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Dr. Frannie Léautier is Chair of the IFIT International Advisory Council.
Frannie is CEO of SouthBridge Investments. Previously she held many positions including: Senior Vice President at the African Development Bank, where she was responsible for the day to day running of the Bank and led the intense transformation effort the Bank was going through; executive director of the TBG Group; and Managing Partner of the Fezembat Group, a company she founded in 2007. Clients she served in the latter role included the Trade and Development Bank (TDB—formerly PTA Bank) where she was an Eminent Person and Special Advisor to TDB Bank Board and President, advising on strategy, investments in infrastructure and alternative finance arrangements including private equity. She also advised the chairman of OCP (the largest phosphate company in the world) in the Kingdom of Morocco.
Earlier in her career, Dr. Léautier was Chairperson and Co-Founding Partner of Mkoba Private Equity, a fund offering growth capital to small and medium enterprises in Africa. She also spent fifteen years at the World Bank, 11 of which in executive roles. These included World Bank Vice President and Chief of Staff to the President of the World Bank. She was also Executive Secretary of the African Capacity Building Foundation (ACBF) where she led the effort of transforming the Foundation and orienting it towards the new sources of funding capacity building, public goods efforts, and philanthropic activities.
She is experienced with Executive and non-Executive roles on Boards having chaired the AfDB Board, and through holding wide ranging Board Director positions including Vice Chair TDB Bank; Treasurer and Chair of Risk and Audit Committee African Economic Research Consortium (AERC); Founding Board Member Nelson Mandela Institute for Science & Technology; Founding Member Editorial Board of the Journal of African Trade (JAT); Founding Board Member UONGOZI Institute; Founding Board Member of the Journal of Infrastructure Systems; and Advisory Board Member of the Institute of Security Studies (ISS). She recently joined the UN foundation board. She chairs the environment, social and governance (ESG) committee of Orca Explorations, a natural gas company operating in Tanzania, and listed on the Toronto Exchange.
Dr. Léautier served on Visiting Committees at the MIT Corporation, was a Trustee at the King Baudouin Foundation USA (KBFUS) and served on the Advisory Board of Women’s World Banking. She served as Co-Chair for World Economic Forum (WEF) Africa and is a member of the board of the WEF ́s regional strategy group (RSG) for Africa. She is an active member of the WEF Global Agenda Councils and was Co-chair of the Global Future Council on the Future of Economic Progress. Another of her roles with the WEF was as a member of the Core Working Group on the Digital Economy Research Agenda of the WEForum.
Dr. Léautier has a masters and doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering from University of Dar es Salaam. She graduated from Harvard University’s Executive Program. She is a recipient of many awards including Best Manager at the World Bank, an honorary Doctor of Law from Lancaster University in the UK in recognition of her work in infrastructure, and an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters from North Central College in recognition of her contribution to Africa. Dr. Léautier received the title of Queen of Development for the Agona area in Ghana in 2012. She has featured several times in the list of the most influential people in Africa. She held the position of Distinguished Professor at Sciences Po Paris for five years, where she still teaches a graduate course on Leadership in a Globalized World. She is well published, including three acclaimed books: Leadership in a Globalized World; Cities and Spaces of Leadership; and Cities in a Globalized World.
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Ellen Friedman (she/her) is a social change strategist, organizer, philanthropic advisor, and network weaver. For eleven years she served as the Executive Director of the Compton Foundation, which seeks to ignite change toward a sustainable, just, and peaceful future. During Ellen’s tenure, the Foundation aligned its investment and grantmaking program with the Foundation’s mission and made the courageous decision to spend out the Foundation’s assets after 75 years of operation. Ellen served on the coordinating committee of the Divest/Invest Philanthropy campaign, was a member of the Steering Committee of Peace and Security Funders Group, and the Trust Based Philanthropy Project.
Prior to her tenure at Compton, Ellen served as the executive vice president of Tides where she worked for twenty-three years with individual donors and other social change activists. Previously, as a program officer, Ellen designed the Domestic Violence program at the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation and was an organizer on issues of gender-based violence for many years. She is a trustee of Rockwood Leadership Institute, the Tara Health Foundation and Criterion Institute. She is also a member of the Directors Circle of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality.
Ellen holds an MBA from UCLA, studies Jewish meditation and feminist spirituality, and leads the grief support team in her synagogue community in San Francisco. She is the proud mother of two remarkable humans and the partner of another.
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Adelaide Sosseh is an educator, gender specialist and human rights advocate. She recently served as the Deputy Chairperson of The Gambia's Truth, Reconciliation and Reparations Commission (TRRC) set up by government to establish the historical record of human rights violations committed during the 22 years of the Jammeh regime, promote national reconciliation, and consider the granting of reparation to victims.
Mrs. Sosseh is a former Director of Schools (1990-1993) and had served in various roles in the education sector before rising to the position of Director under the restructured Ministry of Education. From there, she transited to Women’s Affairs and worked under the Office of the President as Project Manager of the multi-donor Women in Development Project (1993-1995).
Post government, Mrs. Sosseh became an active member of civil society and was appointed Executive Director of Worldview The Gambia, a communications development agency in 1999, a position she held until 2010. She also founded or chaired several civil society organisations at the national, regional and global levels, including the Education for all Campaign Network (EFANet), as founder and chairperson (2000-2010); the Pro-Poor Advocacy Group (Pro-PAG), as founder and chairperson (2000-2009); the National Human Rights Defenders, as founder and Secretary General (2000-2006); The Gambia Red Cross Society, as Member of the Executive Board (2004-2007); Amnesty International The Gambia, as member (2000-2005); and the Global Campaign against Poverty (GCAP), including as Global Co-Chair (2005-2010) and Ambassador (2010 to date).
Mrs. Sosseh has also served as the Executive Director of the GAM Africa Institute for Leadership (GAIL): an organisation focused on developing the leadership capacities of emerging youth leaders. At the regional level she served as a resource expert for the ECOWAS Gender Development Centre (EGDC) from 2005-2016, conducting gender training in all the ECOWAS countries and developing gender training manuals for the region. At the global level she served on the Global Advisory Committee for UN Girls Education (UNGEI GAC) and as a Representative of the Africa Campaign Network on Education for All (ANCEFA).
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Ahmed Rashid is one of the world's foremost experts on Afghanistan, Pakistan, Central Asia and the Taliban. He is the author of many influential books on the region, including the bestselling Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia. Published prior to the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, Taliban became a critical guide to understanding the Taliban in their wake and was translated into more than 40 languages. He has also written two books on Central Asia: The Resurgence of Central Asia and Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia. Following Taliban, he completed a trilogy of books on Afghanistan, Pakistan and the US involvement in the region with Descent Into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia and most recently, Pakistan on the Brink: The Future of Pakistan, Afghanistan and the West.
He is a champion of local media development and donated a third of the profits from his book earnings to create the Open Media Fund for Afghanistan. He also enlisted the Open Society Institute, AOL Time Warner Foundation, and Internews Network to provide financial support for local Afghan journalists.
Rashid has been covering the wars in Afghanistan and conflicts in Central Asia and Pakistan since 1979. He currently writes regularly for the Financial Times, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, Britain's Spectator magazine, Spain’s El Mundo, BBC Online and several Pakistani publications. Previously, he was the Afghanistan and Central Asia correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review (1982-2004), a correspondent for The Independent (1986-1992) and The Daily Telegraph (1992-2008). Foreign Policy magazine chose him as one of the world's most important 100 Global Thinkers in 2009 and 2010.
Rashid is a member of the Advisory Board of Eurasia Net of the Soros Foundation, a scholar of the Davos World Economic Forum and a member of the Advisory Committee of the Asia division for Human Rights Watch. In 2004, he was appointed to the Board of Advisers of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva, and in December 2009, he was appointed a member of the board of New York’s Committee to Protect Journalists. A former Visiting Scholar at the Columbia University School of Journalism. Rashid has received several international awards for his work, including the Nisar Osmani Courage in Journalism Award and Spain’s prestigious Casa Asia prize.
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Professor Chaiwat Satha-Anand succumbed to cancer on June 27, 2024. He was the Director of the Thai Peace Information Centre which conducts studies and activism in relation to the Thai military and social issues. He was also Chairperson of the Strategic Nonviolence Commission in Thailand. His whole life was dedicated to nonviolence theory and activism, and he was particularly dedicated to understanding the peacebuilding traditions of Islam. For several years, he directed the International Peace Research Association (IPRA) Commission on Nonviolence.
His works have been published both in Thailand and abroad, and some of his writings have been translated and published in Arabic, Bahasa Indonesia, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Korean. International research projects which he recently led include: Chaiwat Satha-Anand and Olivier Urbain (eds.) Protecting the Sacred, Creating Peace in Asia-Pacific (Routledge, 2017); and Chaiwat Satha-Anand and Olivier Urbain (eds.) The Promise of Reconciliation? Examining violent and nonviolent conflicts in Asia (Routledge, 2017).
In 2006, he was named “Thailand’s Best Researcher in Political Science and Public Administration” by the National Research Council and Thammasat University’s Kiratiyajaraya Distinguished Professor. He received the National Sri Burapha Distinguished Writer Award in Bangkok, and the International El-Hibri Peace Education Prize in Washington D.C. in 2012.
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Elisabeth Ungar Bleier is Colombian born of Austrian immigrant parents. Her academic and non-profit activities have related to strengthening democracies and democratic institutions; transparency and anti-corruption in the public and private sectors; and citizen participation and social movements.
A political scientist educated at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, she has a Master´s
Degree in Legal Institutions and Sociology of Law from the University of Wisconsin in
Madison. She is the founder of Congreso Visible (Visible Congress), a watchdog organisation, and was a professor and researcher in the Department of Political Science at Universidad de los Andes from 1975 until 2009, serving as Director of the Department (1995-1996) and a board member of the university (2005-present).
For nine years, she was the Executive Director of Transparencia por Colombia, the
Colombian chapter of Transparency International (TI), later joining its global board of directors. She has also been a member of other boards, such as the World Movement for
Democracy and the Latin American and Caribbean Network for Democracy. She has been
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for Freedom of Expression and Access to Information, several watch dog NGOs
and “La Paz Querida”.
She was selected by an independent commission to be part of the Misión Electoral
Especial (Special Electoral Commission), created in compliance with the Peace
Agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC-EP.
She is the author of numerous books and articles about transparency, anti-corruption,
political reform, political parties, and congress. She is a permanent columnist of El Espectador, the second largest Colombian daily newspaper. Fluent in Spanish, English and German, and proficient in French, she is the proud mother of two wonderful young women.
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Professor the Hon Gareth Evans AO QC is Distinguished Honorary Professor at the Australian National University, where he was Chancellor from 2010-19, and President Emeritus of the International Crisis Group, the independent global conflict prevention and resolution organisation which he led from 2000 to 2009.
He previously spent 21 years in Australian politics, thirteen of them as a Cabinet Minister. As Foreign Minister (1988-96) he was best known internationally for his roles in developing the UN peace plan for Cambodia, concluding the Chemical Weapons Convention, and initiating new Asia Pacific regional economic and security architecture. He has written or edited nine books - most recently The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and for All, published by the Brookings Institution in 2008 - and has published over 100 journal articles and chapters on foreign relations, human rights, and legal and constitutional reform.
He has co-chaired two major International Commissions, on Intervention and State Sovereignty (2000-01), and Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament (2008-10), whose report Eliminating Nuclear Threats was published in December 2009. He was a member of the UN Secretary-General's High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change (2004), the Blix Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction (2006), the Zedillo Commission of Eminent Persons on The Role of the IAEA to 2020 and Beyond (2008) and the UN Secretary-General's Advisory Committee on Genocide Prevention. He is Co-Chair of the International Advisory Board of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect.
In May 2010 Gareth Evans was awarded the 2010 Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute Four Freedoms Award for Freedom from Fear, for his pioneering work on the Responsibility to Protect concept, and his contributions to conflict prevention and resolution, arms control and disarmament. In December 2011 Foreign Policy magazine cited him as one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers for 2011.
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Hakan Altinay is a Professor of the Practice at Tisch College, and the founding Director of the European School of Politics in Istanbul. He has previously served as a senior fellow at Brookings Institution, a world fellow at Yale University, and taught at Bogazici, Koc and Sabanci universities in Istanbul.
His book, “Global Civics: Responsibilities and Rights In An Interdependent World”, was published by Brookings Institution Press, and subsequently translated and published in Arabic, Chinese, Russian and Spanish. His 2023 book, “Medeni (Civic)”, was published by Iletisim Press. His writings have appeared at The Economist, Financial Times, Global Policy, The New York Times, openDemocracy, and ProjectSyndicate.
His current interests revolve around what can be achieved through good conversations and generous listening, as well as the opportunity cost of neglecting our civic muscles around these perennial practices. Altinay is a member of IFIT’s International Advisory Council.
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Hilary Pennington is Ford Foundation’s former executive vice president of programs (2018-2024) where she oversaw all of the foundation’s programs globally, working closely across programs and offices to ensure strategic, meaningful, and well-aligned global grant making. She also oversaw the foundation’s BUILD program, and the Office of Strategy and Learning. Before assuming that role, she served as the foundation’s vice president for Education, Creativity, and Free Expression (2013-2018).
Between 2006 and 2012, Hilary served as director of education, postsecondary success, and special initiatives at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, where she guided grant programs across the country and worldwide. Before joining Gates, she was a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and president and CEO of Jobs for the Future, a research and policy development organization she co-founded. In 22 years with JFF, Hilary helped the organization become one of the most influential in the country on issues of education, youth transitions, workforce development, and future work requirements. She also served on President Bill Clinton’s transition team and as co-chair of his administration’s presidential advisory committee on technology.
Hilary serves on the boards of Bard College, Search for Common Ground and Lego Foundation, and she is a member of the Trinity Church Vestry and the Council on Foreign Relations. She is a graduate of the Yale School of Management and Yale College, and she holds a graduate degree in social anthropology from Oxford University and a master’s degree in theological studies from the Episcopal Divinity School. In 2000, she was a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She is the Co-Convenor of the Global Initiative on Polarization and a member of the IFIT International Advisory Council.
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Jennifer Widner is Professor of Politics and International Affairs and Director of Innovations for Successful Societies, a Woodrow Wilson School research program on improving government performance. Before joining Princeton, she taught at Harvard and the University of Michigan. Her current research focuses on the political economy of institutional reform, government accountability and service delivery. She also remains interested in constitution writing, constitutional design and fair dealing—topics of earlier research. She is the author of Building the Rule of Law (W. W. Norton), a study of courts and law in Africa, and she has published articles on a variety of topics in Democratization, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Journal of Development Studies, The William & Mary Law Review, Daedalus, the American Journal of International Law and other publications. She is currently completing work on a book about making government work in challenging settings, drawing on experiences in Africa, Asia and parts of Latin America.
Jennifer received her PhD from Yale University.
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John Carlin is a much-travelled journalist and author whose book Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game that Made a Nation, about former South African president Nelson Mandela, is the basis for the 2009 film Invictus.
Carlin began his journalism career at the Buenos Aires Herald in 1981, writing about film, football and politics. In 1982, he began a six-year stint as a foreign correspondent in Mexico and Central America working for, among others, The Times and Sunday Times, the Toronto Star, BBC, CBC, and ABC (US) before joining the staff of The Independent at the newspaper's launch in 1986.
Carlin was The Independent's South Africa bureau chief from 1989–1995.In 1993, Carlin wrote “War on Peace”, a BBC documentary on the South African Third Force, his first television work.
From 1995–1998 he was the United States bureau chief for The Independent on Sunday. In 1997, Carlin wrote an article titled "A Farewell to Arms" for Wired magazine about cyberwarfare that inspired the 2007 Bruce Willis film, Live Free or Die Hard (Die Hard 4.0).
In 1998, Carlin joined El País, the world's leading Spanish-language newspaper, where he worked as a senior international writer and football columnist until October 2017. Carlin was writer and interviewer for the Emmy-nominated 1999 documentary "The Long Walk of Nelson Mandela" for the American PBS series Frontline. He has since worked on a dozen more film documentaries.
Carlin won the 2000 Ortega y Gasset Award, Spain’s most prestigious journalism prize, for an article on immigration for El País. In 2004 he won the British Press Awards "Food and Drink Writer of the Year" prize. He has won other awards in Spain and Italy. He has written for numerous publications, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, The Observer and the Financial Times. He now writes a weekly column on international politics for Barcelona’s La Vanguardia and Argentina’s Clarín. His latest book is a graphic novel called “Mandela and the General”. Carlin holds an MA in English Language and Literature from Oxford University.
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Justin Kosslyn is Interim Publisher at GZERO Media and a Special Advisor at Eurasia Group. Previously, he was the Director of Product Management for Google's News Ecosystem, overseeing products such as Google Trends, Search Console, Reader Revenue Manager, Site Kit, Pinpoint, and R&D efforts in Generative AI.
Before that, Justin was Head of Digital Products at TED, the organization behind TED Talks. He also spent a decade at Google Jigsaw, where he led teams developing software tools to enhance digital and information security. His work included managing Google's warnings for government-backed cyberattack targets and developing ClaimReview, a fact-checking tool now widely used across major tech platforms.
Justin graduated from Yale University with a BS in Computer Science. He lives in New York with his wife and two children.
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Maria Livanos Cattaui was Secretary General of the International Chamber of Commerce from July 1996 to June 2005. She has championed the role of world business in the global economy and was instrumental in establishing a global partnership between business and the United Nations, leading to greater business input into UN economic activities.
Mrs. Cattaui worked with the World Economic Forum in Geneva from 1977 to 1996, where she became Managing Director, responsible for the celebrated Annual Meeting in Davos, building the public awareness it enjoys today.
She holds board and advisory board memberships on the EastWest Institute (New York), the International Crisis Group (Brussels), the Institute of International Education (New York), the National Bureau of Asian Research (NBR), the Schulich School of Business (York University, Toronto) and the Elliott School of International Affairs (George Washington University, Washington D.C.).
Mrs. Cattaui, who is of Swiss nationality and Greek origin, was educated in the United States. She is an honours graduate of Harvard University. She holds an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from York University, Toronto.
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Melanie Cohen Greenberg is the Managing Director, Peacebuilding, at Humanity United. Previously she was President and CEO of the Alliance for Peacebuilding. Before that, she was the President and Founder of the Cypress Fund for Peace and Security, a foundation making grants in the areas of peacebuilding and nuclear nonproliferation. From 2003–2004, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, focusing on issues of justice in post-conflict peacebuilding. From 2000–2002, Ms. Greenberg was Director of the Conflict Resolution Program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. She previously served as Associate Director of the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation, and Deputy Director of the Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation. In her work on international conflict resolution, Ms. Greenberg has helped design and facilitate public peace processes in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, and the Caucasus. She has taught advanced courses in international conflict resolution, multi-party conflict resolution and negotiation at Stanford Law School and Georgetown University Law Center and is currently an adjunct faculty member at the Elliott School of George Washington University. She was lead editor and chapter author of the volume Words over War: Mediation and Arbitration to Prevent Deadly Conflict (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).
Ms. Greenberg is a frequent writer, lecturer, teacher and trainer in a broad range of areas related to international law, international security, and peacebuilding. In her training, she has led courses for Congressional staff, scientists at the National Institutes of Health, international lawyers, business executives, and graduate students from around the world. Before beginning her work in international peacebuilding, Ms. Greenberg practiced as a bankruptcy lawyer at Weil, Gotshal & Manges in Houston. Ms. Greenberg serves on a number of boards of peace and security organisations. She holds an AB from Harvard, and a JD from Stanford Law School. She lives in Washington, DC with her husband and college age children.
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Dr. Nasser H. Saidi is the Founder and President of Nasser Saidi & Associates. He is the former Chief Economist and Head of External Relations of Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC) and Executive Director of the Hawkamah-Institute for Corporate Governance and The Mudara Institute of Directors at the DIFC between 2006 and 2012.
Dr. Saidi is a member of the IMF’s Regional Advisory Group for MENA and Co-Chair of the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) MENA Corporate Governance Working Group. He is a member of the Private Sector Advisory Group of the Global Corporate Governance Forum, an institution of the World Bank driving global corporate governance reforms. He is also Chair of the regional Clean Energy Business Council.
In 2013, he was named among the 50 most Influential Arabs in the World by The Middle East magazine, for the fourth consecutive year and named among the 500 Most Powerful Arabs in the world by Arabian Business for the second consecutive year.
Dr. Saidi was the Minister of Economy and Trade and Minister of Industry of Lebanon between 1998 and 2000. He was the first Vice-Governor of the Central Bank of Lebanon for two successive mandates, 1993-1998 and 1998-2003. He was a Member of the UN Committee for Development Policy (UNCDP) for two mandates over the period 2000-2006, a position to which he was appointed by former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, in his personal capacity.
He has written a number of books and numerous publications addressing macroeconomic, capital market development and international economic issues in Lebanon and the region and is the author of, “Corporate Governance in the MENA countries: Improving Transparency & Disclosure”. His research interests include macroeconomics, financial market development, payment systems and international economic policy, and information and communication technology (ICT).
Dr. Saidi was a private banker and served as an economic adviser and director to a number of central banks and financial institutions in Arab countries, Europe and Central and Latin America. Prior to his public career, Dr. Nasser pursued a career as an academic, serving as a Professor of Economics at the Department of Economics in the University of Chicago, the Institut Universitaire de Hautes Etudes Internationales (Geneva, CH), and the Université de Genève. He also served as a lecturer at the American University of Beirut and the Université St. Joseph in Beirut.
Dr. Saidi holds a Ph.D. and a M.A. in Economics from the University of Rochester in the U.S.A, a M.Sc. from University College, London University and a B.A. from the American University of Beirut.
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Nathalie Tocci is Director of Istituto Affari Internazionali, Editor of The International Spectator and former Special Adviser to EU HRVP Federica Mogherini, in charge of outreach to think tanks and coordination of work on a new European Security Strategy. She is honorary professor at the University of Tübingen. Previously she held research positions at the Centre for European Policy Studies, Brussels, the Transatlantic Academy, Washington and the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, Florence. Her research interests include European foreign policy, conflict resolution, the Middle East and the Mediterranean. Her major publications include Turkey and the European Union, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015 (co-author); Multilateralism in the 21st Century, London and New York, Routledge, 2013 (co-editor), Turkey’s European Future: Behind the Scenes of America’s Influence on EU-Turkey Relations, New York and London, New York University Press, 2011 (author); The EU and Conflict Resolution, Routledge, London, 2007 (author); and EU Accession Dynamics and Conflict Resolution: Catalyzing Peace or Consolidating Partition in Cyprus?, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2004, (author). Nathalie is the 2008 winner of the Anna Lindh award for the study of European Foreign Policy.
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Philip McDonagh is Director of the Centre for Religion, Human Values, and International Relations at Dublin City University. He is also Distinguished Global Fellow at the Princeton-based Centre of Theological Inquiry.
In Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs, as Political Counsellor in London, Philip played a significant part in the Northern Ireland peace process in the build-up to the Good Friday Agreement. He later served as Head of Mission in India (accredited also to Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bangladesh), the Holy See, Finland, Russia (and the five Central Asian states), and the OSCE. As a serving diplomat, and since retiring in 2017, Philip has been closely involved in bringing lessons from the Northern Ireland peace process to other situations, including Jammu and Kashmir (a joint Irish-British initiative), Sri Lanka (another Irish-British initiative, with the participation of John Hume), the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the ‘protracted conflicts’ of concern to the OSCE, and the situation on the Korean peninsula.
Philip has published poetry and works for the theatre, including The Song the Oriole Sang (Dedalus Press, Dublin, 2010) and Gondla, or the Salvation of the Wolves (Arlen House, 2016 – an adaptation of Nikolay Gumilev’s verse drama). His articles have appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, Poetry Ireland Review, Studies (Dublin), Doctrine and Life (Dublin), Transnational Perspectives (Geneva), India International Quarterly (New Delhi), Logos (St. Paul, Minnesota), and the Balliol College Record. He is also principal author of the OSCE Academic Network Report on ‘Religion and Security-building in an OSCE Context’ (2018). With three co-authors, he is currently completing a book on religion in global diplomacy.
Philip is a member of the Advisory Council of the Institute for Economics and Peace (Sydney) and a member of the Steering Committee of the OSCE Academic Network (Hamburg). He read Classics at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was elected President of the Oxford Union in 1972.
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Rafael Vilasanjuan is the Policy and Global Development Director of ISGlobal, a major institute that addresses urgent challenges in global health. He has a long and distinguished career in international humanitarian and development issues.
Mr Vilasanjuan worked for over 12 years with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), starting as Communication Director in 1995 and later as General Director of the Spanish section of MSF. In 1999, when the organisation was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, he was appointed General Secretary of MSF International, a position he held until 2005. During this period, he worked in conflict zones such as Rwanda, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Somalia, Sudan, West Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Colombia. As General Secretary of MSF, between 2002 and 2004 he was the chair of the Steering Committee for Humanitarian Response, representing the largest international humanitarian organisations before the UN. He was a founding member of the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDi), which develops and delivers new drugs for diseases in developing countries – an organisation in which he still collaborates.
Mr Vilasanjuan is a professional journalist with a degree in information sciences. He has a weekly opinion column on international affairs in El Periódico and contributes weekly as a political affairs analyst on the news programme of Cadena SER, the leading radio station in Spain.
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Rev. Dr. Samuel Kobia is the Chairman of Kenya’s National Cohesion and Integration Commission: a unique statutory body and institution to promote national identity and values; mitigate ethno-political competition and ethnically-motivated violence; eliminate discrimination on an ethnic, racial and religious basis; and promote national reconciliation and healing.
Previously, he served as Senior Advisor on Cohesion, Peace and Conflict Resolution in the Executive Office of the President and Cabinet Affairs of Kenya. From 2007-2018, he was Chancellor of St. Paul’s University. From 2011-2015, Dr. Kobia also served as a Commissioner in the Judicial Service Commission, which recruits Kenyan judges and oversees the judiciary. In addition, from 2010-2012, he served as Ecumenical Special Envoy for Sudan and South Sudan. He also served from 2004-2009 as General Secretary of the Geneva-based World Council of Churches, having been the General Secretary of the National Council of Churches of Kenya at an earlier stage in his career.
Dr. Kobia holds a Master degree in Urban Planning from MIT, a doctorate in International Relations from Geneva School of Diplomacy, and a doctorate in Theology from the Christian Theological Seminary. He is a visiting Professor to Wesley Colleges in USA and UK. He has previously held a fellowship at Harvard Divinity School and a visiting professorship at Cambridge University. He is the author of several books, including Dialogue Matters.
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Shaharzad Akbar is the Executive Director of Rawadari and the former Chairperson of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. Previously, she served as Deputy National Security Council on Peace and Civilian Protection as well as Senior Advisor to Afghan President on High Development Councils (August 2017 - August 2018) where she coordinated the prioritization of development projects and programs for executive decision-making. Prior to this, Shaharzad was Country Director for Open Society Afghanistan (September 2014 - July 2017), a non-profit that supports Afghan civil society and media in areas of peacebuilding, human rights and promoting tolerance. Before this, Shaharzad was partner and chief operating officer with QARA Consulting, a firm owned and run by young Afghans in Kabul which she co-founded in 2010; an analyst for the Free and Fair Elections Foundation; a journalist for BBC Afghanistan; and a research assistant on the Women of Courage book project. In 2012, she was the first elected chairperson for the Afghanistan 1400 movement.
Born in Jawzjan, Afghanistan in 1987, Shaharzad lived for a few years as refugee in Pakistan during the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Shaharzad completed an MPhil at Oxford University as a Weidenfeld scholar in 2011; previously she obtained her BA (cum laude) in anthropology from Smith College in the U.S.
Shaharzad’s writing has appeared in international and Afghan media including Newsweek and Al Jazeera, and in academic journals. In 2017, she was selected by World Economic Forum as Young Global Leader.
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Dr. Frannie Léautier is Chair of the IFIT International Advisory Council.
Frannie is CEO of SouthBridge Investments. Previously she held many positions including: Senior Vice President at the African Development Bank, where she was responsible for the day to day running of the Bank and led the intense transformation effort the Bank was going through; executive director of the TBG Group; and Managing Partner of the Fezembat Group, a company she founded in 2007. Clients she served in the latter role included the Trade and Development Bank (TDB—formerly PTA Bank) where she was an Eminent Person and Special Advisor to TDB Bank Board and President, advising on strategy, investments in infrastructure and alternative finance arrangements including private equity. She also advised the chairman of OCP (the largest phosphate company in the world) in the Kingdom of Morocco.
Earlier in her career, Dr. Léautier was Chairperson and Co-Founding Partner of Mkoba Private Equity, a fund offering growth capital to small and medium enterprises in Africa. She also spent fifteen years at the World Bank, 11 of which in executive roles. These included World Bank Vice President and Chief of Staff to the President of the World Bank. She was also Executive Secretary of the African Capacity Building Foundation (ACBF) where she led the effort of transforming the Foundation and orienting it towards the new sources of funding capacity building, public goods efforts, and philanthropic activities.
She is experienced with Executive and non-Executive roles on Boards having chaired the AfDB Board, and through holding wide ranging Board Director positions including Vice Chair TDB Bank; Treasurer and Chair of Risk and Audit Committee African Economic Research Consortium (AERC); Founding Board Member Nelson Mandela Institute for Science & Technology; Founding Member Editorial Board of the Journal of African Trade (JAT); Founding Board Member UONGOZI Institute; Founding Board Member of the Journal of Infrastructure Systems; and Advisory Board Member of the Institute of Security Studies (ISS). She recently joined the UN foundation board. She chairs the environment, social and governance (ESG) committee of Orca Explorations, a natural gas company operating in Tanzania, and listed on the Toronto Exchange.
Dr. Léautier served on Visiting Committees at the MIT Corporation, was a Trustee at the King Baudouin Foundation USA (KBFUS) and served on the Advisory Board of Women’s World Banking. She served as Co-Chair for World Economic Forum (WEF) Africa and is a member of the board of the WEF ́s regional strategy group (RSG) for Africa. She is an active member of the WEF Global Agenda Councils and was Co-chair of the Global Future Council on the Future of Economic Progress. Another of her roles with the WEF was as a member of the Core Working Group on the Digital Economy Research Agenda of the WEForum.
Dr. Léautier has a masters and doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering from University of Dar es Salaam. She graduated from Harvard University’s Executive Program. She is a recipient of many awards including Best Manager at the World Bank, an honorary Doctor of Law from Lancaster University in the UK in recognition of her work in infrastructure, and an honorary doctorate in Humane Letters from North Central College in recognition of her contribution to Africa. Dr. Léautier received the title of Queen of Development for the Agona area in Ghana in 2012. She has featured several times in the list of the most influential people in Africa. She held the position of Distinguished Professor at Sciences Po Paris for five years, where she still teaches a graduate course on Leadership in a Globalized World. She is well published, including three acclaimed books: Leadership in a Globalized World; Cities and Spaces of Leadership; and Cities in a Globalized World.
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