Claire Hajaj

Claire Hajaj is a specialist in conflict and post-conflict dynamics, currently serving as the executive director of Inter Mediate. For more than 20 years, she has contributed to humanitarian, political and security strategies to mitigate conflicts in some of the world’s most complex settings.

Hajaj started her career working on conflict resolution and negotiations at the United Nations Security Council in 2002 with the UN Counter Terrorism Committee and later worked for the United Nations in Lebanon, Kosovo, Iraq, Myanmar, Nigeria and Pakistan. Her experience ranges from negotiating community-level access for vaccinators in extremist-dominated regions on the Afghan-Pakistan border to supporting the UN Special Representative in Iraq during the height of the post-war insurgency, to negotiating a landmark stabilisation agreement between the UN and Lebanon during the Syria conflict and refugee crisis.

Sharing Palestinian and Jewish heritage, Hajaj ’s writing on conflict has appeared in Newsweek, the Sunday Times, the New Statesman, the Economist, Granta, and as the author of two novels. Her policy writing has appeared in Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Global Journal of Health Governance and the UN Centre for Policy Research, where she is an Inaugural Fellow. She is also a trustee for the UK for UNHCR.