2010 he served as the Director of the Center for International Conflict Resolution and as an Associate Research Fellow at Columbia University in the City of New York.
His research interests are mainly related to: armed conflict, conflict resolution, peace process, third party intervention, insurgency, terrorism, internally displaced people, human rights, youth violence, child soldiers, and DDR programs.
Since 2001, he has been conducting extensive fieldwork in Colombia on issues related to internally displaced people, insurgency, counterinsurgency, DDR, and child soldiers. Between 2005 and 2008, he was a facilitator of the dialogue efforts between the Government of Colombia and the National Liberation Army (ELN) insurgency. He has conducted fieldwork and conflict analysis in the Western Balkans, Mexico, and Colombia. He has designed and facilitated workshops in conflict resolution in highly volatile and violent contexts such as Colombia and Haiti. He served as an adviser to the president of the European Union Romano Prodi, to the mayor of Palermo in Italy Leoluca Orlando, to UNDP and USAID. Since 2007, he has been advising Colombian rock star Juanes on his peace initiatives such as the Peace without Borders concert in La Havana, Cuba. In February 2010, Dr. Civico joined a research group of the Commission on Historical Memory, part of the Colombian National Commission for Reparation and Reconciliation.
During the 2008 U.S. Presidential campaign, he served as an informal advisor for the Western Hemisphere policy team to both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Since 2007, he is an affiliated scholar at the Center for American Progress, a Washington D.C. based think-tank.
Between 2004 and 2007, he taught political anthropology and Latin America ethnography at The New School, Lehman College-CUNY, and William Patterson University.
He is the author of the book La Scelta (Piemme 1994), the intellectual biography of Ennio Pintacuda, a Jesuit and a pioneer of the Italian social movement against the Mafia. He contributed to the edited book Engaged Observer by Victoria Sanford and Asale Angel-Ajani (Rutgers University Press 2007) with the chapter “Portrait of a Paramilitary.” In Colombia, he published the book Las Guerras de Doblecero (Intermedio, Bogota: 2009) that collects the life history of a mayor paramilitary leader.
At Rutgers University he will teach courses in urban anthropology, anthropology of violence and anthropology of power.
He holds a Ph.D in anthropology from Columbia University and a “laurea” in Political Science from the University of Bologna, Italy.
(Photo: Laura Rico, La Silla Vacia)
