Director, and Associate Professor
Center for Applied Conflict Management
Kent State University—USA


Dr. Patrick G. Coy is Director and Associate Professor at the Center for Applied Conflict Management at Kent State University in the USA. As Center Director, he coordinates and oversees the county’s largest undergraduate degree program in Peace and Conflict Studies, enrolling well over a 1,000 students in its classes each academic year. The Kent State degree is an applied program, focused on teaching the skills of conflict management.

Patrick Coy teaches courses on mediation, public sector dispute resolution, negotiation, mediation, nonviolence, and human rights. In addition, he has provided training seminars and various services in conflict resolution, mediation, and meeting facilitation to a variety of organizations and groups.

Professor Coy recently (2009) co-authored the book, Contesting Patriotism: Culture, Power and Strategy in the Peace Movement. He has also edited ten books: Social Conflicts and Collective Identities; A Revolution of the Heart: Essays on the Catholic Worker Movement; and eight volumes of Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change. He has published over 25 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. For full-text versions of many of these articles, go here: http://www.kent.edu/cacm/faculty/profiles_detail.cfm?profileitem=pcoy

Patrick Coy received the "Distinguished Teaching Award" of the College of Arts and Sciences at Kent State University, and the “Outstanding Published Article Award of 2008 from the American Sociological Association’s section on Peace, War and Social Conflict for his co-authored article examining the uses of the “support the troops” rhetoric in the US during wars from the Vietnam War to the Iraq War.

Formerly the national chairperson of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Coy has also served as a research fellow of the Albert Einstein Institution, and the executive director of the Lentz Peace Research Laboratory.

Dr. Coy’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the Albert Einstein Institution, the Council for International Exchange of Scholars, the American Sociological Association, and by the University Research Council of Kent State University.

He has served as an international observer and as a member of Peace Brigades International team supplying nonviolent protective accompaniment services to threatened individuals during the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka and he has long been active in the alternative dispute resolution movement as a mediator and as a scholar of the movement.

In 2010-2011, Professor Coy served as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Botswana, working on indigenous minority rights issues with the Research Centre for San Studies.