Dolores Gandulfo has extensive experience in democracy, electoral systems, and human rights in Latin America. Currently, she serves as the Director of the Electoral Observatory of the Permanent Conference of Political Parties of Latin America and the Caribbean (COPPPAL). In this role, she has coordinated more than 24 electoral missions in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela.
Dolores is also the Director of Institutional Policy at the Ombudsman’s Office of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires. She previously held the position of coordinator of the Electoral Observation Working Group with a Human Rights Perspective at the Ibero-American Ombudsman Federation (FIO). Additionally, she is a member of the Observatory of Political Reforms of Latin America and the Caribbean (IIJ-UNAM), the Association for Studies in International Relations of Argentina (AERIA), the Ojo Paritario Collective, and the Network of Political Scientists.
Dolores has extensively published on electoral observation and human rights in Latin America. She holds a Master’s in Public Policy from Georgetown University and a Bachelor’s degree in International Relations from the Universidad del Salvador. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Political Science from the National University of General San Martín (Argentina).
A journalist by profession, Cecília Olliveira has dedicated her career to covering violence and drug and arms trafficking. She is the founder and executive director of Fogo Cruzado Institute, an organisation that uses technology to generate and distribute open and collaborative data on armed violence in Brazil.
Cecília also co-founded the news portal Intercept Brasil, and serves as director of the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism (ABRAJI). She has previously worked as a consultant for Amnesty International and a communications advisor for the PRVL (Programme for the Reduction of Lethal Violence against Adolescents and Young People), an initiative undertaken by the Favelas Observatory in collaboration with UNICEF and the Human Rights Secretariat of the Presidency of the Republic of Brazil.
Cecília holds a postgraduate degree in Crime and Public Security from the Federal University of Minas Gerais. She studied drug policy, HIV, and human rights at the University of Texas and participated in the “Latin American Advocacy Fellowship Program on Drug Policy Reform” of Open Society Foundations. In 2020, Cecília was a finalist for the Reporters Without Borders Press Awards, an honour that recognises courageous voices in global media.
Tania Pariona is a passionate advocate for the rights of Indigenous Peoples, women, youth, and girls. She served as a member of the Peruvian Congress representing the Ayacucho region from 2016 to 2019. During her tenure, she tirelessly championed the rights of Indigenous communities in Peru, including advocating for prior consultation, land titling, and reparations for victims of the internal armed conflict. In 2018, she was elected president of the Women and Family Committee in Congress, where she made significant contributions to the passage of laws against gender-based violence, the promotion of gender equality, and the advancement of women’s political participation.
Tania is a prominent member of the Continental Link of Indigenous Women of the Americas (ECMIA) and a co-founder of several organisations dedicated to empowering Indigenous children and youth at local, regional, national, and international levels. She has actively participated in international forums, including as a representative of the Global Indigenous Youth Caucus within the Global Indigenous Coordinating Committee for the 2014 World Conference on Indigenous Peoples.
Tania holds a bachelor’s degree in Social Work from the Universidad Nacional de San Cristóbal de Huamanga – UNSCH and a master’s degree in Human Development from the Universidad Católica de Peru. In 2009, she was honoured as a Fellow of the Human Rights Program for Indigenous Leaders, a collaborative initiative between the University of Deusto (Bilbao, Spain) and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Gabriela Warkentin is a distinguished communicator, academic, and businesswoman. Since 2016, she has directed and hosted the popular morning news programme “Así las cosas” on W Radio in Mexico. She is also the host and producer of “Al Habla… con Warkentin,” a weekly interview podcast on El País, where she fosters constructive and grounded conversations on the challenges facing Mexico. In addition to her broadcasting roles, Gabriela serves as a columnist for the newspaper Reforma.
A founding member of the IFIT Mexico Brain Trust, Gabriela is a professor at the Universidad Iberoamericana and a founding partner of Tridente Aceleradora. From 2002 to 2011, she served as the director of the Department of Communication at the Universidad Iberoamericana. During this period, she also played a pivotal role as the creator and director of the radio station Ibero 90.9 and later as the director of W Radio from 2013 to 2017.
Gabriela holds memberships in various influential organisations, including the Council of Article 19, the Council of OXFAM Mexico, the Governing Council of Mexican Transparency, and the Assembly of the Information Group on Chosen Reproduction (GIRE).
Gabriela has earned recognition as one of the 50 most important women in Mexico, according to Forbes magazine, and as one of the 300 top leaders of Mexico, according to Líderes magazine. Her writings have been featured in El País, El Universal, Reforma, La Crónica de Hoy, and Rolling Stone México.
Gabriela holds a degree in communication from the Universidad Iberoamericana. She has also pursued postgraduate studies in comparative literature at UNAM and in communication at the University of Navarra. Fluent in English, German, and French, Gabriela is also a skilled translator of Spanish.
Alongside the work of its in-country brain trusts, global initiatives and thematic practice groups, IFIT sometimes establishes regional initiatives as a way to strengthen the synergies across its diverse projects and bring forward ideas and new strategic collaborations that have a cross-country dimension. The first such programme is the IFIT Latin America and Caribbean Regional Programme.
Our Regional Initiatives
Regional Programme for Latin America and the Caribbean
The Regional Programme for Latin America and the Caribbean’s aim is to foster ideas generation, lessons sharing and strategic collaborations for reducing violence, strengthening democracy and the rule of law, and mitigating polarisation in the region.
Informed by the work of the IFIT brain trusts in Colombia and Mexico and IFIT’s Inclusive Narratives Practice Group, we created a toolkit that helps promote viewpoint plurality and constructive dialogue in polarised contexts during electoral periods and beyond.
This practice brief reflects on the development of the toolkit, which included research on narrative and polarisation, a set of consultations with experts in diverse fields, and testing and improvement of the tools in Colombia and Mexico. The brief discusses the challenges and lessons that emerged in the process, and provides recommendations for other practitioners interested in developing and using such a resource to enable narrative transformation and manage conflict.
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With over 20 years of diplomatic experience, María Ángela Holguín is the former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Colombia (2010-2018). In this role, she also served as the delegate of President Juan Manuel Santos in the peace negotiations with the FARC, and was a member of the Post-Conflict Cabinet.
María Ángela has also held positions including Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Colombia to the United Nations; Ambassador of Colombia to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela; Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs; Secretary-General of the Foreign Ministry; and First Secretary of the Embassy of Colombia in Paris, overseeing commercial affairs. Her extensive professional experience also includes serving as the Private Secretary of the Attorney General and representing the Interamerican Development Bank-CAF in Argentina.
A political scientist by education, María Ángela holds specialisations in Public Administration and Administrative Institutions from the Universidad de los Andes and in Diplomacy and Strategy from the Center for Diplomatic and Strategic Studies (CEDS) in Paris, France. She authored the book “La Venezuela que Viví” and currently serves on the Board of Directors of several companies.
This brief presents a summary of the ideas and practices IFIT has developed for addressing the role of narratives in driving polarisation and conflict. Challenging the tendency of peacebuilders to promote a new, unifying narrative from the outside, IFIT advocates for raising awareness of narrative dynamics, changing conflict narratives from within, and amplifying less prominent stories to encourage peaceful engagement.
The brief outlines why and how narratives are important for advancing peace. Based on consultations with IFIT’s country brain trusts, IFIT’s Inclusive Narratives Practice Group and a large community of specialised experts, our narrative approach offers guidance gleaned from practical experience to support practitioners, policy makers, donors and others working for peace.
After outlining narrative structure and dynamics in the first video in this series, narrative theory expert and IFIT Inclusive Narratives Practice Group member Sara Cobb focuses on practice in this 20-minute follow-up video. She presents a set of narrative tools and how to use them to transform polarising narratives as part of peacebuilding efforts.
Cobb describes a narrative as a tree. The trunk is the visible narrative, which hardens and forms from shared roots and justifies people’s ideas and actions. The roots are facts, events, parables and stories about the collective past, which anchor people’s worldviews. And the branches are actions, policies and other outcomes of the narrative trunk. It is the branches and roots that are most amenable to change, as the trunk tends to be most rigid.
A range of proven narrative tools are then presented. These can be employed in meetings, workshops, public debates and similar spaces for peacebuilding. The first is positive connotation, through which participants describe the opposing side in terms of a positive trait or intention in order to enable humanisation and mutual legitimacy. The second is circular questioning, through which participants make comparisons between their own and others’ stories and thereby introduce new elements that transform their narrative. The third is scaffolding, which helps participants identify exceptions to events in their stories to again introduce new elements and change their narrative. And the fourth is narrative inoculation, where participants identify obstacles to narrative transformation ahead of time so they can strategically address them.
Narratives are crucial to addressing polarisation and advancing peace in fragile and conflict-affected countries. Since narratives shape how we understand ourselves in society and how we mobilise for action when conflict arises, narrative strategies and tools should be central elements of peacebuilding. Informed both by IFIT’s Inclusive Narratives Practice Group and by IFIT’s country brain trusts, this Narrative Peacebuilding Hub provides in-depth information and practical guidance – including publications, videos, toolkits and more – on how to enrich national narrative landscapes so as to diminish the influence of simplified, divisive stories. It is intended as a platform for practitioners, policy makers, donors and others working for peace to exchange knowledge and create new ideas and practices at the intersection of narrative and peacebuilding.
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