Vern Neufeld Redekop

A world-renown scholar in Peace and Conflict Studies, he is Emeritus Professor at St. Paul University, Ottawa, Canada, where he worked since 2001. He is the initiator of the Integrative Peacebuilding Program at the Professional Development Institute (PDI) at the University of Ottawa. The author of From Violence to Blessing: How an Understanding of Deep-Rooted Conflict Can Open Paths to Reconciliation (Novalis, 2002) translated in French and Arabic, Co-editor with Shirley Paré of Beyond Control: A Mutual Respect Approach to Protest Crowd – Police Relations (Bloombury, 2010), Co-author of Introduction to Conflict Studies; Empirical, Theoretical, and Ethical Dimensions (Oxford University Press, 2012), Co-editor with Gloria Neufeld Redekop of AWAKENING: Applying Spirituality, Emergent Creativity, and Reconciliation (Lexington Books, 2019), Co-editor with Gloria Neufeld Redekop of TRANSFORMING: Exploring Spirituality, Emergent Creativity, and Reconciliation (Lexington Books, 2021),editor of René Girard and Creative Mimesis (2016, Lexington Books) and René Girard and Creative Reconciliation (2010, Lexington Books) both with Thomas Ryba, among many other scholarly and non-scholarly articles.

Before that he was President at the Canadian Institute for Conflict Resolution. His involvement in training and program development has taken him to Indigenous communities in Canada as well as to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sudan, Taiwan and other countries.

Since 2010 he has been working on the development of a Graduate Diploma in Integrative Peacebuilding. His theoretical and practical insights found expression in his book, From Violence to Blessing: How an Understanding of Deep-Rooted Conflict Can Open Paths to Reconciliation, which included two chapters devoted to mimetic theory and scapegoating respectively and was organized around the concepts of mimetic structures of violence and mimetic structures of blessing. Subsequent research has focused on protest crowds and police, resulting in (with Shirley Paré) Beyond Control: A Mutual Respect Approach to Protest Crowd – Police Relations. Oxford University Press has published Introduction to Conflict Studies: Empirical, Theoretical, and Ethical Dimensions, which he co-authored with Jean-Francois Rioux. He edited (with Thomas Ryba) René Girard and Creative Mimesis and René Girard and Creative Reconciliation.

Currently, he is preparing a workbook on Community Dialogue processes on Social Reconciliation and Economic Development, a project supported by the James Bay Cree of Quebec.