Joyce Neu
Founding Executive Director, Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice

 

Joyce Neu, Ph.D., special advisor to the IPJ, is a conflict resolution specialist with a background in scholarship and practice in international mediation and negotiation. She is founder and senior associate of Facilitating Peace, a consultancy network started in 2009, whose clients include the United Nations, International Criminal Court, Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other governmental and nongovernmental organizations. 

After seven years as executive director of the IPJ, Neu was recruited to spend a year as the first “Team Leader” for a new U.N. Standby Team of Mediation Experts established by the United Nations in collaboration with the Norwegian Refugee Council. The purpose of the standby mediation team is to assist and support U.N. mediation efforts around the world. Neu was deployed to work on mediation efforts or conflict analyses in the Central African Republic, Comoros, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti (for Somalia peace talks), Ethiopia, Kenya and Senegal. Though having left the Institute as a paid member of the staff, Neu remains affiliated as an IPJ associate and special advisor.

Neu has conducted conflict assessments in Albania, Georgia, Latvia, Macedonia, Madagascar and Moldova and has helped facilitate discussions between parties in conflict in Bosnia, Congo-Brazzaville, Côte d’Ivoire, Estonia, Mali, Sudan and Uganda. During her years at The Carter Center, Neu accompanied the former president to Bosnia where they obtained a four-month cease-fire in December 1994. She led a Carter Center mediation team assisting Sudan and Uganda to restore bilateral relations. This culminated in the 1999 Nairobi Peace Agreement. During the 2006 to 2007 academic year, Neu was a Jennings Randolph Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C., where her research focused on the impact of International Criminal Court interventions on peace processes.

Neu has taught at the University of San Diego, Emory University, Penn State, University of California at Irvine and the University of Southern California and has been a guest lecturer at universities in the United States, Mexico, Europe and Africa. She holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in linguistics from the University of Southern California and a B.A. in English and French from the University of Colorado. Neu was a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal and a Fulbright professor in Poland.

Updated on 8/05/2010