WASHINGTON, May 8,2012 – On April 30, the first part of a 2-day workshop on the Contagion of Violence was convened in Washington DC by the Institute of Medicine, the health arm of the National Academy of Science.
Jason Featherstone from the UK-based CeaseFire replication Surviving Our Streets and Zainab Al-Suwaij of the American Islamic Congress brought these perspectives into a real-world context sharing experiences from the London Riots and the Arab Spring. Jason showed how the riots escalated from a police shooting in the Tottenham community, where he grew up, spread throughout London. He then analyzed how the events could have played out differently if an effective mediation structure, like CeaseFire, had been in place. Zainab shared how the same factors were at work in the Arab Spring events and showed the spread of violence from country-to-country.
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