Abhoud Syed M. Lingga is executive director of the Institute of Bangsamoro Studies in Cotabato City, Philippines. He holds Master of Arts in Islamic Studies and Master of Arts in Education degrees. He participated in a number of trainings, among which are on conflict prevention and peacebuilding conducted by the United Nations Institute for Training and Research; human rights and people’s diplomacy by the Diplomacy Training Program of the University of New South Wales, local government and civil society by Friedrich Naumann Stiftung in Germany, and various trainings on leadership and management. He participated in various sessions of the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations in Geneva.

For some years he had been Associate Professor at the Mindanao State University in Maguindanao and lecturer at Cotabato City State Polytechnic College, Sultan Kudarat Islamic Academy Foundation College, and Mindanao State University Buug College. His research interests are on Bangsamoro self-determination, conflict management, human rights, sustainable development, and Islamic education. As accomplished author and writer, he has published numerous articles in local and international journals and chapters of books.

Prof. Lingga is an active member of various non-government organizations, and has served in management capacities in various public and private sector organizations.

Craig Zelizer holds a doctorate from the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University. His dissertation research examined the use of community arts in peacebuilding within Bosnia-Herzegovina. He received a Master of Arts in Society and Politics from Central European University and a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Social Thought and Political Economy from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Dr. Zelizer is a founding member of the Alliance for Conflict Transformation. His areas of expertise include working with youth from violent conflict regions, civil society development and capacity building in transitional societies, conducting applied research and program evaluation, and mentoring aspiring professionals in the field. To date Craig has worked in over 10 countries, helped train hundreds of individuals in conflict resolution processes and facilitated several long-term dialogue processes He has worked with diverse groups including journalists and young people from Southeastern Europe, young people from Georgia and Abkhazia, Roma populations in several countries, and community groups in the United States.

Craig is also the founder of the ACT Forums one of the premier resources for professionals seeking employment and funding opportunities in the fields of peace and conflict resolution, civil society development, human rights and international education. ACT currently maintains Announcement Forums for individuals seeking jobs, grants and scholarships, and information on conferences and other events. Over 100 organizations and universities throughout the world currently use the forums to recruit entry-level to advanced professional and academic candidates and there are several thousand subscribers from throughout the world. He has helped to advise countless professionals and students on professional and academic opportunities in the field.

He has worked for several international
organizations and taught as an Adjunct Faculty at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution. He has also received a number of fellowships and awards, including serving as a Fulbright Junior Scholar in Hungary for two years and most recently as a National Security Education Program Fellow in Bosnia-Herzegovina. He speaks several languages including Hungarian, Bosnian and Spanish.

Currently, Craig is a Visiting Assistant Professor Visiting Assistant Professor for the Master of Arts in Conflict Resolution program at in the Department of Government Georgetown University

Dr.David Connolly is a Research Fellow who specializes in the theory and practice of post-war recovery and conflict resolution. He has taught and supervised research on reconstruction reform, governance, international intervention, and research methods at York, the Central European University, and the Istituto per gli Studi di Politica Internazionale in Milan. David is also the convenor of the annual Chevening Course on Conflict Resolution, which is sponsored by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

With concentrated field experience in Afghanistan, Egypt, Indonesia, Northern Ireland and Sierra Leone, practical insight is fundamental to David’s research and teaching. He is currently an academic advisor to the London-based NGO, Tiri, and has worked as a consultant for the World Bank, the government of Afghanistan, the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, and the Community Relations Council, among other organizations.

Geoff Harris is Professor of Economics at the University of Natal, where he is also Director of the Conflict Resolution and Peace Studies Programme. Geoff Harris is a development economist with a particular interest in military expenditure in developing countries. He also directs the university's Conflict Resolution and Peace Studies Programme.

His main research interests concern recovery from war and alternative ways of achieving security. He edited Recovery from Armed Conflict in Developing Countries. An Economic and Political Analysis (Routledge, London, 1999) and jointly edited Building Peace in Bougainville (Centre for Peace Studies, University of New England/ National Research Institute, Papua New Guinea, 1999) harrisg1@ nu.ac.za

John A. Wagner is a professional mediator and conflict managing consultant with forty years of experience. His career began in 1968, in Labor Relations and Human Resources, before joining the Federal Mediation & Conciliation Service, (FMCS) in 1973. He served in a number of administrative and managerial positions with the FMCS while continuing to mediate private, public and federal sector collective bargaining disputes, equal employment opportunity complaints, as well as facilitating Regulatory Negotiations. He has trained and lectured to a wide variety of audiences, both domestic and international, including the University of Moscow, and instructed for George Mason University at the Organization of American States.

Mr. Wagner offers a wide variety of conflict managing services which includes
consultation, systems design, training, mediation, facilitation, professional coaching and
evaluation. He has assessed, designed and evaluated conflict managing systems for both
public and private institutions, most notably: the Environmental Protection Agency, Bureau of National Affairs, the Federal Elections Commission, the Peace Corps, Immigration and Naturalization Service, and National Aeronautical and Space Administration. He assisted in the design, training, intake and delivery of alternative dispute resolution services for both internal and external complaints procedures at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Mr. Wagner has lectured extensively on design and implementation of conflict management processes. He has been a featured presenter at the Annual Federal Dispute Resolution Conference.

His international work has been devoted to consultation, facilitation, training and
dispute systems design in Europe, Canada, Indonesia, the Caribbean and Latin America.
Since 1995, he has served on the Board of the Institute for Conflict Analysis & Resolution
at George Mason University. Mr. Wagner has chaired the Arlington Catholic Diocese
Fact Finding Panel and facilitated a number of parish issues.

Mr. Wagner received his B.S. in Political Science from St. Peter’s College and a M.S. in Conflict Management from George Mason University. Currently, he is on the faculty of the Lutheran Colleges Consortium in Arlington, Virginia.

June Pagaduan-Lopez (born 1951) has worked for more than three decades in human rights protection, psychosocial intervention and peace advocacy. As a professor at the University of the Philippines (UP) and a psychiatrist, she has helped human rights abuse victims in the Philippines and in other countries and contributed to the development of a more humane approach to medical practice. During the Martial Law regime, she risked arrest and detention and suffered personal and professional persecution because of her activism. She is currently head of the UP Center for Gender and Women’s Studies.

The work of Dr. June Pagaduan-Lopez is well known and respected internationally because of her involvement both in the academe and in global networks that share her advocacy. In the medical profession, she is at the forefront of psychosocial trauma management. She got involved in human rights work as a student activist before and during the Martial Law era. After graduating from medical school in 1976 and having finished her residency in psychiatry in 1979, she helped found the Medical Action Group (MAG), a non-government, cause-oriented organization that provided medical and psychosocial support to victims of human rights abuses of the Marcos regime.

Her work on torture victims resulted in the establishment of the Philippine Action Against Torture. At the UP Medical School, she worked for the implementation of a ten-hour Human Rights Course for Medical Students, the only one of its kind to be mainstreamed into an undergraduate medical curriculum in the country.

A founding member of the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims (IRCT), she has trained medical practitioners in the detection, management and rehabilitation of torture victims and other survivors of political violence in the Philippines, East Timor, Nepal, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Burma, Cambodia and Kosovo. In East Timor, she managed a nationwide research project on the psychosocial effects of war trauma in coordination with the United Nations Transition Administration (UNTAET). Back in the Philippines, June Lopez decide to implement the East Timor concept in the war-torn regions of Muslim Mindanao. In 2002, using foreign and local government funds, she started “Balik-Kalipay” (Return to Happiness), a psychosocial intervention project for victims of armed conflict. It now covers 15 villages and has trained 46 teachers and more than 200 youth volunteers.

In current and post-conflict communities, community organization, healing and empowerment can be integrated into reconstruction and rehabilitation efforts. Dr. June Lopez has mobilized the academe, government and international institutions and NGOs to help the traumatized sectors in conflict areas. For her work she has received the Leo and Lisl Eitinger Human Rights Award from the University of Oslo in 1991, has bee nominated to the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize as one of the One Thousand Peace Women of the World and given the 2007 Most Outstanding Psychiatrist for Community Service Award by the Philippine Psychiatric Association.

Miki is a human rights activist and peace program specialist from Sarajevo, Bosnia Hercegovina. He is a co-founder of Global Youth Connect and organized GYC’s first delegation to Bosnia in the summer of 2006. In addition, Miki works full-time as a senior policy officer at Women Waging Peace where he oversees policy efforts aimed at including women in formal and informal peace processes. Before the war in Bosnia, Miki headed the UN Youth Chapter and was president of the local committee of AIESEC, the largest student association in the world. During the war, he was involved in numerous projects to ease the suffering of youth and the elderly. In 1994, he founded and directed Collegium Bosniacum, an organization of Bosnian students in Europe. Out of that work grew the initiative, Academic Lifeline for Bosnia Hercegovina, which aimed at rebuilding the country's academic institutions. In 1995, Miki headed the Vienna office of the World University Service, dealing with education issues in troubled regions. During this time, he also lived and worked in South Africa, Northern Ireland, Palestine, and Central American countries. Miki has consulted with many conflict resolution organizations, including Search for Common Ground, where he led efforts to develop child soldiers programs. He has led several delegations of international activists and conflict resolution practitioners to various post-conflict settings, including the Balkans, Northern Ireland, South Africa and Guatemala. He has served on the Board of Directors of several organizations, including the KARUNA Center for Peacebuilding, Global Youth Action, Sustaining the Soul that Serves, State of the World Forum, and others. He has been honored with numerous awards, including the Fetzer Institute Fellowship, Rotary International Scholarship, Soros Foundation Scholarship, State of the World Forum ChangeMaker award 1999, and honorary President of the Bosnian Student Union. Miki holds a Master of Science degree in Conflict Analysis and Resolution from George Mason University. He teaches in the Conflict Transformation Across Cultures Program, (CONTACT) Summer Peace building Institute at the School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont, and is an associate faculty member for the Trauma and Conflict Program at Prescott Collage in Arizona. He is married to Guatemalan human rights activist Eva Morales, and they live with their two children in the Washington, DC area.

Phra Paisarn, or Paisarn Wongworawisith as his former name, was born in May 10, 1957. He started his primary and high school education at Assumption School before his graduation in 1980 with the Bachelor of Arts from Thammasart University Thailand.

In 1983, he went into priesthood at Wat Thong Noppakun, Bangkok then moved to Wat Sa Nam Nai for his Dharma practice. At the present time, Phra Paisarn is the abbot at Wat Pa Sukato. He is also the chairman of many foundations and institutions such as the chairman of Komol Keemthong Foundation, the chairman of Thai Holistic Heath Foundation, the chairman of Peace Way Foundation, the chairman of the Institute for Peace studies at Khonkhan University and the independent chairman of the National Reconciliation Commission also.

Phra Paisarn is a thinker and an experienced writer as well. His writing works make him a writer, a coordinating writer, a translator, a coordinating translator, an editor and a coordinating editor. He is an activist and his views are requested by many magazines and journals.

His talent to combine and to explain Buddhist knowledge in a clear and practical dimension is outstanding. Phra Paisarn can illustrate life phenomena and Dharma principles explicitly and concretely causing many people to realize the importance of Dharma which should be studied and practiced. He is also involved in activities to preserve the environment and build harmony between man and nature (please refer to Bangkok post article).

Oliver Richmond's primary area of expertise is in peace and conflict theory, and in particular its interlinkages with IR theory. He is interested in how critical approaches to international theory impact upon debates about conflict and peace, and has recently finished a book project on concepts of peace and their implicit usages in IR theory (Peace in IR, Routledge, forthcoming 2008). He also published "The Transformation of Peace" in 2005. This was funded by a Leverhulme Fellowship and examined the conceptualisation of peace, and in particular the construction of the 'liberal peace', in post- conflict zones.
He is currently co-directing projects on 'Liberal Peace Transitions' (funded by the Carnegie Trust), Orthodox Terrorism and Liberal Peacebuilding (funded by the British Academy), and 'Rethinking the Liberal Peace' (funded by the UN University and University of St Andrews). He is also involved with a PRIO project on the 'Ethics of Liberal Peace'. He has been involved in fieldwork in Cyprus and Turkey, Kosovo, Bosnia, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, East Timor, Nepal and Kashmir, as well as in the Eastern Congo region. He is also on the editorial team of the Review of International Studies.
He directs the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, which houses the 'Liberal Peace Transitions' and 'Orthodox Terrorism and Liberal Peace' projects, mentioned above. This centre is the first of its kind in Scotland, and aims to stimulate and facilitate new thinking in theoretical and empirical terms in the area of peace and conflict studies. The centre's research projects, conducted by Oliver Richmond and by the centre's full time research fellow, Dr. Jason Franks, involves theoretical and comparative fieldwork in a number of post-conflict peacebuilding sites. The centre also hosts a number of other projects, Phd students, and an Mlitt programme in Peace and Conflict Studies.
Finally, he edits a Palgrave Book Series called Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies, which seeks to provide a forum for the development of new and alternative approaches for understanding the dynamics of conflict and of the construction of peace.

Mr.Jehan Perera is presently the Executive Director of the National Peace Council of Sri Lanka (NPCSL).  He is also a columnist for the national newspapers, writing in both the English and Sinhala language media, focusing on the ethnic conflict and inter-ethnic relations.  He is also quoted in the international media.  He has been awarded two international peace prizes, the Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti National Award for Peace, Tolerance and Harmony 2006 by the Inter Faith Harmony Foundation of India and the Nonviolence Award 2007 by the Swedish Fellowship of Reconciliation.

In his work with NPCSL, Jehan Perera has traveled extensively throughout the country, addressing seminars and public meetings, and advocating a negotiated political settlement between the government and LTTE based on principles of federalism and power sharing with the ethnic minorities.  He has traveled extensively to the conflict areas, in both peace time and times of war, by land, air and ship.

He has met several times with LTTE leaders in the areas controlled by them, both during times when they were a banned organization in Sri Lanka and during the time of the peace process.  He has also addressed a public meeting in Kilinochchi in 2005, the administrative capital of the LTTE at the invitation of the LTTE on the issue of human rights.  In addition, together with NPCSL, he has led delegations of journalists and editors to meet with the LTTE and gain an exposure to LTTE-controlled areas.

However, most of his work has been in the Sinhalese areas, where resistance to a negotiated settlement with the LTTE has been greatest.  Over the past decade he has met with hundreds of community groups and addressed seminars and other educational programmes, seeking to give Sinhalese opinion leaders and community leaders a greater awareness of the aspirations and grievances of the ethnic minorities.

Prior to working with NPCSL, Jehan Perera worked with the Sarvodaya Movement in Sri Lanka from 1988 to 1995.  He joined the Sarvodaya Movement soon after returning from the United States, where he had obtained a Juris Doctor (Doctor of Law) degree from Harvard Law School in 1987, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics from Harvard College.  In the US, he read on Mahatma Gandhi, and was inspired by his non violent philosophy and desire to seek the upliftment of all, and not only a majority or minority.  The Sarvodaya Movement offered a vehicle to transform these ideas into reality.

Raymond G. Helmick, S.J., Instructor in Conflict Resolution, Department of Theology, Boston College, has worked extensively in mediation. He has been involved in Northern Ireland since 1972, with the Kurds of Iraq since 1973, with the Lebanese factionssince 1982, with Israelis and Palestinians since 1985, with the Kurds of Turkey since 1992, and with the various Balkan countries since1995. He mediated negotiations between the IRA Army Council andthe Northern Ireland Office for six weeks during the hunger strike of 1981.
Father Helmick also was invited to the White House for the 1993 signing of the peace accord between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization. He joined the Reverend Jesse Jackson in his 1999 mission to Belgrade for the release of three imprisoned American soldiers and the reopening of diplomacy in a tense political situation.
He is a founder and executive board member of the U.S. Interreligious
Committee for Peace in the Middle East and Senior Associate of the Program in Preventive Diplomacy at the Center for Strategicand International Studies. He is the author and editor of numerous books, monographs, and articles including Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Religion, Public Policy, and Conflict Transformation (with Rodney L. Petersen) and Negotiating Outside the Law: Why Camp David Failed.
Father Helmick started the discussion by describing Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 8, .Develop a Global Partnership for Development,. which he believes is one of the most ambitious MDGs, with its staggering set of targets: developing an open, rulebased, predictable, non-discriminatory trading and financial system; addressing the special needs of the least developed countries, including tariff and quota-free access for least developed countries. exports, an enhanced program of debt relief for heavily indebted poor countries and cancellation of official bilateral debt; addressing particularly the special needs of landlocked developing countries and small island
developing States; and dealing comprehensively with the debt problems
of developing countries through national and international measures.

Bhikkhuna Dhamma Nandha, or Associate Professor Chatsumal Khabilsingha as formerly, graduated primary education from Rajini Bon School then continued her bachelor degree in Philosophy at Santi Niketan ,India. With her first class-honored degree, she got the Canadian Government scholarship to study the Master of Philosophy and the Philosophy of Philosophy degree. With this notable opportunity, her Ph. D. thesis ‘Comparison Study on Bhikkhuni Pahtimohk’ was published in English in 1981.
Assoc. Prof. Chatsumal started her teaching career at McMaster University, Canada in 1969 and backed to Thailand as a lecturer at the Department of Philosophy and Religion, Thammasat University from 1973- 2000. During that time, she was also well-known as an advisor for master degree students and Ph. D. students from Thammasat University, Mahidol University, Mahachulalongkorn Buddhist University, etc.
With expertise in issues between women, religion and environment, Assoc. Prof. Chatsumal was often invited to many leading international conferences becoming a well-known person among religion scholars.
Her experiences were published in a famous Thailand Weekly Newspaper, Matichon Sud Sabda, in ‘Dhamma Leela’ (Dhamma Style) column. Her publications released in varied style such as academic research, dhamma documentary, Mahayana Sutra Translation and Dalai Lama’s books and article translation.
Moreover, she was also a founder of Ban Santi Raksa Foundation provided help for women and children, promoted them opportunities for a better life quality.
Having a remarkable rhetoric, Assoc. Prof. Chatsumal expresses her standing point bravely, impressively and clearly making her a host in Dhamma Television Show ‘Cheewit Mai Sin wang’ (There is always hope) from 1994-2000. The show was awarded as The Best Dhamma Television Show for 2 years continuously.
Assoc. Prof. Chatsumal ordained as a bhikkuni and had been known as ‘Dhamma Nandha”