Day 1

Importance of Promoting Tolerance in Communities in Times of Crisis at 10:05 (NY) / 19:05 (Mct)

About Me

Director of the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA) and Policy and Mediation Division in the United Nations. After an early career as a journalist and writer – including two years in El Salvador, where she wrote on a book on the impact of the assassination of six Jesuit priests on the negotiations towards the end of the civil war – she spent five years with the UN’s Department of Political Affairs in the 1990s working on Central American peace processes and other issues. After leaving the Organization in 2000, she wrote two further books – one on Groups of Friends and UN peacemaking, the other on the slow process towards the end of the violent Basque separatist group ETA. Whitfield is also a fellow of New York University’s Center on International Cooperation, gave analytical support to the UN while Director of the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum at the Social Science Research Council, and served as a Senior Advisor to Geneva-based Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue. She taught at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, provided support to the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the Colombian peace process, and re-joined the UN in mid-2016 from the International Crisis Group, where she was Senior Advisor to the President.