Abstract

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.

For those hoping to pursue a career in the ‘Third Sector’, especially amidst a broad range of organisations and agencies whose mandates can be loosely collected under the umbrella headings of ‘Human Rights and Social Justice’, ‘Conflict and Security’ or ‘Development and Humanitarian Aid,’ the terrain can be difficult to navigate. A sound academic training, the kind provided by Cambridge University, is important but certainly not enough to prepare students for the transition into working in this sector. Through a mixture of substantive discussion, personal reflection and practical advice, the CGHR Practitioner Series brings together high‐level experts working in these fields and creates a forum in which students and researchers can listen and ask questions about what this work actually involves, seek out reflections from experience on the dilemmas and challenges faced, and probe the skill set and experience needed to forge a career in these fields.

More about the CGHR Practitioner series: http://www.cghr.polis.cam.ac.uk/events/practitioner_series