Indian American Vivek Viswanathan has bagged the first prize of $10,000 college scholarship in this year's National Peace Essay Contest, sponsored by the US Institute of Peace (USIP).
A student at Herricks High School in New York, Viswanathan received the prize for his essay titled "Establishing Peaceful and Stable Post-war Societies Through Effective Rebuilding Strategy".
More than 1,000 students from American high schools across the US and abroad took part in the contest.
Viswanathan is co-editor-in-chief of the school newspaper. He serves on the executive boards of both the student government and the world affairs club.
He hopes to pursue a career in law or politics upon graduation from college. He is also a member of the university basketball team and a trombonist in the jazz band.
A three-time national finalist in the National History Day competition, he produced a paper entitled, "Fallout From Reykjavik: Reagan's Stand and the Fate of Arms Control," for which he interviewed former secretary of state George Shultz and former secretary of defence Caspar Weinberger.
In his essay, Viswanathan drew upon the 1947 US Marshall Plan for post-World War II Europe as a successful example of post-war reconstruction and Somalia of the early 1990s as an unsuccessful model.
He argued that to be effective, reconstruction efforts should be tailored to the specific post-war situation and should obtain a large commitment of resources and assistance from the international community.
{{/usCountry}}He argued that to be effective, reconstruction efforts should be tailored to the specific post-war situation and should obtain a large commitment of resources and assistance from the international community.
{{/usCountry}}David Leimbach of Jenks High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was awarded a $5,000 for his second-place essay on "Attempts at Sustainable Progress Following Conflict: East Timor and Cambodia."
Kevin Schaeffer, a student at the Canterbury School in Fort Wayne, Indiana, won the third-place award of $2,500 for his essay on "Political Reconstruction: Planting Democracy and Stability for the Next Generation".
The winners were announced at the Institute's annual awards banquet, according to a USIP statement in Washington on Friday.
Institute president Richard H Solomon commented on the high standard of all the essays, noting that their authors "are already extraordinary ambassadors of peace".
Viswanathan, Leimbach and Schaeffer joined the other 49 state-level winners in Washington, DC, during June 19-24 for a programme that introduced them to senior US government and foreign embassy officials, members of Congress, and other experts involved in the making of US foreign policy.
The purpose of the exercise was to encourage the participants to closely examine the process of post-conflict reconstruction, the release said.