faculty

Karen Feste,PhD, Director, Conflict Resolution Institute Graduate Program and Professor, Graduate School of International Studies.

Karen Feste

Professor, Graduate School of International Studies

Director, Conflict Resolution Institute Graduate Program

Karen Feste, Professor at the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver, served as Associate Dean of GSIS from 1988 until September, 2000, and currently is Graduate Director of the interdisciplinary Conflict Resolution Institute at the University. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Minnesota in 1973, has been listed in Who’s Who in American Women and in 1980, was selected as an Outstanding Young Woman in America. She was a Fulbright Scholar to Vienna, Austria during 1986-87 and in 1993-94.

Her professional work in international studies has sharpened around three national security themes: military intervention, terrorism, and conflict resolution.

She began research on Cold War intervention patterns, comparing American and Soviet responses to domestic unrest around the world which resulted to two books, American and Soviet Intervention (an annotated edited collection) and Expanding the Frontiers, a quantitative study of events, both published in the 1990s. Recently, she completed a project dealing with American foreign policy and intervention in the post-Cold War period. Her book, Intervention: Shaping the Global Order, published in September, 2003, is an examination of American intervention patterns—where, when, why, and how often military contingents were sent abroad during the twentieth century—combined with a timeline of intervention opportunities (defined as civilian conflict uprisings throughout the world) over the last fifty years, which form the backdrop to a comparative case analysis of the eight major Post Cold War interventions that occurred in the twelve year period from the Panama intervention in 1989 through the War in Afghanistan in 2001. The results of that research led to her current project, examining the linkage between U.S. Intervention and international terrorism.

With respect to the Conflict Resolution field, her analysis of theories of negotiation and conflict with application to the Arab-Israeli dispute, was published as a book, Plans for Peace, in 1991. She developed a new graduate course in Conflict Resolution in the mid-1990s, following an initiative from the Association of Professional Schools of International Studies (APSIA) and a United States Institute of Peace grant. From this basic course, she developed a specialized study in Conflict Resolution launching a university-wide multi-unit interdisciplinary program on campus, which began in 1998. Her proposal to the Henry Luce Foundation for program expansion through a Luce Professorship was accepted in 2000.

Feste has a background in quantitative research methodology and in this capacity she has worked outside academia, serving as a consultant to the Egyptian Ministry of Planning and the Ministry of Health; and an advisor to the Ministry of Science, Technology and Energy in Thailand. In the early 1980s, she was a senior analyst at CACI, a private consulting firm in Washington D.C., where she prepared reports for the U.S. government on political instability in Egypt Iran, and the Philippines; and estimating future leadership in China.

Karen Feste was the editor in chief of The Monograph Series in World Affairs, a quarterly publication devoted to contemporary issues in international relations between 1979-1992.

As an invited academic scholar, Dr. Feste has lectured on American Foreign Policy in Germany, Austria, Turkey, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, and in various venues throughout the United States. Her current public lecture topics include: (1) Intervention Issues in the Post Cold War Era; (2) U.S. Intervention and Anti-American Terrorism; (3) Resolving intervention-terrorism conflict; (4) Conflict Resolution in the 21st Century; and (5) Conflict Resolution Processes in the Israeli-Palestinian Dispute.