Sanam Naraghi Anderlini

About

Sanam Naraghi Anderlini, MBE, is the Founder and CEO of the International Civil Society ActionNetwork (ICAN) and a Richard von Weizsacker Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy. She has nearlythree decades of experience as a peace strategist working globally on conflicts, crises, violent extremism and peacebuilding with civil society, governments and the UN. Through ICAN, she spearheads the Women’s Alliance for Security Leadership (WASL) comprising independent women-led organizations active in 40 countries globally, preventing violence and promoting peace, rights and pluralism, and established the Innovative Peace Fund (IPF) - the first and only independent multi-donor fund dedicated to women-led peacebuilding organizations.

Ms. Naraghi Anderlini has led groundbreaking initiatives including being a civil society leader and drafter of the seminal UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security and leading multi-country research initiatives on women’s contributions to peace processes, men’s experiences in conflict settings, and violent extremisms and the gender dimensions of the weaponization of identities. She was appointed to the UN’s Standby Team of Mediation Experts as the first Senior Expert on Gender and Inclusion working on Somalia, Libya and Syria, Sudan among other cases in 2011-2012.

Ms. Naraghi Anderlini has extensive experience in designing and delivering curricula on gender responsiveness, preventing violent extremism, and inclusive mediation issues for senior government officials, UN staff, and mediators. Since 2018, she has been an adjunct Professor at the Columbia University School of International Public Affairs (SIPA) and from 2020 to September 2022, she served as Director of the LSE Centre for Women, Peace and Security. In November 2022, Ms. Naraghi Anderlini was the first Andrew Mellon Fellow at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA.

Ms. Naraghi Anderlini serves on the Steering Board of the UK’s National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security and Prevention of Sexual Violence, the Commonwealth’s Panel of Experts on Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), and the WMC’s Steering Committee. She also served as Co-Chair of the Principles for Inclusive Peace Initiative between 2020-23.

Ms. Naraghi Anderlini’s media appearances include CNN’s Amanpour, and Al Jazeera. She has published numerous articles including in Foreign Affair, Le Monde Diplomatique and the UK’s Observer. Her books include Civil War, Civil Peace (Pluto Press, 1998) and Women Building Peace: What they do, why it matters (Rienner, 2007).

In 2020, she was awarded an MBE by HM The Queen, for her services to International Peacebuilding and Women’s Rights. Ms. Naraghi Anderlini speaks four languages and holds an MPhil in Social Anthropology from Cambridge University. Iranian by birth she is a UK and US citizen and has identical twin daughters.

Agenda

Apr

Closing Panel: A Global Arc Toward Belonging

Belonging without othering is a radical new proposition to create a shared future for all including our earth. Where might belonging without othering, as a new political, social, and spiritual frame, take us next on the bending of the arc and beyond? In March 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr famously proclaimed that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” What is our global trajectory of equality, peacebuilding, and human rights, and how does belonging add to that? How might we integrate and build new norms that advance belonging? As we face a warming planet and...