2016

27th January: Frederik Galtung, President and Co-Founder, Integrity Action

Fredrik Galtung is the President and co-founder of Integrity Action, a London-based NGO that was founded in 2003 to find ways of making public services work better for the poor by reducing fraud and corruption and building integrity. Over more than 20 years, Fredrik has consulted on strategic corruption control and integrity building in more than forty countries. An estimated 25% of aid and government projects’ value is lost to fraud, corruption and mismanagement in developing and war-torn countries. Fredrik Galtung is re-defining anti-corruption work from top-down finger pointing to bottom-up promotion of integrity at the community level. Challenging the assumption that corruption can be tackled through punishment and compliance based tactics, he founded Integrity Action (IA) in 2003 with the primary objective of fixing problems through collaboration and constructive engagement. Integrity Action’s Community Integrity Building approach has helped local organisations monitor – and fix – hundreds of projects affecting around 5 million people across more than a dozen countries.

10th February: Pamela Aall, Senior Advisor for Conflict Prevention and Management, US Institute of Peace

Pamela Aall is a senior advisor for conflict prevention and management at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) and senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI). She was founding Provost of USIP ’s Academy for International Conflict Management and Peacebuilding and headed the Institute’s education and training programs for a number of years. She is currently directing a project for CIGI on Africa’s regional conflict management capacity. Her research interests include mediation and negotiation, non-governmental organizations, civil–military relations, education and training and the role of education in exacerbating conflict or promoting reconciliation. She is chair of the board of the International Peace and Security Institute and a board member of Women in International Security, an organization dedicated to promoting women’s professional advancement in the foreign affairs and security fields. In 2014, she was the Sharkey Scholar at Seton Hall University. Aall has co-authored and co-edited a number of books, most recently Rewiring Regional Security in a Fragmented World (2011) and Managing Conflict in a World Adrift (2015) with Chester Crocker and Fen Hampson. 

24th February: The UN from Within – Stephanie La Hoz Theuer, MPhil candidate Cambridge, former Associate Programme Officer, UNFCCC; Victoria Stewart-Jolley, PhD candidate, POLIS, formerly at UNV, UNDP; Chair: Dr Devon Curtis, POLIS, formerly at UN Staff College

Stephanie La Hoz Theuer – A climate policy expert with over 10 years of experience in the regulation and implementation of market instruments for climate change. After five years in the private sector and another five at the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat, her current focus is policy research on economic and financial instruments for climate change mitigation and adaptation. She holds a Production Engineering degree from the University of Sao Paulo (Brazil), and is currently part of the MPhil programme in Environmental Policy at Cambridge University.

Victoria Stewart-Jolley, PhD candidate, POLIS – former UNV , UNDP, Indonesia (planning officer), special assistant to the SRSG , DPA, Iraq, and UNDP Elect consultant, Albania, Solomon Islands and 2014 Afghan recount.

Dr Devon Curtis, University Lecturer, POLIS . Formerly employed at UN Staff College.

9th March: Nadia Kevlin and Daniella Ritzau Reid, Humanitarian Aid Workers

After studying Social and Political Sciences and an MPhil in African Studies at Cambridge, Nadia has spent five years working in the humanitarian aid industry in a variety of roles, working in South Sudan, Jordan and Sierra Leone.