Working alongside Building Bridges for Peace, we have Advisors from different areas of conflict transformation and peace who are committed to our vision. These advisors help us with our carry forward our our aims and objectives.

Dr Naomi Head

Dr Naomi Head is a Lecturer of Politics at the University of Glasgow. She specialises in research on empathy, dialogue and conflict transformation.  She is the author of  ‘Justifying Violence: Communicative Ethics and the Use of Force in Kosovo’ (Manchester University Press, 2012) and has written articles on the role of empathy, dialogue and trust in international relations.  She is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Institute for Conflict, Cooperation and Conflict at the University of Birmingham and has participated in several training workshops on mediation in conflict.  She is currently involved with projects on the Iranian nuclear negotiations and the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Beatrix Austin

Beatrix Austin is co-editor and coordinator of the “Berghof Handbook for Conflict Transformation” [www.berghof-handbook.net] and a senior coordinator at Berghof Foundation, Berlin. Her most recent publications are “Peace Infrastructures” (Berghof Handbook Dialogue No. 10; edited with B. Unger, S. Lundström, K. Planta, 2013) and “Advancing Conflict Transformation” (edited with M. Fischer and H.J. Giessmann). Beatrix previously has worked with various NGOs in the field of conflict management in research, facilitation and organisational development capacities, including: Search for Common Ground, Washington DC, USA; Seeds of Peace, Connecticut, USA; Public Conversations Project, Watertown, USA; International Alert, London, UK; and Vienna Conflict Management Partners, Austria, of which she is a founding member. She holds an MPA from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, Cambridge, USA. She also holds an MA degree in Political Science/International Relations from the Free University Berlin, Germany. Her current research interests focus on issues of reconciliation and the role of victimhood in peacebuilding. She is the (fairly new) mum of one daughter and lives near Berlin, Germany.

Professor Lynne Cameron

Lynne Cameron is Professor of Applied Linguistics at The Open University, and a professional artist. She has carried out research into the nature of empathy in contexts of violence and conflict, including in the conversations of Jo Berry with Patrick Magee which is published as the book ‘Metaphor and Reconciliation’ published by Routledge. She is currently working with conflict transformation practitioners from Nepal and Kenya to understand the empathy dynamics in their work. She writes the Empathy Blog –  http://empathyblog.wordpress.com/

Kai Frithjof Brand-Jacobsen

Kai Frithjof Brand-Jacobsen is a practicing peaceworker, and founder and Director of the Peace Action, Training and Research Institute of Romania (PATRIR). Kai is a global consultant, advisor and practitioner on peacebuilding, conflict transformation, war-to-peace transitions, and post-war reconciliation and healing, and has worked in Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Russia, Moldova, South Eastern Europe, Mexico, Colombia, Cambodia, southern Thailand, Burma, Somalia, Aceh, North America, and the Middle East at the invitation of governments, inter-governmental organisations, UN agencies, and local organisations and communities. Since 1996 he has provided more than 250 training programmes in peacebuilding, development, and constructive conflict transformation to more than 5000 participants in 36 countries, and has been invited to provide more than 600 public talks.

‘There is no time left for anything but to make peace work a dimension of our every waking activity.‘ Elise Boulding