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Conference Webinar: Environmental Diplomacy

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Overview of Conference

The need for a deeper level of collaboration among all practitioners of diplomacy has never been greater as we confront the extraordinary diplomatic challenge presented by the global ecological crisis, a challenge that has served to accelerate the rise of nationalism, racial and economic inequality, and the fear of religious and ethnic difference. This conference will explore the work and the strategies being proposed and employed by practitioners and scholars of diplomacy across multiple vocations and contexts to promote such cooperation.

The mission of The Grace School is to train future practitioners of diplomacy across all vocations – from those pursuing careers in the foreign service to those who want to build bridges as NGO leaders, private sector actors, scientists, artists, religious leaders, community organizers, and activists. Our goal is to create cohorts of students with a wide range of vocational trajectories who engage in the study and practice of diplomacy together, and in so doing establish networks that they will take with them as they pursue or redirect their respective careers upon graduation. The theme of our conference was to examine the transprofessional diplomatic work which is currently taking place, and which must now be amplified in the name of supporting environmental sustainability. To this end, seven round tables and three keynotes were delivered by 24 distinguished speakers who joined us from around the world to engage the subject of Environmental Diplomacy from multiple perspectives and disciplinary approaches.


Welcome + An Introduction to Environmental Diplomacy

Speakers and Biographies:

Leila Nicolas

Leila Nicolas Ph.D. serves as both a scholar and practitioner. She is a Professor of International Affairs at the Lebanese University, two other institutions at the Lebanese Army (Command and Staff Academy and The Center of Research and Strategic Studies), and a visiting scholar at Oxford, Stanford, Claremont McKenna College, and California State University.

She was a Fulbright scholar at Fordham University, New York (2021), where she conducted a part of her research on populism and the Right to Self-determination. She had been granted by the US Department of State a scholarship to earn a Postdoctoral diploma "US Grand Strategy in Context," Summer 2016.

She earned a grant from Lebanese University to conduct field research "The impact of the Lebanese COVID-19 Response on the Public's Trust in Public Institutions" (2020) and a grant from UNESCO to research "transitional justice" in the Arab world (2014).

Her research interests include Great power politics and Grand Strategies, Transitional Justice, Security and Conflicts, and Broader Middle East. She has ten published books, and more than 80 (Arabic and English) refereed journal articles, book chapters, working papers, and conference lectures.

Dr. Nicolas is a co-founder of (LEDGE) "Lebanese for Democracy and Good Governance" (NGO), and a member of the Advisory board for Academy of transformation - Oxford University, and the Academic Council on the United Nations System (ACUNS). She serves as a consultant and trainer at many international NGOs. She has been working with civil societies in the MENA region since 2000 to promote conflict resolution, Transitional Justice, and Rule of Law.

She is also a political analyst and commentator for several media outlets about MENA regional issues (BBC, Al Mayadeen, Skynews, TRT....) and international affairs. She is a co-founder of Lebanese for Democracy and Good Governance (NGO).

Her latest book, Effective forms of Environmental Diplomacy, Routledge, (June 2021).

Geoffrey Wiseman

Geoffrey Wiseman holds the Endowed Chair in Applied Diplomacy at DePaul's Grace School of Applied Diplomacy. He is a former diplomat and foundation program officer who served in the Australian foreign service with postings in Stockholm, Hanoi, and Brussels and as advisor to the Australian Foreign Minister, Gareth Evans. He has also worked in the Strategic Planning Unit of the Executive Office of the United Nations Secretary-General and as peace and security program officer at the Ford Foundation. Geoffrey’s key journal articles cover a range of topics relevant to this conference, notably ‘polylateralism’; diplomatic culture; American diplomacy; diplomatic practices at the United Nations; public diplomacy and hostile nations; and contemporary challenges for foreign ministries. He is the author of Concepts of Non-Provocative Defense: Ideas and Practices in International Security and co-editor of Diplomacy in a Globalizing World: Theories and Practices and The Diplomatic Corps as an Institution of International Society. Geoffrey has held academic appointments at the Australian National University and the University of Southern California.


Panel One: Diplomacy, Migration and  Vulnerability

Panel One - Panelists and Biographies:

Antonio Alejo

Collaborator at the Research Group on Societies in Motion at the University of A Coruña and is a Research Associate at the Instituto Galego de Análise e Documentación Internacional (Galicia, Spain). His research analyzes contemporary diplomacy's transformations beyond state-centric perspectives with a transdisciplinary dialogue between global studies (sociology and urban governance), critical diplomatic studies, human mobility, and nomadic thinking. The author has published in journals such as International Studies in Sociology of Education; Education, Citizenship and Social Justice; Migration Letters; Migraciones; Colombia Internacional; Latin America Policy; Politics and Policy and CIDOB d'Afers Internacionais. (A Coruña)

Shailja Sharma

Shailja Sharma is Professor of International Studies and the Director of the Refugee and Forced Migration Studies program in DePaul University. She is the author of Postcolonial Minorities in Britain and France: In the Hyphen of the Nation-State (Manchester 2016) and editor of New Cosmopolitanisms: South Asians in the United States (Stanford 2006). She was a Fulbright Fellow in India in 2018-2019, working on a project on violence, memory and citizenship. She writes for public outlets including newspapers, journals. You can hear her TedX talk here.

Karlos Pérez de Armiño

Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Bilbao. Research Fellow and former director (2015-2021) of Hegoa, Institute for International Cooperation and Development Studies.

Main researcher of the Research Group on Human Security, Human Local Development and International Cooperation, founded by the Basque Goverment. University Advanced Degree in Geography and History, University of Deusto. Ph.D. in International Studies (UPV/EHU) with the doctoral thesis on: "Food security and the human right to food". Implications for public policies and international assistance in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Main research lines: Complex political emergencies, humanitarian action, food security (starvation in conflicts), human security, post-war rehabilitation and peace-building (Mozambique, Angola and recently Colombia).

Several publications (mainly in Spanish), including the edition of a voluminous and widely used dictionary on humanitarian action:

Karlos Pérez de Armiño (director), "Diccionario de acción humanitaria y cooperación al desarrollo", Ed. Icaria, Barcelona (650 pages).

Some other publications:

Karlos Pérez de Armiño (2021), “Ethical debates on global hunger: moral obligations to the distant other and global justice”, in Leire Escajedo (ed.), Ethics of Charitable Food: Dilemas for Policy and Practice, Springer (in press).

Karlos Pérez de Armiño (2019), “La paz tiene lugar. Poder, agencia y transformación del espacio en la construcción de la paz”, in Karlos Pérez de Armiño e Iker Zirion Landaluze (coords.), Pax Crítica. Aportes teóricos a las perspectivas de paz posliberal, Tecnos, Madrid, pp. 125-166.

Karlos Pérez de Armiño (2016), "La tensión entre lo global y lo local en los procesos de construcción de la paz: aportes para una paz cosmopolita", in Caterina García Segura (dir.), La tensión cosmopolita. Avances y límites en la institucionalización del cosmopolitismo, pp. 291-321.

Karlos Pérez de Armiño (2016), "Local and regional experiences of conflict management and peace building in Africa. Innovations and challenges", in ERIS, European Review of International Studies, vol. 3, nº 2, pp. 95-101.

Karlos Pérez de Armiño (2014), “Erosion of Rights, Uncritical Solidarity and Food Banks in Spain”, in Graham Riches y Tiina Silvasti (eds), First World Hunger Revisited. Food Charity of the Right to Food? Second Edition, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke (UK) and New York (USA), pp. 131-145.

Karlos Pérez de Armiño e Irantzu Mendia (eds) (2013), "Seguridad humana. Aportes críticos al debate teórico y político", Tecnos, Madrid, pp. 11-20.

Karlos Pérez de Armiño (2013), “La gobernanza global de la seguridad alimentaria: debilidades, disparidades e iniciativas de reforma”, in Xavier Pons (ed.), Alimentación y Derecho Internacional. Normas, instituciones y procesos., pp. 83-118.

Karlos Pérez de Armiño (2011), “Crisis alimentaria y lucha contra el hambre en el África Subsahariana. La cuestionable contribución de los ODM”, Revista de Economía Mundial, vol. 27, pp. 117-148.


Panel Two: Science Diplomacy,  Environmental Knowledge and Global Public Health 

Panel Two - Panelists and Biographies:

Daryl Copeland

Daryl Copeland, is a former Canadian diplomat, analyst, author, educator and consultant. He is a Senior Fellow at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, Policy Fellow at the Centre for International Studies and Research (CERIUM), University of Montreal and in 2017-2018 was Senior Advisor, Science Diplomacy at the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Vienna. He has recently completed terms as Visiting Professor at the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna and the Academy of Diplomacy and International Governance (UK). Mr Copeland specializes in the relationship between science, technology, diplomacy, and international policy, and his book, Guerrilla Diplomacy: Rethinking International Relations (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2009), is cited as an essential reference by the editors of Oxford Bibliographies Online. A frequent public speaker, Mr. Copeland comments regularly for the national media on global issues and public management and has written 12 book chapters and over 200 articles for the scholarly and popular press. His work has appeared in many anthologies, as well as in the International Journal, World Politics Review, Foreign Policy in Focus, The Hague Journal of Diplomacy, Place Branding and Public Diplomacy, The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Ottawa Citizen, Embassy, The Mark, iPolitics and elsewhere. He was awarded the 2010 Molot Prize for best article published in Canadian Foreign Policy (“Virtuality, Diplomacy and the Foreign Ministry”, 15:2). From 1981 to 2011 Mr. Copeland served as a Canadian diplomat with postings in Thailand, Ethiopia, New Zealand and Malaysia. During the 1980s and 1990s, he was elected a record five times to the Executive Committee of the Professional Association of Foreign Service Officers. From 1996-99 he was National Program Director of the Canadian Institute of International Affairs in Toronto and Editor of Behind the Headlines. In 2000, he received the Canadian Foreign Service Officer Award for his "tireless dedication and unyielding commitment to advancing the interests of the diplomatic profession." Among his positions at the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) in Ottawa, Mr. Copeland has worked as Senior Intelligence Analyst, South and Southeast Asia; Deputy Director for International Communications; Director for Southeast Asia; Senior Advisor, Public Diplomacy; Director of Strategic Communications Services; and, Senior Advisor, Strategic Policy and Planning. He was DFAIT representative to the Association of Professional Executives (APEX) 2001-06. Mr. Copeland has taught at the University of Ottawa's Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, the London Academy of Diplomacy (UK) and Otago University (NZ). He has served as a peer reviewer for University of Toronto Press, Canadian Foreign Policy Journal, the International Journal and The Hague Journal of Diplomacy, and is a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Place Branding and Public Diplomacy and the International Advisory Board of The Canadian Foreign Policy Journal. From 2009-11 he was Adjunct Professor and Senior Fellow at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs, and in 2009 was Research Fellow at the University of Southern California's Center on Public Diplomacy.

Mr. Copeland grew up in downtown Toronto and received his formal education at the University of Western Ontario (Gold Medal, Political Science; Chancellor's Prize, Social Sciences) and the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs (Canada Council Special MA Scholarship). His consulting clients have included the governments of New Zealand. Malaysia Thailand and Quebec, and several NGOs. He has spent years backpacking on six continents, and enjoys travel, photography, arts and the outdoors.

Further information on Daryl Copeland and his thinking on diplomacy, development and security in the age of globalization is available here.

Lydia Stazen

Lydia has dedicated her career to building a world where all people have a place to call home and a strong foundation upon which they can build the lives they envision for themselves. Lydia has held executive leadership roles in anti-poverty organizations across the Midwest United States, focusing on housing, employment, education, and policy advocacy. Immediately prior to joining the Ruff Institute for Global Homelessness, Lydia served as Vice Chancellor of Advancement and President of the City Colleges of Chicago Foundation, where key achievements included establishing a fund for student basic needs emergencies and securing funding for a full-time staff position to drive a college-wide response for students experiencing homelessness. She also served for several years as Vice President of All Chicago Making Homelessness History, where she was instrumental in integrating homeless data with medical data to help patients experiencing homelessness access housing services. Lydia is a founding editorial Board Member of the International Journal on Homelessness, and previously served as Board Member for Facing Forward to End Homelessness. She holds her Masters Degree in Public Policy, is a Certified Fund Raising Executive (CFRE), and was a “Greater Good” fellow at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management in 2015.

Mark Potosnak

Dr. Mark Potosnak has degrees from Harvard and Columbia Universities, and he was a fellow in the Advanced Study Program at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. His research focuses on interactions between the plants and air quality. Specifically, he studies how trace gas emissions from plants affect atmospheric chemistry and how climate change will impact this interaction in the future. His field studies have been conducted in temperate, tropical, urban, arid and tundra ecosystems. Dr. Potosnak also deploys low-cost sensors that allow urban areas to be more resilient to climate change.


Keynote: The Future of State-Sponsored  Environmental Diplomacy

Keynote Speaker and Biography:

Robert William Dry

With academic interests in environmental governance, U.S. policy in the Persian Gulf, and the institution and practice of diplomacy, Professor Dry is a foreign affairs practitioner turned international relations instructor. He served as an American diplomat in Iraq, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Oman, China, Vietnam, and France, as well as in a range of assignments at the Department of State in Washington, D.C. During the terrorist attacks on the U.S. on September 11, 2001 and thereafter, he was the chief of mission (long-term chargé d’affaires) in Muscat, the Sultanate of Oman, where he facilitated the U.S. and allied invasion of Afghanistan and the coalition counterterrorism campaign. This political/military assignment represented a departure from economic and scientific postings, including as economic counselor at the U.S. embassy in Hanoi with the goal of completing normalization of relations between the U.S. and Vietnam. In another assignment, he served as counselor for scientific, environmental, technological, and health affairs and nonproliferation at the U.S. embassy in Paris, negotiating with the French government - among other agreements - the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (‘ITER’), designed to prove the utility of fusion energy for the 22nd century. Earlier, he negotiated with the Saudi Arabian government on its accession to the WTO (eventually successful) and the Kyoto Protocol under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (ultimately unsuccessful).  

As his final diplomatic assignment, the Department of State assigned Professor Dry as diplomat-in-residence and visiting professor at the City College of New York. In addition to recruiting for the U.S. Foreign Service, he taught and lectured throughout the Greater New York Region, including, for example, at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Since 2010, he has taught at the Department of Politics and its successor IR Program at NYU. Also following retirement, he developed capstone projects at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.  In 2019, Professor Dry served as Visiting Professor of Government and Podlich Distinguished Fellow at Claremont McKenna College in California teaching global environmental governance. Professor Dry seeks to marry practical, pragmatic and legal (international law) IR studies together with academic scholarship in his courses. These include Global Environmental Governance: Approaches, Structures, and Diplomacy; the United States and the Persian Gulf; and Foundations for Diplomacy. His education includes an MA from Glasgow University, Scotland; a JD from George Washington University; and an LLM (environmental law) from the University of Maryland.  He is married to Ellen Kerrigan Dry, a practicing attorney and equestrian, and they live in Middleburg, Virginia.  They have two lovely daughters, a wonderful new grandson, four horses and an Australian shepherd.

Publications:

Robert William Dry, ‘Loyalty: The Hallmark of the Professional Diplomat’, The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2013.

Robert Dry, ‘Diplomacy Works: A Practitioner’s Guide to Recent Books’, The Foreign Service Journal, Jan-February 2015. 

Robert Dry, ‘Read and Practice the Wisdom’ Book Review, To Serve with Honor: Doing the Right Thing in Government, by Terry Newell, Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2015. 


Panel Three: State-Sponsored Environmental Diplomacy; Beyond the Paris Agreement

Panel Three - Panelists and Biographies:

Lawrence Susskind

Larry Susskind is a member of the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he has taught negotiation, international environmental policy-makingpolicymaking, and water diplomacy for almost fifty years. He is one of the co-founders of the inter-university Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School where he is currently Vice-Chair for Instruction, Director of the Teaching Negotiation Resource Center (TNRC) and lead instructor for executive training programs in Advanced Mediation, the Negotiation Master Class and Negotiation and Leadership.   More than 25 years ago, Professor Susskind founded the not-for-profit Consensus Building Institute  (CBI)  that provides mediation assistance in some for the most complex public disputes around the world. He is also the author or co-author of twenty books that have been translated into eight languages including Environmental Diplomacy (Oxford), Negotiating on Behalf of Others (Sage), and Multi-Party Negotiation (Sage).  

Phillip Stalley

Phillip Stalley has been at DePaul University since 2007. He is the Endowed Professor of Environmental Diplomacy in the Grace School of Applied Diplomacy and an Associate Professor in the Political Science Department. Prior to joining DePaul, Phillip was a visiting research fellow at Princeton University in the Princeton-Harvard China and the World program. Professor Stalley also served as a visiting scholar in the Environmental Economics department at Fudan University in Shanghai. He was a member of the Public Intellectuals Program of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations from 2011-2013. Phillip's research focuses primarily on Chinese environmental politics and international relations. He is the author of Foreign Firms, Investment, and Environmental Regulation in the People's Republic of China (Stanford University Press, 2010) and his work can be found in academic journals such as The China Quarterly and Journal of Contemporary China. His current research project focuses on China's environmental diplomacy and its approach to international environmental institutions.

Marcela Lopez Vallejo

Is a Full-Time Professor at Universidad de Guadalajara, in Mexico. She has been an International Relations professor for more than twenty years. She worked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and at the Ministry of Public Education, as well as in the lobbying firm Burson-Marsteller. She belongs to the Mexican National Research System (Level 1) and is part of the Editorial Council of Latin American Policy. She has participated as a fellow researcher at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies in the UK, the Université de Montréal, the Wilfried Laurier University, both in Canada, the Universidad del País Vasco in Spain, and at the Universidad de Buenos Aires in Argentina. She has several academic and policy-oriented publications on North American regionalism, transnational governance, environment, climate and energy policies, and sub-state diplomacy. Her two latest books address the reconfiguration of climate governance and the environmental policy in North America.


Panel Four: Urban Diplomacy and Its  Contribution to Building Social, Economic and Environmental Sustainability

Panel Four - Panelists and Biographies:

David Wellman

David Joseph Wellman’s work focuses on the relationship between diplomacy and religion, ecological sustainability and interconvictional engagement. He is an Associate Professor and the Director of The Grace School of Applied Diplomacy at DePaul University in Chicago. Wellman is the author of Sustainable Diplomacy: Ecology, Religion and Ethics in Muslim-Christian Relations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and Sustainable Communities (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 2001). Wellman's writing on diplomacy was used as the basis for an international conference, whose outcome was the collaborative volume Sustainable Diplomacies, edited by Costas Constantinou and James Der Derian, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). His more recent work has focused on European Union integration, non-state actor and grassroots diplomacy and the role of religious culture in building bridges across boundaries of difference. Wellman's current book project focuses on urban diplomacy among non-state actor and grassroots practitioners in Paris and Chicago.

Sohaela Amiri

Sohaela Amiri is an adjunct policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, research associate at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, and doctoral fellow at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. Dr. Amiri’s research focuses on the role of non-state and subnational actors such as cities, diaspora groups and immigrants as well as the metrics and evaluation of noncoercive statecraft. Dr. Amiri’s recent work includes the book, “City Diplomacy: Current Trends and Future Prospects ” She is currently the guest editor for the Hague Journal of Public Diplomacy’s Forum on City Diplomacy with the goal of exploring a framework for city diplomacy.

Sana Syed

Sana Syed is a theologian, architect, and community organizer based in Chicago. She holds a Bachelor’s in Architecture from Mumbai University and a Master of Arts in Religious Leadership for Social Transformation from the Chicago Theological Seminary. Sana currently serves as the Director of Strategic Initiatives at the Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN), where she leads big impact, innovation and mission advancement opportunities. Sana has worked with diverse global communities through several nonprofits in Sweden, Egypt, Yemen, Spain, Somaliland, India, Switzerland, and the United States. A recipient of the Emerging Leader Award by Caux Dialogue for Land and Security, Switzerland, and the Extraordinary Service in Leadership Award by the Chicago Theological Seminary, Sana serves on the board of the Oasis Initiative, and the Strategic Planning Committee at the Chicago Theological Seminary. As a theologian and minister, Sana has particular interest in liberation theology, femininity, and womanist theology, decolonial thought and praxis, and ecotheology.


Panel Five: Diplomacy and the Arts in the Age of the Anthropocene

Panel Five - Panelists and Biographies:

Jessica Horton

Jessica L. Horton is an associate professor of art history at the University of Delaware. Her research and teaching emphasize the centrality of Native North American art, culture, and politics to a global story of modernity. Her first book, Art for an Undivided Earth: The American Indian Movement Generation (Duke University Press, 2017), traces the impact of Indigenous struggles for land and life on artists working internationally since the 1970s. Her second book-in-progress, Earth Diplomacy: Indigenous American Art and Reciprocity, 1953–1973, examines how artists revitalized Indigenous cultures of diplomacy in the unlikely shape of Cold War tours, translating Native American approaches to political ecology across two decades and five continents. Her research is supported by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Social Science Research Council, and others.

Hanan Toukan

Hanan Toukan is Professor of Middle East Studies. Her teaching and writings sit at the intersection of international politics, Middle East politics, postcolonial studies, visual cultures and cultural studies. Prior to joining Bard College Berlin, Toukan was Visiting Assistant Professor of Middle East Studies at Brown University and Visiting Professor of Cultural Studies of the Middle East at Bamberg University. She has also taught at Freie Universität Berlin and SOAS, University of London in Media and Film Studies, as well as Politics and International Studies. She is a recipient of several research awards including most recently from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for her current research project on migration and the visual politics of museums in Europe and the Middle East. Her book The Politics of Art: Dissent and Cultural Diplomacy in Palestine Lebanon and Jordan (2021) is published with Stanford University Press. The book is based on her Ph.D. undertaken at SOAS, University of London which won the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) Malcolm H. Kerr Award for Best Ph.D. in the Social Sciences in 2012.

Toukan’s work has been published in Cultural Politics, Arab Studies Journal, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Radical Philosophy, Journal of Visual Culture, Journal for Palestine Studies, Review of Middle East Studies, Jerusalem Quarterly, SCTIW Review, Jadaliyya and Ibraaz amongst others. She has published chapters in Leila Farsakh (ed.) Rethinking Statehood in Palestine: Self-Determination and Decolonization Beyond Statehood (University of California Press, 2021),Viola Shafik (ed), Documentary Filmmaking in the Middle East and North Africa (Cairo University Press, 2021); Friederike Pannewick and Georges Khalil (eds.), Commitment and Beyond: Locating the Political in Arabic Literature since the 1940s (Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2015); and Dina Matar and Zahera Harb (eds.), Narrating Conflict in the Middle East: Discourse, Image and Communication Practices in Lebanon and Palestine (IB Tauris, 2013). She is also Contributing Editor at the Jerusalem Quarterly and a member of the Editorial Collective of the Journal of Visual Culture.

Hanan Toukan is a Fellow at the Europe in the Middle East-Middle East in Europe (EUME) research program at the Berlin-based Forum Transregionale Studien.

Hameed Khasawnih

Hameed Khasawnih has been in the coordinating position of the Ueber den Tellerrand volunteer network in Germany for the past 4 years. Ueber den Tellerrand, is a German NGO that engages in the field of Social Inclusion. Local volunteer groups are active under its umbrella in about 25 cities in Germany where they organize social and cultural activities to bring people from different backgrounds together. Hameed’s academic background is in the field of Development and Economics. His previous professional engagement was as a project coordinator in the Jordan Red Crescent and Danish Red Cross where he also coordinated the efforts of local groups of volunteers in Jordan and Palestine who engaged in the field of Youth Capacity Building.


Keynote: Facing Ecological Challenges: The Future of Environmental Law

Keynote Speaker and Biography:

Teresa Fajardo

Teresa Fajardo is associate professor in the Department of International Law and International Relations in Granada University where she teaches Public International Law at the Faculty of Law and International and European Environmental Law at the Science Faculty. She read law at Granada and Poitiers Universities and the Licence Spéciale en Droit Européen at the Institut d’Etudes Européennes at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. In her thesis, she explored the EU External Action in the field of Environmental Protection. She has spent stages at the Legal Service of the European Commission and has been a visiting researcher at the universities of Brussels, Geneva, King’s College of London, Oslo and Cambridge. Her research fields are International and European Environmental Law, EU migration law and policy, International Law of the Sea and Soft Law. She has participated in European research projects and contracts funded by the European Commission and the European Parliament, such as the interdisciplinary research project EFFACE, “European Union Action to Fight Environmental Crime”, funded under the 7th Research Framework Programme of the EU. She is a member of the Jean Monnet Chair on European Union Environmental Law at the University of Barcelona. She is currently researching in several inter-university projects and initiatives relating to International and European environmental law. Her publications include the co-edited volume (with Mar Campins Eritja) Biological Diversity and International Law: Challenges for the Post 2020 Scenario (Springer, 2021) and La diplomacia del clima de la Unión europea: La acción exterior sobre Cambio Climático y el Pacto Verde Mundial, (Reus, 2021).


Panel Six: Indigenous Voices in Global  Environmental Diplomacy

Panel Six - Panelists and Biographies:

Jessica Shadian

Dr. Jessica M. Shadian is President and CEO of Arctic360. Over the course of almost two decades, Shadian has lived and worked as an academic and consultant throughout the European and North American Arctic. Dr. Shadian is widely published; her books, articles, book chapters and other commentary concentrate on the global politics of the Arctic, Arctic Indigenous governance and law, and most recently on the role of global financial institutions in the emerging economy of the North American Arctic. Her expertise is regularly solicited by media outlets, policy makers, and institutions i.e., the Arctic Council, Northern governments, the private sector, and think tanks throughout Europe, Canada, and the United States. Shadian’s 2014 book entitled: The Politics of Arctic Sovereignty: Oil, Ice, and Inuit Governance (Routledge) is the first in-depth history of the Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC) and Inuit sovereignty in global politics reaching back to pre-European discovery. Shadian’s consulting work began while living in the Norwegian Arctic as part of becoming the co-creator and organizer of an Arctic Dialogue series which brought together state and local political leaders, oil and gas and other industry leaders, local communities, and academia concerned with Arctic offshore oil and gas development to create and increase information sharing about Arctic resource development. Dr. Shadian holds a Ph.D. in Global Governance from the University of Delaware (2006) during which she wrote her dissertation at the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI), University of Cambridge, UK on an NSF award. She then spent the following 5 years in Norway at first at the Barents Institute and then as a Senior Researcher at the High North Center for Business and Governance, Nord University, Bodø. She then received an Associate Professor, Marie Curie COFUND Fellowship, Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (AIAS), Denmark. In June 2017, Shadian completed a two-year Nansen Professorship co-funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the University of Akureyri, Iceland prior to moving to Toronto and dedicating herself full-time to building Arctic360, a Partnership with the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History, Trinity College, and the Munk School. Arctic360 brings together Northern leaders, global financial institutions, the federal Government, and other stakeholders to address infrastructure and related economic development priorities for the North American Arctic.

Hayden King

Dr. Hayden King an Assistant Professor and Advisor to the Dean of Arts on Indigenous Education at Ryerson University, Toronto. He is Anishinaabe from Beausoleil First Nation on Gchi'mnissing, in Huronia Ontario. Dr. King is the Executive Director of the Yellowhead Institute and Co-Founder of The Ogimaa Mikana Project. His areas of expertise include Indigenous Policy, Law, Governance and Education and Settler Colonialism. Dr. King’s current research focuses on Indigenous jurisdiction in modern treaty contexts and the practical strategies First Nation communities deploy to reclaim land and resources, as well as efforts to re-articulate the legal relationships between hunters and the land. His recent publications include the 2021 "Rising Like a Cloud: New Histories of Old Toronto" in Indigenous Toronto: Stories that Carry This Place, edited by D. Bolduc, M. Gordon-Corbiere, R. Tabobondung and B. Wright-McLeod. Toronto: Coachhouse Books; with J.B. Zoe and J. Simpson, 2020. Gowhaedo Ginaewo (Ancestral ways): Mapping Modern Treaty Implementation, Northern Public Affairs (2020) 6(2) and, with S. Pasternak, Canada's Emerging Indigenous Rights Framework: A Critical Analysis, Toronto: Yellowhead Institute, 2018.

Leona Morgan

Leona Morgan (she/her) is a Diné activist and community organizer who has been fighting nuclear colonialism since 2007. Leona co-founded and works with the Indigenous-led Haul No! initiative and citizen-science Radiation Monitoring Project. In June 2016, she co-founded the Albuquerque-based Nuclear Issues Study Group, which is a multi-racial, multi-generational, and women-led organization dedicated to protecting New Mexico from all things nuclear; and Leona also works nationally to address the country's high level radioactive waste problem and is part of the international campaign Don’t Nuke the Climate that focuses on nuclear energy as a global climate issue. Leona lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico and is currently pursuing a Masters in Community and Regional Planning at the University of New Mexico.


Panel Seven: Interconvictional Bridge Building as a Diplomatic Response to the Ecological Crisis

Panel Seven - Panelists and Biographies:

François Becker

Engineer from Ecole Centrale-Supelec, Master of Sciences from MIT, Doctor of Science from the University of Paris-Saclay, François Becker is an honorary professor at the University of Strasbourg and former director of its School of Engineering in Telecommunications and Physics; he is also dean emeritus of the International Space University.

After research work devoted to theoretical nuclear physics and then to the observation of the Earth by satellite, which led to more than a hundred international publications in journals or books, François Becker, a Christian of the Catholic faith, has been involved since his retirement in the Christian reformers' movement and is campaigning, with an interconvictional approach, for a better way of living together in a multicultural and multiconvictional Europe, in particular through the development of social, economic and political Human Rights.

Until 2016, he represented, at the Council of Europe, the European Network Church on the Move of which he was the Secretary General. Invited by the INGO Conference of the Council of Europe to chair its working group on "Human Rights and Religions", he enabled this group, thanks to a leadership based on interconvictional practices, to propose consensual conclusions approved by a very large majority and published in 2015 by the Council of Europe.

During his term of office at the Council of Europe, he was often invited to the annual meetings between the Council of Europe and the representatives of Europe's religions and schools of thought organised by the Committee of Ministers, where his contributions are published.

In order to promote social cohesion and better living together in a pluriconvictional Europe, François Becker contributed to the creation in 2005 of the G3i (International, Intercultural and Interconvictional Group) which he chaired until 2015. One of the objectives of the G3i is to reflect on the conditions and rules allowing the practice of interconvictional dialogues, and to promote their practice in interpersonal relations and the preparation of political decisions, notably at the European level.

François Becker contributed to the reflections of the G3i, based on numerous studies, notably on the importance of interconvictional attitudes and practices for a responsible exercise of freedoms, as well as on the two colloquia organised at the Council of Europe by the G3i, one in 2007 on "Social cohesion in a multicultural Europe: role and impact of religions and schools of thought" and the other in 2012 on "Becoming citizens of a plural Europe - Interconvictional spaces and practices,” the proceedings of which being edited by François Becker.

These reflections and studies led to several conferences and publications of the G3i, such as the proposal for a "European Charter of Interconvictionality" , published in 4 languages and distributed to various political bodies, as well as the issue n° 50 of the journal Diasporiques entitled "Daring to use the neologism Interconvictionality.”

Rafael Tyszblat

Rafael Tyszblat is a founding leader of Connecting Actions and the European Institute for Dialogue, two NGOs focused on providing platforms for interfaith and interconvictional organizations to create networks across Europe. An expert in conflict resolution, mediation, intercultural and interconvictional dialogue, Rafael has trained thousands of youth and adults in effective communication skills through his work with the non-profit New York-based organization Soliya.

Parin Begum

Parin Begum is a broadcast journalist working with the BBC. Over the years, she has led various projects with an interfaith, youth, and community development focus. She has been involved with the Muslim Jewish Conference (MJC), a global network, working to develop and maintain diplomatic links with the two Abrahamic communities and the wider communities beyond. Besides her international work in interfaith dialogue, Parin gets involved with local organisations to support the development of community cohesion in her local area, to address issues of racial and religious prejudice. She currently resides in Blackburn, UK.