Alliance for Peacebuilding / About Us
Senior Fellows
Devon Knudsen — Senior Fellow
Devon Knudsen is a foreign policy professional, who covered East and Southern Africa for the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) until September, and will be supporting AfP’s atrocities prevention portfolio. While at State, she led the Atrocity Prevention Task Force and International Atrocity Prevention Working Group from the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations (CSO). Devon worked for the Department of Defense as a strategist for AFRICOM, led humanitarian assistance and disaster response programs at U.S. EUCOM, and conducted research and courses for the Africa Center for Strategic Studies. Prior to joining government, Devon helped the Kenyan Ministry of Environment develop their National Climate Change Action Plan while teaching international relations at the University of Nairobi and United States International University-Africa.
Kathleen Kuehnast — Senior Fellow
Dr. Kathleen Kuehnast, former Director of the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) Program at the U.S. Institute of Peace, is a recognized and published international expert in the fields of conflict prevention, women in war, and social change, who will be supporting AfP’s WPS portfolio. Her work has focused on the impacts of violent conflict on women and the need to amplify their voices in peacebuilding. She co-founded the Missing Peace Initiative, which addresses conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) and supports young scholars to better communicate their research to policymakers. Prior to joining USIP, she spent 15 years with the World Bank as a senior social scientist, focusing on poverty, social capital, and community-driven development in fragile and post-conflict contexts. Her regional expertise is Central Asia, where her doctoral fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan examined post-Soviet transitions in women’s lives, generated a number of publications, including the co-edited volume, Post-Soviet Women Encountering Transition (2004). Recently, she wrote “Gender and Armed Conflict” in The Gender and Security Agenda (2020) and co-edited Women and War: Power and Protection in the 21st Century (2011). She holds a Ph.D. in socio-cultural anthropology from the University of Minnesota and is a recipient of the University of Minnesota’s 2024 Alumni of Notable Achievement Award, as well as the 2016 United Nations Association-NCA Perdita Huston Human Rights Award.
Peter J. Quaranto, Senior Fellow for the Future of Peace and Security
Peter J. Quaranto currently serves as a senior fellow for the future of peace and security with the Alliance for Peacebuilding. Peter serves concurrently as a visiting professor of the practice and distinguished global policy fellow for 2025-2026 in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. Peter has two decades of experience working across the U.S. Department of State, White House, Congress, and with civil society to elevate peacebuilding and conflict prevention in foreign policy efforts. Previously, Peter served as the acting principal deputy assistant secretary in the Department of State’s Bureau of Conflict & Stabilization Operations (CSO). In this and other leadership roles within CSO, he worked to enhance U.S. diplomacy to anticipate, prevent, and respond to violent conflict around the world. Peter was at the center of implementing the Global Fragility Act law, including authoring the related Strategy to Prevent Conflict and Promote Stability.
Charles F. Bolden — Senior Fellow
Maj. Gen. Charles Bolden served as the 12th Administrator of NASA, leading the agency’s efforts in space exploration and the development of scientific partnerships from July 2009 to January 2017. Prior to leading NASA, Charlie had a distinguished 34-year career with the Marine Corps, including 14 years as a member of NASA’s Astronaut Office. He served on four separate missions in space, commanding two and piloting two others. His flights included deployment of the Hubble Space Telescope and the first joint U.S.-Russian shuttle mission.
Charles “Chip” Hauss — Senior Fellow for Innovation
Chip Hauss is Senior Fellow for Innovation at AfP and is the lead editor of AfP ‘s book series with Rowman and Littlefield, Peace and Security in the Twenty-First Century, for which he wrote the lead volume.
Dave Loew — Senior Fellow for Media and Communications
Dave Loew is the Executive Creative Director at Hey Let’s Go and previously worked at both Ogilvy and Leo Burnett. He’s been instrumental in a number of social media campaigns around issues of peace and inclusion and brings deep expertise in communications, design, and media to AfP. In addition to working on campaigns for iconic brands like Coca-Cola and P&G, he’s created pro-bono campaigns for marriage equality, various environmental causes, Mother Jones magazine, and The Chicago International Film Festival.
Douglas Irvin-Erickson — Senior Fellow for Peacebuilding in the US
Douglas Irvin-Erickson is Assistant Professor, Director of the Genocide Prevention Program, and Fellow with the Center for Peacemaking Practice at the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution.
George Halvorson — Senior Fellow for Early Childhood Development
George Halvorson is Chair and CEO of the Institute for InterGroup Understanding. He is also currently Chair of the First 5 Commission for Children and Families for the State of California.
Gretchen Sandles — Senior Fellow for Research
Gretchen Sandles supports research at the Alliance for Peacebuilding on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion issues and U.S. peacebuilding. She retired in 2005 after a career as a U.S. intelligence analyst, researcher, and editor.
Hamse Warfa — Senior Fellow
Hamse warfa is the Senior Advisor to the U.S. State Department advancing President Biden’s democracy strengthening agenda at home and abroad. Hamse was the Deputy Commissioner for Workforce Development at the Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED). Appointed in April 2019, Deputy Commissioner Warfa was the highest ranking African immigrant official in Minnesota government.
Kevin Rachlin — Senior Fellow for Israel and Palestine Policy
Kevin Rachlin is the Washington Director at Nexus Leadership Project with over a decade of experience in U.S.-focused advocacy and non-profit leadership. Kevin previously served as the Vice President of Public Affairs at J Street and as the U.S. Director for the Alliance for Middle East Peace, a coalition of 150+ Israeli and Palestinian peacebuilding organizations.
Lisa Schirch — Senior Fellow for Policy
Lisa is a research professor of peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University’s Center for Justice & Peacebuilding. She is currently working with global civil society partners and key security sector experts to write a curriculum on security force-civil society relations.
Lynn Carter — Senior Fellow for Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE)
Lynn Carter recently stepped down as Senior Adviser and Senior Vice President overseeing democracy, rights, governance, and peacebuilding programs at Management Systems International. She has a strong applied research and P/CVE background and has worked extensively in South Asia and the Middle East. She currently provides research support to a PVE project in Indonesia.
Mari Fitzduff — Senior Fellow for Academic-Practitioner Cooperation in Peacebuilding
Mari Fitzduff is the Founding Director of the professional Master’s program in Conflict Resolution at Brandeis University. She is from Northern Ireland and has served as a consultant on conflict programs in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. Her latest book, ‘Our Brains at War: The Neuroscience of Conflict and Peacebuilding' was written specifically for Peacebuilding and Military colleges.
Michael Dziedzic — Senior Fellow for Combating Criminalized Power Structures and Elite Capture
Michael Dziedzic is an Adjunct Faculty at George Mason University and at the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center. A retired Colonel, his publications have shaped the way the U.S. approaches peace and stability operations: Policing the New World Disorder led to the creation of the Center of Excellence for Stability Police Units; Quest for Viable Peace proposed “conflict transformation” as the strategy for sustainable peace and was adopted as a paradigm for U.S. strategic planning. Criminalized Power Structures: The Overlooked Enemies of Peace, published by the Alliance for Peacebuilding, provides recommendations for defeating the predominant spoilers of peace and stability operations.
Miguel Diaz — Senior Fellow for Religion and Peacebuilding
Miguel Diaz is the John Courtney Murray University Chair in Public Service and was selected by President Barack Obama as the 9th U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See. Prof. Díaz obtained his doctorate in Systematic Theology from the University of Notre Dame. He is a member of the Catholic Theological Society of America (CTSA) and member and former President of the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States (ACHTUS).
Patricia Shafer — Senior Fellow for Peace Education
Patricia Shafer is Executive Director of NewGen Peacebuilders, an innovative peace education, training and mentoring organization and program initiative that has been delivered and/or is in development on four continents, with a long-term mission of “making learning to a be a peacebuilder a rite of passage for everyone.”
Ambassador Rick Barton - Senior Fellow
Ambassador Rick Barton is a visiting lecturer for the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. He has leadership experience in more than 40 war-torn countries over the past two decades, bringing together policy and practice and seeking pragmatic ways to advance peacebuilding.
Celestine Procter — Senior Fellow for Conflict, Environment and Peacebuilding
Celestine Procter is an expert in conflict, stabilization, and peacebuilding settings with a focus on environmental and climate change integration into conflict and peacebuilding programming. She is a freelance environmental-conflict policy and programming analyst, with previous experience in the United Nations, non-governmental organizations, and the UK government’s Stabilization Unit. She has worked extensively in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. She currently provides support to AfP’s Environment, Climate Change, and Conflict Working Group.