Raúl Rosende will be in conversation with Dr Annette Idler on his 26 years of facilitating negotiations between authorities and non-state armed groups and verification and monitoring of ceasefires. Before his current posting in Colombia, Raúl Rosende was the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for northern Syria between 2014 and 2016; the Head of Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), in Damas, Syria (2013-2014) and in Yemen (2010-2013). From 2008 to 2010 he was the UNDP Peace Advisor in Palestine, and between 2008 and 2010 led OCHA in Colombia, where he had previously served as advisor to the Resident Coordinator and Program Coordinator. He has also worked on UN missions in Afghanistan and Guatemala.

Dr Aldo Civico will be "in conversation" with Dr Annette Idler, discussing his work on the anti-mafia movement in Sicily, groups in the Western Balkans and Syria, and paramilitaries in Colombia from a civil society perspective as anthropologist.

Aldo Civico is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University and director of International Institute for Peace. He was director of the Center for International Conflict Resolution at Columbia University.

Dr Scilla Elworthy will be in conversation with Dr Annette Idler about her work as aworld-renowned peace activist on understanding and responding to violent non-state groups from a human perspective.

Dr Elworthy set up Peace Direct in 2003 in order to support local peace-builders in conflict areas. Prior to that, she served as executive director to the Oxford Research Group, an NGO she founded in 1982 to develop effective dialogue between nuclear weapons policy-makers worldwide and their critics, for which she was nominated three times for the Nobel Peace Prize. In 2003 she was awarded the Niwano Peace Prize. From 2005 she also advised Peter Gabriel, Desmond Tutu and Richard Branson in setting up The Elders. She is a member of the World Future Council and co-founded Rising Women Rising World.

Reconciliation: Utopia or necessity in a peace process. The Colombian experience

Ingrid Betancourt Pulecio is a Colombian politician, former senator and anti-corruption activist. She was kidnapped by FARC on 23 February 2002 while campaigning for the presidency of Colombia and was rescued by Colombian security forces six and a half years later along with 14 other hostages. She has received multiple international awards.

Alvaro de Soto will be in conversation with Edward Mortimer.

This event is co-sponsored with OxPeace and CIS. 

In a conversation with Dr Annette Idler, Mr Villalobos will share his experience as guerrilla leader and the motivations for engaging in peace negotiations with the Salvadorian government. Discussing the challenges the guerrillas faced during the process that led to the signing of the peace agreement, he will reflect on lessons for solving contemporary armed conflicts that involve violent non-state groups as well as on negotiations with gangs in Central America today.

Joaquín Villalobos is the former leader of the Salvadorian guerrilla People's Revolutionary Army and later became one of the main military strategists of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front.He is signatory of the peace agreement of El Salvador which was signed in Mexico in 1992. Joaquin is member of the Inter-American Dialogue, Washington, the Friends of the Interamerican Democratic Charter of the Carter Center, and the Advisory Council of the first UNDP Report on Citizen Security. He works as a consultant on conflict in Sri Lanka, Philippines, Bosnia, Afghanistan and Colombia. He is the former security adviser to the Mexican government and currently adviser to the Colombian government on the peace process, as well as to “Inter-Mediate” a London-based conflict mediation NGO led by Jonathan Powell. 

During the Cold War, many rebel movements adopted a revolutionary agenda, with a Marxist or socialist orientation. A large qualitative literature contends that revolutionary rebels were generally high quality ones, but their overall impact has yet to be investigated systematically. We find that civil wars where the main rebel actor was a socialist revolutionary group, took the form of highly demanding irregular wars rather than conventional or symmetric, non-conventional wars; they lasted longer and produced more fatalities on average. However, and contrary to our expectations, we also find that rebel quality failed to translate into positive outcomes: socialist revolutionary rebels tended to be defeated at a higher rate compared to other rebels--hence a “Marxist Paradox.” To account for it, we argue that states challenged by socialist revolutionary rebels successfully stepped up their game by both drawing from substantial external assistance and launching counter-mobilization campaigns. Our analysis suggests the usefulness of incorporating rebel political identity in the study of civil war and historicizing it. We also point to the state-building dimension of civil wars implicating revolutionary rebels and stress the indirect ways in which they shaped conflict. We conclude by drawing implications for the latest wave of revolutionary rebellion, the jihadi one.

Stathis Kalyvas is Arnold Wolfers Professor of Political  Science and Director of the Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence. He is the  author of The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge University  Press, 2006) The Rise of Christian Democracy in Europe (Cornell  University Press, 1996), and Modern Greece (Oxford University Press, 2015), as well as the co-editor of Order, Conflict & Violence (Cambridge University Press, 2008).