Speaker Bios

Panel I: National Peace Initiatives

Carlo Nasi
Paper Title: Colombia's Peace Processes 1982-2002: Conditions, Strategies and Outcomes

Carlo Nasi directs the Theory and Practice of Conflict Resolution in Civil Wars and Negotiations & International Relations graduate programs at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. He received his Ph.D. in Government and International Studies from the University of Notre Dame in 2002. Between 1999-2001, he was a Visiting Researcher at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). He was also a consultant to the Colombian Congress during peace negotiations with paramilitary groups.
Email: cnasi@uniandes.edu.co

Jorge Rojas Rodriguez
Paper Title (with Adam Isacson): Origins, Evolution and Lessons Learned from the Colombian Peace Movement

Jorge Rojas Rodriguez is a founder and the Director of CODHES (Consultoria para los derechos humanos y el desplazamiento) - Consultancy for Human Rights and Displacement in Bogotá, Colombia. He is a former journalist and winner of the Interaction Humanitarian Award 2004 in honor of his years of work defending human rights in Colombia.
Email: jorgerojas@codhes.org.co

Adam Isacson
Paper Title (with Jorge Rojas): Origins, Evolution and Lessons Learned from the Colombian Peace Movement

Adam Isacson is the Director of Programs at the Center for International Policy in Washington, D.C. and a specialist on Colombia. He holds a Masters in International Relations from Yale University. The Center for International Policy was founded in 1975 by diplomats and peace activists to promote a U.S. foreign policy based on international cooperation, demilitarization and respect for human rights.
Email: isacson@ciponline.org

Ana Maria Velasquez
Paper title: Peace Education in Colombia

Ana Maria Velásquez is a psychologist with a Masters in Education from the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. She is the former Director of the Program on Emotional Intelligence at the Fundación Asesorias Pedagógicas (The Foundation for Pedagogical Assistance) is a co-author (with Enrique Chaux, Ph.D. Harvard School of Public Health) of Competencias Ciudadanas: de los Estandares al Aula. She is a participant in a project on mediating school violence and another developing a curriculum to promote co-existence and aggression prevention in Colombian schools.

Catalina Rojas
Paper Title: Women's Initiatives for Peace in Colombia

Catalina Rojas is a Colombian Political Scientist and doctoral candidate at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. She has written extensively on women and the peace process and on displaced persons in Colombia.
Email: crojas@gmu.edu

Panel II: International Peace Initiatives

Arturo Carrillo
Paper Title: Peace, Justice, Reparations, and the Relationship to Peace Processes in Colombia

Arturo Carrillo is Associate Professor of Clinical Law at The George Washington University Law School and is the senior advisor on Human Rights Policy to the U.S. Agency on International Development (USAID) in Colombia. He holds a J.D. from George Washington University and an LL.M. degree from Columbia University. He is past Henkin Senior Fellow of the Colombia Human Rights Institute; was a legal adviser and human rights monitor in the Human Rights Division of the United Nations Observer Mission to El Salvador (ONUSAL) from 1991-1994; and worked as the attorney for United Nations Affairs of the Colombian Jurists in Bogotá from 1994-1998.
Email: acarrillo@law.gwu.edu

James Jones
Paper Title: U.S. Policy and Peace in Colombia: Lost in a Tangle of Wars

James C. Jones is a Latin America area specialist with a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology and an M.S. in Economics. Since the mid-1970s, he has worked or conducted research in 15 countries of the region, and has consulted on international development issues in the areas of education, the environment, health, agriculture, and rural development. From 1997 to 1999, he served as Latin America Regional Advisor in Alternative Development to United Nations International Drug Control Program. In that capacity, he worked closely with small farmers who were growing coca and opium poppy in Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia as well as with national agencies using rural development for drug control. In 2000, he received a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to research the impact of U.S. policy on the armed conflict and drug control in Colombia and is preparing a book based on this research. He recently completed a Latin America regional report and a major global report for UN Office on Drugs and Crime to assess the use of Alternative Development (or "Sustainable Livelihoods") as a drug-control tool. Mr. Jones has served as an adjunct faculty member at George Washington University's Elliott School. He is a U.S. citizen.
Email: jonesjcz@prodigy.net

Neil Jeffery
Paper Title: Weathering the Storm: U.S. NGO Efforts to Support and Protect Peace in Colombia

Neil Jeffery was former Executive Director of the U.S. Office on Colombia from February 2001-May 2005. Previously he worked at Oxfam GB in the United Kingdom as South America Policy Advisor. He is a founding member of the Peace Brigades International - Colombia Project and served as Program Coordinator from 1993 until 1996. From 1991 to 1993 he worked for the PBI team in Guatemala. Neil has a BA in geography from the University of Cambridge. He studied as a visiting fellow at the Refugee Studies Center at the University of Oxford from 1996 to 1997 and has an MA and postgraduate diploma in forced migration. Mr. Jeffrey is a UK citizen.
Email: neil_jeffery@yahoo.com

Sabine Kurtenbach
Paper Title: Europe's Role in the Complicated Transformation from War to Peace in Colombia

Sabine Kurtenbach is a political scientist with a Ph.D. from Hamburg University. She is a senior researcher at the Institute für Ibero-American Studies Hamburg and consultant in development policies for various German agencies of development cooperation, including the Foreign Ministry, Ministry of Cooperation, GTZ, and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation. Her main subject areas are peace and conflict studies, development policies, and human rights, particularly in Central America, Colombia, and the Andean Region. Her current research interests are the developments in post conflict societies and the strategies of external actors towards complex emergencies. Dr. Kurtenbach is a German citizen.
Email: kurtenbach@public.uni-hamburg.de

Jesus Abad Colorado
Photojournalist: Photo Essay on Peace Peace Building in Colombia

Jesús Abad has participated in more than 30 individual and collective exhibits at the national and international level. He has written, participated in and collaborated with a wide variety of publications on human rights and armed conflict. As a photo-journalist with over 13 years experience documenting Colombia's internal conflict, he has focused on issues such as forced internal displacement, the suffering of communities affected by violence and their resistance to war. He has received several national prizes, including the Simon Bolivar Prize for Journalism, which he won twice. He has also received recognition at the international level. During 2003 and 2004, he exhibited in Spain. His exhibition entitled "Memory" was also presented in the Swiss Parliament in Geneva, after which it went on tour through several cities in Switzerland. His exhibition of 160 photographs entitled "Against Forgetting" (and organized into 5 thematic sections: Displacement, Schools, Our Mark on Nature, Pain, and Resistance) was exhibited during the International Symposium of Restorative Justice which took place in the Colombian city of Cali in February 2005.
Email: kjabadc@epm.net.co

Panel III: Local and Regional Peace Initiatives

Christopher Mitchell
Paper Title: Local Zones of Peace: Lessons from the Colombian Experience

Christopher Mitchell is French-Cumbie Professor of Conflict Resolution at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia and a member of the Institute's Local Zones of Peace Working Group. He is also the Senior Consulting Editor for Peace and Conflict Studies. Prof. Mitchell's work on local peace initiatives has been conducted in conjunction with Sara Ramirez, who is currently on the staff of Justapaz in Colombia. He has also published widely on various aspects of conflict resolution and local peacebuilding. His most recent book is Gestures of Conciliation: Factors Contributing to Successful Olive Branches (London and New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2000). Dr. Mitchell is a UK citizen.
Email: cmitchel@gmu.edu

Maria Clemencia Ramirez
Paper Title: Negotiating Peace and Visibility: Civil Society, Armed Conflict, and the War on Drugs in the Putumayo

Maria Clemencia Ramirez s a Senior Researcher at the Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, and Professor of Anthropology at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. She attended the Universidad de los Andes and the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, earning a B.A in Anthropology and an M.A. in History. She also holds a Ph. D. in Social Anthropology from Harvard University. Her work explores the intersections of violence and identity through the lens of public policy and state/citizen relations, especially in the Amazon Region of Colombia and specifically in the department of Putumayo, where the implementation of Plan Colombia began in 2000. She has written on the intersection of drugs and war, and the cocalero movement in the Western Amazon, and is author of the book, Entre el Estado y la Guerrilla: Identidad y Ciudadanía en el Movimiento de los Campesinos Cocaleros del Putumayo (Icanh-Colciencias, 2001). She was the 2004-2005 Santo Domingo Visiting Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, where she is writing about the impact of Plan Colombia on the small coca growers of Putumayo. She is a Colombian citizen.
Email: Clema15@yahoo.com

Leslie Wirpsa
Paper Title: The Power of the Basto'n: Indigenous Resistance and Peace Building in Colombia

Leslie Wirpsa is presently an S.V. Ciriacy Post-Doctoral Fellow in Natural Resource Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. from the School of International Relations at the University of Southern California, and is completing a book, Shielding the Heart of the World: Oil, Contentious Politics and Indigenous Rights. Dr. Wirpsa's work examines the geopolitics of oil, militarization, U.S. security policy and internal conflicts. She is co-author of "Oil and the Political Economy of Conflict in Colombia and Beyond: A Linkages Approach," which appeared in the journal, Geopolitics. From 1984-1998, Dr. Wirpsa worked as an award winning investigative journalist covering primarily Latin America. She was based for a decade in Colombia. During that time, her work appeared in media and scholarly outlets including National Public Radio, Newsweek, San Francisco Chronicle, Reuters, National Catholic Reporter, Der Spiegel, Cultural Survival Quarterly and others. She was the primary author and consultant on several human rights reports on Colombia published by the Washington Office on Latin America and the Institute for Alternative Legal Studies (ILSA). Dr. Wirpsa also served as the Co-Executive Director and Primary Research Consultant for the U'wa Defense Project from 1998 - 2001.
Email: wirpsa@berkeley.edu

Javier Moncayo
Paper Title: From the Periphery to the Center: The Role of Civil Society in Constructing a Durable Peace: The Experience of Regional

Javier Moncayo is a medical doctor at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, where he has done post-doctoral studies in Health Services Administration. He has participated in training programs offered by the Pan-American Health Organization and the World Bank. He worked on community health projects in the Magdalena Medio for the Catholic Church's Social Pastoral, and was the advisor and head of the Office of Emergencies and Disasters of the Colombian Ministry of Health from 1993-1995. He has worked for the Development and Peace Program of the Magdalena Medio since 1996, serving as deputy director from 2002-2004, and he has been involved in the European Union-funded peace laboratory there. Since 2004, he has coordinated the National Network of Regional Development and Peace Programs (Red Nacional de Programas Regionales de Desarrollo y Paz), a network of 17 regional organizations. He is also the coordinator of the Programa de Paz y Desarrollo del Nororiente Antioqueño (Program for Peace and Development in northeastern Antioquia province). Mr. Moncayo is a Colombian citizen.
Email: coordinacion@redprodepaz.org

Angelika Rettberg
Paper Title: Business and Peace in Colombia: Responses, Challenges,And Achievements

Angelika Rettberg RETTBERG is an Assistant Professor at the Political Science Department at the University of the Andes (Bogotá, Colombia) and the Director of its Research Program on Peacebuilding. Her research has focused on the private sector as political actor and, more recently, on private sector behavior in contexts of armed conflict. She has completed a comparative study on the participation of the business community in the peace processes of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Colombia and research on local level business-led peace initiatives in Colombia. Her research has been funded by the Crisis States Programme of the London School of Economics, the Social Science Research Council, the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs, and the Colombian National Institute for Science and Technology (Colciencias). Her work has been published in journals such as Latin American Politics and Society, Business & Politics, Revista Iberoamericana, Colombia Internacional, and Revista de Estudios Sociales. She is a Colombian citizen.
Email: rettberg@uniandes.edu.co

Ricardo Esquivia
Paper Title: La comunidad local como refugio creativo de transformación restaurativa (Local community as creative refuge forrestorative transformation)

Ricardo Esquivia is the Coordinator General of the Red Asvidas of Montes de Maria and Sincelejo, an organization of 130 local community groups working in the Colombian provinces of Bolivar, Sucre, Cordoba and the Caribbean coast, that boasts 2500 members and a team of 30 volunteer facilitators. Dedicated to accompaniment and development of sustainable peace efforts. Founding member of the Director's Council fo the Foundation Network for Development and Peace in Montes de Maria (Consejo Directivo de la Fundacion Red de Desarrollo y Paz para Montes de Maria.) Executive director of the Asociation Sembrando Semillas de Paz with headquarters in Sincelejo. Member of the Mennonite Church.
Email: resquivia@yahoo.es

Mary Roldán
Paper Title: Cambio de Armas: Negotiating a Language of Peace Amidst a Sea of Armed Actors in Northwestern Colombia

Mary Roldán is an Associate Professor of Latin American History at Cornell University. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and specializes in 20th century Colombian political, cultural and social history. Her research and teaching interests include: violence, state formation, popular culture, narcotics trafficking and urban history. Her book Blood and Fire: La Violencia in Antioquia, Colombia, 1946-1953 (Duke, 2002) was published in Spanish as A Sangre y Fuego: la violencia en Antioquia, Colombia, 1946-1953 (Bogota, 2003) and won Colombia's Fundación Alejandro Angel Escobar prize for research in the Social Sciences and Humanities. She has collaborated on analyses of contemporary Colombia subjects for PBS/WCNY's "The Next Big Thing" radio program and PBS/WNET's Wideangle documentary film series. Her work has appeared in the Radical Historians Newsletter, Analísis Político, Estudios Sociales and in Cocaine: Global Histories (Routledge, 1999) and Wounded Cities (Berg, 2003). Her current research projects include an examination of the role of radio in distance education and modernization projects in 20th century Colombia and an analysis of the emergence of local social movements advocating non-violent approaches to conflict resolution in the northwestern Colombian department of Antioquia. She is a U.S. citizen.
Email: mjr8@cornell.edu

Panel IV: Toward an Integrated Approach to Peace

Jennifer Schirmer
Paper Title: Crafting Dialogue and Skilling for Peace among The Armed Actors in Colombia

Jennifer Schirmer is a political anthropologist and Senior Researcher at the University of Oslo, continues to direct a project of mediated dialogues between armed actors and civil society as part of the Colombian peace process, funded by the Norwegian Foreign Ministry. She also conducts Workshops in Conflict Resolution in conjunction with the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University, Sweden. She received her 2nd MacArthur Foundation Research and Writing Grant to conduct research on "Memories and Justificatory Narratives of the Guatemalan Guerrilla Leaders and Cadre," a follow-up to her book of interviews with military officers about the massacre campaign, The Guatemalan Military Project: A Violence Called Democracy. She has written extensively on human rights, civil-military relations and reforms, and security and development in Guatemala. Dr. Schirmer is a U.S. citizen currently residing in Oslo, Norway.
Email: jennifer.schirmer@sum.uio.no

Raul Rosende
Paper Title: The Role of Internationals in Supporting Local Efforts to Reduce Conflict and Foster Integrated Development

Raul Rosende works as advisor of the Resident Coordinator of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in Colombia. Among other tasks he is in charge of peace building programs in conflict areas, relations with civil society and facilitating the coordination of the Group of 24 countries engaged in development, cooperation, peace, and human rights in Colombia. Prior to working with UNDP, Rosende worked with the United Nations in Colombia, Afghanistan, and Guatemala, and with the Organization of American States in Nicaragua. He has been involved in the design and management of peace building programs, strengthening of conflict management capacities in countries in transition, reintegration of war-affected populations and former combatants, and support to negotiations and verification of peace accords. He has also worked as a consultant with the Carter Center and the Pearson Peace Keeping Center.
Email: Paul.rosende@undp.org

Virginia Bouvier
Editor

Virginia Bouvier received her Ph.D. in Latin American Studies from the University of California at Berkeley. She joined joined the United States Institute of Peace in January 2003 as program officer for the Jennings Randolph Senior Fellowship Program. She is the author of Women and the Conquest of California, 1542-1840: Codes of Silence (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001), recently released in paperback, and the editor of The Globalization of U.S.-Latin American Relations: Democracy, Intervention, and Human Rights (Westport, Ct.: Praeger Publishers, 2002) and Whose America? The War of 1898 and the Battles to Define the Nation (Westport, Ct.: Praeger Publishers, 2001). She has published journal articles, reports, and book reviews on aspects of U.S.-Latin American relations, U.S. foreign policy, Colombian peace initiatives, human rights, gender, and political humor. From 1995-2002, she was an Assistant Professor of Latin American literature and culture at the University of Maryland. From 1982-89, she was a Senior Associate at the Washington Office on Latin America. Bouvier has also served as a consultant for the World Bank, Levi Strauss Foundation, Levi Strauss & Co., the C.S. Fund, and research director for the Women's Leadership Conference of the Americas, a joint project of the Inter-American Dialogue and the International Center for Research on Women. Dr. Bouvier is a U.S. citizen.
Email: vbouvier@usip.org