Michelle I. Gawerc

AFCFP Board Member

Michelle Gawerc is a professor of sociology at Loyola University Maryland, who has followed and supported the work of Combatants for Peace since shortly after its formation in 2006. Her scholarly work focuses on initiatives that bring people together across differences and inequality to advocate collectively for justice and peace. Much of her past research has centered on joint Palestinian-Israeli peace/anti-occupation movements, examining how activists cultivate and sustain solidarity, collective identity, and resilience across lines of conflict and occupation. Michelle's current research focuses on truth commissions for racial and indigenous justice and transformation in the United States, including community-engaged research with the Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

She is the author of Prefiguring Peace: Israeli-Palestinian Peacebuilding Partnerships and co-editor of the forthcoming Coalition-building and Solidarity Across Difference: Special Issue of Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change (with Rachel L. Einwohner). Her research has been published in numerous journals covering social movement, peace and conflict studies, and sociology. Michelle is a recipient of several honors, including a Fulbright Fellowship, a Harvard Law School Program on Negotiation Graduate Research Fellowship, and a United Nations Memorial Fellowship Award from the American Sociological Association. Her intellectual and practical work is driven by a dedication to collective liberation and her background as the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors.