A. Marco Turk: Peace Builder Receives Lifetime Achievement Award for Work With Asian Pacific American Community

A. Marco Turk, professor and director of the Negotiation, Conflict Resolution & Peace Building (NCRP) program at California State University, Dominguez Hills, received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Asian Pacific American Dispute Resolution Center (APADRC) at the organization’s Eighth Annual Conversity Awards Reception in April.

Internationally recognized for his work as a peacebuilder, educator and trainer dealing with ethnic conflict, Turk was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in conflict resolution on the island of Cyprus from 1997 to 1999. Since then, he has made several return trips to continue his efforts in helping resolve the intercultural conflicts between Greek and Turkish Cypriots.

APADRC recognized Turk’s local efforts in providing undergraduate and graduate students from the NCRP program as interns for the organization. In addition, Turk welcomed groups of middle and high schools students to CSU Dominguez Hills. The students were sponsored by APADRC in visiting the university for outreach and recruitment activities.

Turk says that his involvement with APADRC has enhanced his teaching by adding “the value of intercultural and multicultural aspects of the field of negotiation, conflict resolution and peacebuilding. By encouraging students to participate in the activities of organizations such as APADRC through on-the-job internships, NCRP provides them with opportunities for real-life involvement in activities that they would otherwise only read about.”

Prior to his arrival at CSU Dominguez Hills in 2002, Turk taught in the Global Peace and Conflict Studies Program and in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine, where he began his full-time academic career in 1995. As part of his work in the area of negotiating ethnic conflict, he created a course in international conflict resolution for Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, where he taught as an adjunct professor of law in the juris doctor and international master of laws programs.

Turk is a certified community and trial court-qualified mediator, and serves on a panel of appellate mediators. A member of the State Bar of California since 1961, he is a former Los Angeles Superior Court judge pro tem, arbitrator for the American Arbitration Association, and adjunct law professor at Southwestern Law School.

For more information on the NCRP program at CSU Dominguez Hills, click here.

- Joanie Harmon