Dr. Ayesha Siddiqa is an independent author and political scientist currently working as senior fellow, department of War Studies, King’s College, London from where she obtained her Ph.D as well. Earlier she was a research associate at the Center for International Studies and Diplomacy at SOAS.
Dr. Siddiqa was also a fellow at St Antony’s college, Oxford, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and a Ford Fellow. She has taught at University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins University and has written two books: (a) Pakistan’s Arms Procurement and Military Buildup, 1979-99, and (b) Military Inc: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy.
She was also a civil servant and served as Director Naval Research at the Naval Headquarters. Her work focuses on military culture and organization, and civil-military relations.
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Professor Augustin Loada obtained his academic qualifications in Burkina Faso and France, and has served as Professor of Public Law and Political Science in Burkina Faso since 1995. Complementing his academic pursuits, he has also practised law since 2016. Professor Loada was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Boston University, United States, and has been a member of the American Political Science Association (APSA) since 2000.
He is the founder and was the inaugural Executive Director (2000–2014) of the Centre for Democratic Governance (CGD), a research institution in Burkina Faso focused on studies in governance and democratization. Additionally, Professor Loada established and directed the Institute for Governance and Development (IGD), which, in collaboration with APSA, organised a workshop entitled “Religion and Politics in Comparative Perspective” in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, in 2013.
In November 2014, Professor Loada was appointed Minister of Civil Service, Labour, and Social Protection in the Transitional Government of Burkina Faso. Since 2016, he has undertaken regular missions to New Caledonia, a French territory in the Pacific, where he joined the United Nations Group of Electoral Experts and led this group from 2018 to 2025. While in Burkina Faso, Professor Loada continues to lecture at the university and oversee the operations of his law firm.
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Colonel Auguste Denise Barry is a senior defense and security expert from Burkina Faso with over four decades of distinguished service in the national armed forces and the Burkinabè government. He is the founder and Executive Director of the Center for Strategic Studies in Defense and Security (CESDS) and is currently completing his PhD at the Institute for International Relations of Cameroon (IRIC), University of Yaoundé II-Soa.
Colonel Barry retired from the armed forces in August 2025 after a career spanning high-level command, strategic planning, and public leadership. His expertise covers defense and security governance, higher education, strategic foresight, geopolitics, mediation, peacebuilding, and conflict management and resolution.
In parallel with his military career, Colonel Barry has built a strong academic and policy profile as a consultant to national governments, regional and international organisations, and international NGOs and think tanks such as Search for Common Ground and the Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance (DCAF). He is also a widely respected university lecturer across West and Central Africa. In his home country, he has served as Minister of Security (2011) and as Minister of Territorial Administration, Decentralization and Security (2014-2015), and has advised the Presidency and Ministry of Defense in multiple senior roles. Internationally, he has contributed to numerous initiatives, including military advisor to the Special Representative of the Secretary General of the United Nations in CAR and most recently as coordinator of the security pillar for the AU–UN High-Level Independent Panel on Security and Development in the Sahel.
A recipient of numerous national and international honors, including Burkina Faso’s rank of Commander of the Order of Étalon, he is also an active author and speaker on peace, security sector reform, and prevention of conflict and violent extremism, contributing to policy dialogue at regional and global levels. Colonel Barry is a graduate of Cameroon’s International War College of Youndé, holds a Master’s degree in Strategy, Defense and Security by the University of Youndé II-Soa, and has earned numerous additional military and civilian qualifications.
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General Alberto José Mejía Ferrero (Ret.) is the former Commander of the Colombian National Army and the Colombian Military Forces. With a military career spanning more than four decades, he led Colombia’s armed forces between 2015 and 2018 during a pivotal period marked by peace negotiations between the Colombian government and the FARC, supporting the process that resulted in the group’s disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration, while upholding democratic civil–military relations.
During his tenure, General Mejía spearheaded a comprehensive institutional transformation to modernise Colombia’s military forces, strengthening operational effectiveness, professional standards, transparency, international cooperation, and compliance with human rights and international humanitarian law, including the implementation of the Plan Damasco doctrine, and the creation of key transparency and international cooperation bodies. He played a vital role in Colombia’s inclusion as a NATO Global Security Partner.
Following his retirement, he served as Colombia’s Ambassador to Australia and New Zealand (2019–2021), promoting bilateral relations and regional cooperation in the Indo-Pacific. He also worked as a consultant to the United States Institute of Peace (USIP) on military transformation and security sector reform and held academic and research positions in Australia and the United States. Currently, he is the honorary president of the Australia-Colombia Business Council in Bogotá and a visiting professor at the University of Los Andes’ School of Government and at the Nueva Granada Military University in leadership and national security.
General Mejía holds advanced degrees in Military Sciences, International Security, Strategic Studies, and National Security, and has received numerous national decorations, including Colombia’s highest honour Cruz de Boyacá, and the Colombian National Congress’s Order of Democracy. He has also been awarded the US Legion of Merit and has received the US Command and General Staff College and the US Army War College Hall of Fame distinctions.
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Ahmad Kobrosli is an Intern at the Institute for Integrated Transitions (IFIT). He holds a Bachelors in Law from the Lebanese University and an LLM in Legal Studies with a specialization in International Law and Human Rights from the University of Bologna. His research mainly focuses on counter-mapping and spatial justice.
Before joining IFIT, Ahmad worked at the World Bank on projects relating to access to law and justice in the Global South. He was also the Managing Editor for the University of Bologna Law Review.
At IFIT, he supports the MENA regional projects by drawing on his academic and professional experience in human rights and armed conflicts.
Working languages: English, Arabic, French.
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Security Engagement Practice Group
Civic groups and state security actors rarely are in direct contact in hybrid regimes and conflict-affected states. The distance can reinforce misperceptions and undermine opportunities for constructive engagement and policy dialogue. The Security Engagement Practice Group (SEPG) works to close this gap through research and practice.
Comprised of a distinguished group of retired senior state security officials, civil-military relations specialists, security sector reform experts, and civic diplomats, IFIT’s Security Engagement Practice Group aims to 1) support and provide practical analysis and advice to local civic and state security actors in identifying and acting on opportunities for trust-building and dialogue between them, and 2) advance knowledge in the field through innovative research.
The SEPG builds on IFIT’s extensive experience engaging with civic and state security actors through its in-country work as well as its comparative research, including a groundbreaking multiyear study on Dialogue with State Security Actors in Hybrid Regimes: Recommendations for Constructive Engagement.
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In many conflict-affected places, young people are spoken about far more than they are listened to. Colombia’s Pacific region of Chocó is no exception. Abundant in biodiversity, culture, and ancestral knowledge, yet marked by historical racism, poverty, and armed conflict, this Pacific region is often portrayed either as a victim of violence or as a distant paradise.
What rarely makes it into the national conversation are the complex stories and political imagination of Chocó’s youth: young leaders who are already shaping peaceful paths in their communities through art, activism, and everyday acts of resistance.
In 2025, the Institute for Integrated Transitions (IFIT) partnered with a group of young artists from the region to challenge that narrative imbalance. Using our narrative peacebuilding approach, we codesigned an arts-based process in which music, dance, and visual art became tools for young people. This approach empowers them to map, analyze, and ultimately enrich the narratives that circulate about their region.
What began as a set of conversations ended in the collective creation and public launch of “La Rompemos” (“We Disrupt It”). This original song, its music video, and a live performance are all rooted in the participants’ own realities and hopes.
Why Chocó? Why Now?
Chocó’s demographics and historical marginalization make narrative enrichment especially urgent. The area’s population, which is majority Afro-Colombian with a significant number of Indigenous communities, endures some of the highest poverty rates and has the most limited state presence in the country.
Two-thirds of the area’s residents live in poverty, with nearly 4 in 10 in extreme poverty. Roughly 80% lack reliable access to drinking water and electricity. Life expectancy lags far behind the national average.
But these statistics hide another truth: Chocó is also home to powerful traditions of cultural expression, community organization, and youth leadership. In other words, its conditions of exclusion and difference are not only material but also narrative.
To help reshape dynamics in such situations, IFIT applies a purpose-built method centered on the metaphor of “narrative trees” standing in a “narrative landscape.” This lens enables communities to see which narrative trees become dominant and why, and which are stifled or blocked. It also allows people to find space where smaller narrative trees can grow.
The aim is not to grow one large narrative tree, or a single unifying message, but rather to populate the narrative landscape with many stories and thereby greater complexity and representativity.
Building on this approach, IFIT’s Colombia team convened 20 young artists—singers, composers, dancers, community leaders, and an illustrator—from diverse backgrounds. They were chosen not only for their creative talent but also for their positive leadership in their communities. The goal was to recognize them as narrative protagonists whose art already shapes how Chocó is seen.
Turning Narrative Insights into Art
Over several days, the IFIT team helped the young artists map the narratives that define Chocó in public debate and everyday life. They noted how the national media tends to emphasize illegal mining, armed groups, state absence, and environmental degradation in the region, while stories of care, creativity, and community organizing remain largely invisible. The youth also explored internal tensions, between Afro-descendant and Indigenous communities and between rural and urban residents.
Using guiding questions from IFIT’s narrative peacebuilding methodology, the group examined: Who tells the story of Chocó? Who benefits from these narratives? Which stories justify certain policies?
The group worked not to erase the painful narratives but to add and amplify stories that reflect joy, pride, solidarity, and long-term vision.
Together, we then worked with the group to translate narrative analysis into artistic creation. The young artists organized themselves into three teams:
- Music: A songwriting group wrote lyrics and melodies grounded in the themes identified in the narrative mapping process—from the trauma of displacement to the beauty of local rivers and ancestral knowledge.
- Dance: A choreography team embodied those narratives, using movement to express resilience and connection to the land.
- Visual art: An illustrator crafted the aesthetic identity of the song and designed cover art.
Draft lyrics were brought back to the group for collective questioning: Are we reproducing stereotypes? Are all voices represented? Does the chorus only denounce what is wrong or does it also promote reflection and solutions?
Rehearsals, studio recordings, and the launch performance at a regional cultural festival were treated not just as artistic milestones but also as spaces to consider how the final product would enter and reshape the wider narrative landscape.
Arts-Based Narrative Peacebuilding as a Tool for Civic Participation
For the participating artists, the process opened a new understanding of narrative power. They began to see how the stories attached to their region can expand or limit their political agency; they can be perceived as victims and criminals or as protagonists of change.
When entire regions are reduced to simplistic narratives, the population’s claims to equal citizenship weaken. Social projects become something done to them, not with them. By contrast, narrative enrichment efforts like those facilitated by IFIT in Chocó allow young people to collectively name their problems, debate their representation, and shape how their region is understood.
Of course, an initiative like ours cannot alone address the region’s larger structural inequalities. However, it can open space for new conversations—in classrooms, on local radio, and in municipal debates—about what a place like Chocó is and what it could be.
By listening closely to young artists and supporting them as narrative actors, we set the stage for a richer, more inclusive story of who “we” are.
Originally published in Resilience & Resistance.
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Inclusive Narratives Practice Group
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publication / Narratives
Fractured Stories, Fragmented Societies: Addressing Collective Trauma through Narrative Engagement
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IFIT Narrative Peacebuilding Hub
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Public Commentary
Beyond a Unifying Story: Enriching Narratives for Inclusive Democracy
By Jasmina Brankovic
Amit Ahuja is an Associate Professor and Faculty-in-Residence at UC Santa Barbara. His research focuses on the processes of inclusion and exclusion in multiethnic societies. He has studied this within the context of ethnic parties and movements, military organization, intercaste marriage, and skin color preferences in South Asia.
Professor Ahuja’s book, Mobilizing the Marginalized: Ethnic Parties without Ethnic Movements published by Oxford University Press was the winner of the 2020 New India Foundation Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Book Prize. He has coedited a volume with Devesh Kapur, Internal Security in India: Violence, Order, and the State published by Oxford University Press. He is currently working on a book-length project titled, Building National Armies in Multiethnic States. In 2022-23, he is a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington DC. Professor Ahuja was awarded The Margret T. Getman Service to Students Award in 2015.
Professor Ahuja’s research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Institute of Indian Studies, the National Bureau of Asian Research and the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, the Hellman Family Foundation, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Michigan.
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Ena Rovira de Villar de Valenciano serves as Administrative Officer at the Institute for Integrated Transitions (IFIT).
She is an early-career professional with experience in administrative support, project coordination, communications, events, outreach, and programme assistance within international and multicultural environments, including NGOs and education-focused organisations. Prior to joining IFIT, Ena worked in the education sector and supported initiatives promoting intercultural exchange. She has also assisted community-based organisations in Barcelona and Malta working on human rights, women’s rights, and gender equality.
Ena holds a Master’s degree in Peace and Conflict Studies from University College Dublin and a Bachelor’s degree in International Relations from Universitat Ramon Llull (Blanquerna). She also completed an academic exchange at Université Saint-Joseph de Beirut, where she developed her understanding of conflict dynamics, political transitions, and social dynamics in Lebanon and the wider Middle East.
Working languages: English, Spanish, Catalan, and French. She also has working knowledge of Italian and basic Arabic.
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Are today’s global institutions and norms for peace, democracy, and human rights still alive, or are they just “dead men walking”?
In this thought-provoking new podcast series by the Institute for Integrated Transitions (IFIT), organised in collaboration with Justice Info, we will try to answer the question.
Listen to a short intro to the series by IFIT executive director Mark Freeman.
At a time of growing polarisation, geopolitical fragmentation, and declining institutional trust, our Dead Men Walking series aims to open space for honest reflection and serious thinking not only about the problems afflicting 20th century global norms and institutions, but also about new ideas and innovations for a changing world order.
Each episode of the series will feature prominent thought leaders, partners and practitioners from IFIT’s 400+ global expert network. The first episode will be published in the coming weeks and will focus on the International Criminal Court (ICC). Tune in to hear top peace mediator Barney Afako in conversation with Beth Van Schaack (former US Ambassador-at-Large for Global Criminal Justice), Janet Anderson (JusticeInfo’s ICC correspondent) and Phil Clark (SOAS Professor of International Politics) about the uncertain future of the ICC.
