Advisory Committee

Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. a professor of peace studies

Johan Galtung

Johan Galtung, Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. a professor of peace studies, was born in 1930 in Oslo, Norway. He is a mathematician, sociologist, political scientist and the founder of the discipline of peace studies. He founded the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (1959), the world’s first academic research center focused on peace studies, as well as the influential Journal of Peace Research (1964). He has helped found dozens of other peace centers around the world.

He has served as a professor for peace studies at universities all over the world, including Columbia (New York), Oslo, Berlin, Belgrade, Paris, Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Sichuan, Ritsumeikan (Japan), Princeton, Hawai’i, Tromsoe, Bern, Alicante (Spain) and dozens of others on all continents. He has taught thousands of individuals and motivated them to dedicate their lives to the promotion of peace and the satisfaction of basic human needs.

He has mediated in over 100 conflicts between states, nations, religions, civilizations, communities, and persons since 1957. His contributions to peace theory and practice include conceptualization of peace-building, conflict mediation, reconciliation, nonviolence, theory of structural violence, theorizing about negative vs. positive peace, peace education and peace journalism. Prof. Galtung’s unique imprint on the study of conflict and peace stems from a combination of systematic scientific inquiry and a Gandhian ethics of peaceful means and harmony.

Johan Galtung has conducted a great deal of research in many fields and made original contributions not only to peace studies but also, among others, human rights, basic needs, development strategies, a world economy that sustains life, macro-history, theory of civilizations, federalism, globalization, theory of discourse, social pathologies, deep culture, peace and religions, social science methodology, sociology, ecology, future studies.

He is author or co-author of more than 1600 articles and over 160 books on peace and related issues, including Peace By Peaceful Means (1996), Macrohistory and Macrohistorians (with Sohail Inayatullah, 1997), Conflict Transformation By Peaceful Means (1998), Johan uten land (autobiography, 2000), Transcend & Transform: An Introduction to Conflict Work (2004, in 25 languages), 50 Years – 100 Peace and Conflict Perspectives (2008), Democracy – Peace – Development (with Paul Scott, 2008), 50 Years – 25 Intellectual Landscapes Explored (2008), Globalizing God (with Graeme MacQueen, 2008), The Fall of the US Empire – And Then What (2009), Peace Business (with Jack SantaBarbara and Fred Dubee, 2009), A Theory of Conflict (2010), A Theory of Development (2010), Reporting Conflict: New Directions in Peace Journalism (with Jake Lynch and Annabel McGoldrick, 2010), Korea: The Twisting Roads to Unification (with Jae-Bong Lee, 2011), Reconciliation (with Joanna Santa Barbara and Diane Perlman, 2012), Peace Mathematics (with Dietrich Fischer, 2012), Peace Economics (2012), A Theory of Civilization (forthcoming 2013), and A Theory of Peace (2013). In 2008, he founded the TRANSCEND University Press. 36 of his books have been translated into 33 languages, for a total of 134 book translations.

He is the weekly editorialist for TRANSCEND Media Service-TMS, which features solutions-oriented peace journalism.

He is founder (in 2000) and rector of the TRANSCEND Peace University, the world’s first online Peace Studies University. He is also the founder and director of TRANSCEND International, a global non-profit network for Peace, Development and the Environment, founded in 1993, with over 500 members in more than 70 countries around the world. As a testimony to his legacy, peace studies are now taught and researched at universities across the globe and contribute to peacemaking efforts in conflicts around the world.

He was jailed in Norway for six months at age 24 as a Conscientious Objector to serving in the military, after having done 12 months of civilian service, the same time as those doing military service. He agreed to serve an extra 6 months if he could work for peace, but that was refused. In jail he wrote his first book, Gandhi’s Political Ethics, together with his mentor, Arne Naess.

As a recipient of over a dozen honorary doctorates and professorships and many other distinctions, including a Right Livelihood Award (also known as Alternative Nobel Peace Prize), Johan Galtung remains committed to the study and promotion of peace.

Researcher in political science at the CNRS

François Burgat

François Burgat is project investigator of the WAFAW project and a senior researcher (DR1) in political science at the CNRS based at the IREMAM in Aix-en-Provence. He was between May 2008 and April 2013 director of the Institut français du Proche-Orient (IFPO) and earlier (1997-2003) headed the Centre français d’Archéologie et de Sciences Sociales de Sanaa (CEFAS).

Fluent in Arabic, François Burgat has devoted his career as a political scientist to the analysis of political systems and civil societies in the contemporary Arab world. In doing that he has also assumed a wide range of academic and institutional responsibilities in a large number of international instances. His approach to the various trends of Islamism has been widely recognised as innovative since he, early on, highlighted the need for the study of Arab societies to be deeply anchored in field research and the need to establish direct contact and discussions with political actors labelled as Islamists.

Though quite iconoclast at first, this approach gained increasing currency, and is now widely shared by many academics, research institutes and think tanks.

François Burgat has constantly favoured an approach that allowed him to fulfil his own individual academic objectives (through extensive fieldwork in the Middle East and North Africa that materialised in five books amongst which three were translated into five languages and reprinted many times, and in the editing of four volumes) while leading collective research activities in France and abroad. Between 2007 and 2010, he led a team of fifteen researchers in the framework of the programme “From the Arabo-Persian Gulf to Europe: between violence and (counter-)violence” funded by the French National Research Agency. Based on various case-studies this multidisciplinary project successfully contextualised the development of a violence continuum linking visible violence (terrorist attacks mainly) to hidden forms of structural violence (inequalities in access to resources, state repression, stigmatisation).

In addition to the 25 years he has spent in the Middle East and North Africa throughout his career, he has carried out and conducted many fieldwork expeditions over the last ten years whether in Yemen (2007 and 2008), Saudi Arabia (2003, 2006) or Iran (2008). He has been invited as guest lecturer or conference participant on topics related to the WAFAW project’s problematics by 73 universities in over 30 countries. He has also been invited by more than 130 governmental and international organisations, public or private think tanks, and companies in over 35 countries. He is since 2013 a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

His most prominent personal publications include L’islamisme à l’heure d’Al-Qaida : réislamisation, modernisation, radicalisations, Paris: La Découverte, 2005 (second updated edition in 2010) (Spanish: Bellaterra 2006, Arabic: Cadmus 2007, English: Texas University Press 2008) ; L’Islamisme en face, Paris: La Découverte, 2002 (third updated edition in 2007) (Portuguese: Instituto Piaget, 1995, Spanish: Bellaterra 1996, English: IB Tauris 2002) and L’Islamisme au Maghreb : la voix du Sud, Paris, Karthala, 1988 (third updated edition by Payot Petite Bibliothèque in 2008). (English: University of Texas Press, 1993-1997 Italian: SEI, 1995, Arabic: Dar-al-thaqafa al-jedida, 2001).

In the framework of his role as WAFAW project investigator, François Burgat leads the team of 9 core-researchers he has assembled as well as the numerous partnerships to be implemented starting in September 2013. His personal research, carried out in co-ordination with the WAFAW team, local partners, PhD students and post-doc fellows, focuses on the structural changes in the political scenes, the shifts in Euro-Mediterranean relations and, the centrality of the Islamist forces in the new equilibriums. He will first put particular emphasis on the Syrian case-study before developing more global analysis, built on the various field work expeditions to be carried out.

Spanish diplomat and politician, a member of the Socialist Workers' Party

Miguel Ángel Moratinos

Miguel Ángel Moratinos Cuyaubé has committed his professional and political activity to international relationships and development cooperation. He was born in Madrid on the 8th of June 1951 and studied at the Madrid French Lyceum. He graduated in Law and Political Sciences at the University Complutense in Madrid, and then in Diplomatic Studies at the Spanish Diplomatic School. He entered Spain’s diplomatic service in March 1977.

At the dawn of Spanish democracy, he began his diplomatic career as the head of the Coordination Section for Eastern Europe between 1977 and 1980. At the end of 1980, he was appointed First Secretary of the Spanish Embassy in Yugoslavia and remained there until 1984 and during the last three years there he held the post of chargé d’affaires. From Belgrade he went on to Rabat, this time as a political adviser, remaining there between 1984 and 1987.

With the Mediterranean in mind, he was appointed General Deputy Director for Northern Africa (1987-1991) and then Director of the Institute of Cooperation with the Arab World (1991-1993). After his tenure at the Institute, he was appointed General Director of Foreign Policy for Africa and the Middle East, holding such position between 1993 and 1996, where he took part in the organisation of the historic Middle East Peace Conference in Madrid in 1992. After being Spain’s Ambassador in Israel from July to December 1996, he was appointed by the European Union as EU Special Representative for the Middle East Peace Process, a mission in which he worked from December 1996 to June 2003. During this period, he promoted Peace Agreements and carried out actions on behalf of the EU to foster the Arab-Israeli dialogue and turn the Mediterranean into a region of peace and prosperity.

After these years of intense political and diplomatic activity, he engaged in Spanish politics and was elected member of Parliament on the lists of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) for the constituency of Córdoba. On the 18th of April 2004, he was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation. In his term at the head of the department, he held the presidency of the United Nations Security Council and the chairmanships-in-office of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the Council of Europe and the Council of the European Union. He fostered the implementation of the Treaty of Lisbon and the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.

As the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the first Minister of Cooperation of the Spanish democratic period, he fostered effective multilateralism, the Alliance of Civilisations, the Group of Friends for the Reform of the United Nations and contributed to the creation of innovative programmes for development, healthcare and women within the United Nations system. He promoted new programmes and funds for water and sanitation in Latin American development countries. In his term as Minister, he doubled Official Development Assistance funds and placed Spain as the sixth donor in the United Nations system.

Upon termination of his office as Minister, on the 20th of October 2010, he joined parliamentary activity until November 2011. In that period, he ran to be elected Director-General of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and targeted his international action towards the struggle against hunger and poverty, the promotion of food security and the right to food.

In January 2012, he joined the team of the Global Dry Land Alliance in Qatar and promoted this international treaty for food security in more than 15 member countries of all continents. From 2012 to 2013 he promoted the signature of the International Treaty for a Global Dry Land Alliance in Qatar and was member of the high level advisory panel of the president of the 67th UN General Assembly.

During his career he has been awarded numerous distinctions, awards and decorations acknowledging his political and diplomatic career path. In the academic sphere, the undertakings of Miguel Ángel Moratinos have been acknowledged with honorary doctorates by the Universities of Saint Petersburg, Malta, as well as by the Ben-Gurion University, in Israel, and the Al-Quds and Tel Aviv University.

He is also a regular lecturer in several international institutions and forums, as well as a prolific writer of articles in Spain and abroad. Since 2011, he teaches at Sciences Po Paris.

Actually he is Honorary Chairman of the CIRSD Board of Advisers (Center for International Relations and Sustainable Development), Senior Advisor of Sustainable Development Solutions Network of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and member of the Leadership Council of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN).

In Spain, he is also the president of REDS, the SDSN Spanish Network and the president of the Trobades literàries mediterràneas association and the promoter of the Albert Camus Mediterranean Literary Gathering and the Trobades Albert Camus Award.

Advisory Committee