Peacebuilding & Development Summer Professional Training Program 2007

Sarah Cohen is a Conflict Specialist with USAID, in the Office of Conflict Management and Mitigation and currently acts as the USAID liaison for the State Departments Office for the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS). She has worked in several countries in Africa, and specializes in the role of civil society in post conflict and transitioning environments. She currently manages the NGO Sector Strengthening Program, which is a program that works to enhance the institutional capacities of local NGOs and Civil Society organizations in fragile and post conflict countries. She is a specialist in Monitoring and Evaluation and designed the first workshop for local and international NGOs and USAID Mission staff on Conflict Sensitive Monitoring and Evaluation for USAID, which was held in West Africa and focused on the Mano River Region. She has worked extensively with participatory methods for program and planning design, and has applied these to several field settings to enhance the participation in planning with local groups and stakeholders. She recently worked on a Disaster Assistance and Response Team (DART) for the Office for Foreign Disaster Assistance in Darfur, Sudan and was stationed in both North and South Darfur.

Mark Chupp, Ph.D., is Visiting Assistant Professor at the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences at Case Western Reserve University and Research Associate with the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development in Cleveland, Ohio. He teaches community development and designs systems for transforming inter-group conflict, increasing citizen participation in democratic decision-making, and facilitating appreciative inquiry in organizations and communities. Mark is an international peacebuilding consultant, having worked in Northern Ireland, Egypt, Croatia and throughout Latin America.

Anthony Wanis-St. John is an Assistant Professor of International Peace and Conflict Resolution at American University. He is a Research Associate at the Center on International Conflict Resolution at Columbia University. He earned his PhD (2001) and MA (1996) from the Fletcher School, Tufts University and was awarded a Doctoral Fellowship at Harvard Law School's Program on Negotiation.

He has taught as an adjunct professor at the University of Massachusetts, Johns Hopkins/SAIS, Tufts University/Fletcher School and Notre Dame University (Beirut, Lebanon). In 2006 he will publish a book with Lynne Rienner entitled: Back Channels: Two Edged Sword of Peacemaking. He consults with the World Bank, the World Health Organization and civil society organizations on their peacebuilding work. He was born in Cairo, Egypt of Palestinian and Lebanese origins and he speaks fluent Spanish and French as well as basic Arabic.

Julie Mertus is an Associate Professor and Co-Director of the MA program in Ethics, Peace and Global Affairs at American University. During academic year 2006-2007, she is a Senior Fulbright Scholar in Denmark where she is working with the Danish Institute of Human Rights. A graduate of Yale Law School, her work focuses on human rights, U.S. foreign policy, refugee and humanitarian law and policy, gender and conflict and post-war transitions. Her geographic expertise is in Central and Eastern Europe, with a specialty on the former Yugoslavia, but she has also participated in human rights projects in such diverse places as Vietnam, Brazil, China, Jordan and South Africa. Her prior appointments include: Senior Fellow, U.S. Institute of Peace; Human Rights Fellow, Harvard Law School; Writing Fellow, MacArthur Foundation, Fulbright Fellow (Romania), and Counsel, Human Rights Watch.

As a practitioner, Professor Mertus has nearly twenty years experience in the human rights field, as a field researcher, lawyer, advocate, political analyst and trainer. At the international level, she has conducted human rights trainings with NGOs, political leaders, school teachers and student activists in over a dozen countries. She has also served as a consultant on human rights and humanitarian issues to UNHCR, the Humanitarianism and War Project, the Watson Institute for International Affairs, Women Waging Peace, OXFAM, the Soros Foundation, and many other nongovernmental and intergovernmental organizations. As a teacher, Professor Mertus has been recognized for her innovative course designs and interactive teaching. She has written curriculum for several human rights courses and her own book on teaching women's human rights.

L. Randolph Carter currently heads the Children and Youth Division of Search For Common Ground and is Co-Chair for the Washington Network on Children and Armed Conflict. He is also co-Founder of the National Association of Palava Managers, a Liberian youth initiative that conducts conflict resolution and peacebuilding work in school and communities in Liberia. For nearly 15 years, Randolph has worked with children and youth in several parts of the world in peace education, conflict resolution, trauma counseling, self esteem building, and reintegration programs. As a consultant, He has provided technical assistance to organizations such as the USAID (Displaced Children and Orphans fund), and the US Department of Labor (International Labor Affairs Bureau). With co-author Jaime Alvis, Randolph is completing a programming toolkit for engaging children and youth in conflict resolution initiatives. The publication, “Common Grounding with Children and Youth”, will be published in May of 2007.

Randolph’s work and experience have been resourced in initiatives such as the Graca Machel Study (The Impact of Armed Conflict on Children), Day of the African Child, YMCA/YWCA projects, The Hague Peace Appeal, Harvard University programs (Harvard Children Initiatives and Harvard School of Humanitarian Policy), American University (Committee on Child Soldiers), Leadership Metro Richmond (Metro-teens) and Children in the Crossfire (US Department of Labor/John F. Kennedy High School).

		Ron Fisher, Ph.D. is a Professor of International Peace and Conflict Resolution at American University, where he teaches courses in approaches to peace, conflict resolution, and third party intervention. He is a social psychologist, who has been published in many of the interdisciplinary journals in peace studies and conflict
resolution, and who has twenty-five years of training and consultation experience at the domestic and international levels. In 2003 he received the Morton Deutsch Conflict Resolution Award from the Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict and Violence, a Division of the American Psychological Association.
		Erin McCandless has worked with organisations around the world on critical issues at the intersections of peace, conflict, and development as a researcher, writer, facilitator, lecturer, trainer, programme coordinator, and policy adviser. For seven years, she has lived and worked in Africa on issues ranging from grassroots to policy levels.
She currently works with the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) as the head of the Evaluation and Strategic Coordination Unit, where her efforts include working to enhance the peace-building capacities and integrated strategies within the mission. McCandless founded and for more than five years has co-edited the internationally refereed Journal of Peacebuilding and Development. She is author of more than forty publications broadly covering areas related to peace-building, conflict, poverty reduction strategies, human and minority rights, social movements and civil society, land reform, reconciliation and justice, elections, and research methods. She was also the co-founder, editor, and publisher of Cantilevers, an international peace and conflict resolution publication highlighting youth from regions of conflict. McCandless has taught in Africa University's Institute for Peace, Leadership and Governance in Zimbabwe, and conducted courses and skills trainings in peace-building and development in many parts of the world. She was a United States Institute of Peace scholar in 2003. She holds a doctorate in International Relations from the American University, Washington, D.C., and degrees from the London School of Economics and the University of California, Berkeley.
		Pat Mische is the Lloyd Professor of Peace Studies and World Law at Antioch College in Yellow Springs Ohio, and has taught in the Peace Education Program at Teachers College Columbia University, and in Peace Studies programs as a visiting professor at several universities, including the Universities of Notre Dame, Georgetown, Seton Hall and American.
She is also the co-founder and President of Global Education Associates, a network of men and women in 90 countries who collaborate in research and educational programs for the advancement of peace, social justice, human rights, democratic participation, and ecological balance. Dr. Mische has conducted more than1000 programs related to peace order in more than fifty countries around the world. She has also collaborated with United Nations agencies and programs, including with UNESCO's program on the Contribution of Religions to a Culture of Peace, and with UNICEF on its Education for All program in East Africa where she has been helping to develop partnerships for sustainable development involving rural women’s groups, nongovernmental organizations, and UN agencies. Dr. Edward (Edy) Kaufman's work has focused on human rights and conflict resolution on several continents, especially Latin America and the Middle East. He has been instrumental in focusing the work of the Truman Institute on joint research projects with Palestinian academics, and has helped to introduce conflict resolution as a discipline to the Hebrew University and to Israel and the Middle East in general. Given his background, his participation in the project will help to direct the project's research towards issues and solution that will be relevant to both Latin America and the Middle East, as well as other parts of the world. Edy has been Executive Director of the Truman Institute from 198-2005 (with a five year break from 1991-96 to direct the Center for Development and Conflict Management at the University of Maryland) and continues as Senior Research Associate.
		Mary Hope Schwoebel has been working in the fields of development, humanitarian assistance, and peacebuilding for over 25 years. She has a Masters from University of California, Davis where she specialized in training for international development, and is a Doctoral Candidate at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University.
Her dissertation is entitled "Nation-building in the Lands of the Somalis". Schwoebel has worked for NGOs, USAID, multilateral banks, UN organizations, and research institutions. She has taught as an adjunct faculty at universities in the Washington DC area, including Georgetown and George Mason, in the fields of peace studies, conflict studies, international affairs, and foreign policy. She spent five years living and working in South America and six in Africa, where she held a variety of positions, including project manager for UNICEF's Urban Basic Services Program in Somalia, and project manager for UNICEF's Ethnic Clashes Program in Kenya. For the past ten years she has worked as a consultant, and has conducted dozens of assessments, policy and program designs and evaluations, conflict analyses, and training in Africa, South America, South and Asia, the Middle East, and the Caribbean.. Most recently she has focused on developing training curriculum and tools for integrating conflict-sensitivity in development, humanitarian assistance, and peacebuilding programs.

Trainer Biographies
	Mohammed Abu-Nimer, Associate Professor at the American University's School of International Service in International Peace and Conflict Resolution, is the faculty director of the Peacebuilding & Development Institute. As a recognized expert on conflict resolution, dialogue,
peacebuilding and development, Dr. Abu-Nimer has worked for over a decade on Arab-Israeli dialogue and peacebuilding efforts, the application of conflict resolution models in Muslim communities; inter-religious conflict resolution training; interfaith dialogue; and evaluation of conflict resolution programs. As a practitioner, he has been intervening and conducting over a hundred training workshops and courses all over the world on themes of conflict resolution; community development, peacebuilding, reconciliation and development, training for trainers; interfaith and interethnic dialogue; culture, religion, intercultural training; conflict resolution and human rights in relief and development projects, and problem-solving workshops in such conflict zones as Sri Lanka, Mindanao- Philippines, Palestine, Israel, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Sierra Leone, and Guatemala, as well as other areas including Egypt and the United States.
	Eileen Borris, Ed.D, is a clinical and political psychologist and the Director of Training for the Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy where she designs and implements training programs in conflict resolution, negotiation, dialogue and peacebuilding. She has worked in places that include the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, India with the
Tibetan government in exile, Nepal, Pakistan and Indonesia. Dr. Borris has worked extensively in this field for over 20 years, and for organizations such as USAID and UNIFEM. She has published extensively in the areas of forgiveness and reconciliation and has written two books on forgiveness entitled “Forgiveness, the Ultimate Freedom” and “Forgiveness, A Seven Step Program for Letting Go of Anger and Bitterness.” She has taught negotiation and cross cultural communication at Thunderbird, the Garvin Center for International Management in Glendale, Arizona. Dr. Borris received her graduate degrees from Johns Hopkins and Columbia University.