TECLA NAMACHANJA

Insider reconciler fellow

BETTY BIGOMBE

INSIDER RECONCILER FELLOW

Betty Bigombe has led peace and humanitarian efforts in northern Uganda, first in the 1990s as Minister of State for Northern Uganda and again as chief mediator to the conflict in the mid-2000s. In 2014, she received the Ordre National de la Legion d’honneur, one of a number of awards honoring her long-standing commitment to peace and humanitarian affairs throughout her career. In a few select appointments, Ms. Bigombe has served as the Senior Director for Fragility, Conflict and Violence at the World Bank Group, State Minister for Water Resources in the Ugandan Cabinet and Member of Parliament, and a Commissioner for the Women’s Refugee Commission and led election observer missions in Zimbabwe and Rwanda. Ms. Bigombe holds a Masters in Public Administration from Harvard University and a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and Rural Economy from Makerere University in Uganda.

EDUARDO GONZALES

RESEARCH AFFLIATE

Eduardo Gonzalez is Peruvian sociologist with twenty years of experience supporting truth and reconciliation processes around the world. After organizing public victim hearings at his country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he served at the International Center for Transitional Justice , where he supported truth commissions in all continents, including notable cases like Greensboro, in the US, East Timor, Tunisia, Canada and many others. As an independent expert he has supported reparations and truth processes in Sri Lanka, Mali, Colombia and Finland. He has written and taught in transitional justice. His next publication concerns unofficial truth commissions. He is affiliated to the Mary Hoch Center for Reconciliation and serves as an advisor at several transitional justice bodies, including the Chega National Center in east Timor and the Site of Memory in Peru.

CHIP HAUSS

Senior Research Affiliate

Charles “Chip” Hauss has been exploring ways of producing large scale social and political change through nonviolent and cooperative means for five decades. In all of this work, he has tried to be a political bridge builder who brings “strange political bedfellows” together to help solve problems that can only be effectively addressed if they work together.

He is currently Senior Fellow for Innovation and an emeritus member of the Board of Directors at the Alliance for Peacebuilding. In that role, his job is to identify ideas, tools, and techniques in other fields that could and should be adapted and adopted by peacebuilders. He is also a Visiting Scholar at George Mason’s School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution.

Hauss is a veteran author. His most recent book in peace studies is From Conflict Resolution to Peacebuilding, a textbook designed to engage introductory students. He is currently working on Connecting the Dots, a book on how Americans are responding to the multiple crises facing the country in 2020.

DR. FANIE DU TOIT, D. PHIL.,

RESEARCH AFFILIATE

Du Toit is currently overseeing a process to build community capacity for insider mediation in Myanmar’s Rakhine State as a step towards reintegration following the 2017 violence which caused 700,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee to Bangladesh. Previously (2016-2018) he was Chief Technical Advisor for UNDP Iraq, facilitating inter-sectarian dialogue in communities fragmented during and after ISIS rule. During the preceding 16 years, he was programme manager and then executive director of the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (IJR) in South Africa, focusing on issues related to post-TRC reconciliation and transitional justice, and worked with colleagues from other African states on similar processes. His latest book, Political Transitions that work—Reconciliation as Interdependence, by Oxford University Press in collaboration with Notre Dame University, appeared in July 2018. As Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, he completed a D.Phil in the Philosophy of Religion in 1995, and in 2005 he received a further Masters’ degree in Justice and Transformation from the University of Cape Town (UCT). In 2007 he received UNESCO’s International Prize for Peace Education on behalf of the IJR. He is also an Honorary Associate Professor at UCT’s Department of Political Studies and a member of the Advisory Board of the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution.