The Utah Council for Citizen Diplomacy presents the Ambassador John Price and Marcia Price World Affairs Lecture Series

The Utah Council for Citizen Diplomacy welcomes John Marks, President and Founder of Search for Common Ground, as part of the Utah Council for Citizen Diplomacy's 2012-2013 Ambassador John Price and Marcia Price World Affairs Lecture Series. Marks will bring his experiences and passion to Utah, lecturing on Preventing Violence in an Adversarial World. Preventing violent conflict is among the most crucial challenges facing humanity today. Where mass violence exists, economic development is stifled; human rights are abused; and the environment is devastated. Current problems are simply too complex and too interconnected to be settled on a violent adversarial basis. Marks argues for the need for a mass attitudinal and behavioral shift toward non-violent, non-adversarial ways of dealing with differences; his organization, Search for Common Ground, does just that. As the world's largest non-profit conflict prevention and peace-building organization, Search for Common Ground has offices in over 30 countries and helps hundreds of thousands of people each year learn to deal with conflict in a peaceful way. Marks championed unique ways to engage others; using everything from comic books to hard statistical data. Search for Common Ground even has a media production division, Common Ground Productions, which produces a 39-episode soap opera on conflict resolution played in 17 countries across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.