The 2019 Nobel Peace Prize, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, and Ethiopian Peacebuilding

Experience the Episode

Meet the Speaker: Hannah Heinzekehr

Hannah Heinzekehr serves as senior director for strategic communications in the Office of the President. In this role, she focuses on communications, event support, strategic initiatives, and special projects in service of the President. Prior to joining the Office of the President, Hannah served as communications program director at Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, part of the Keough School of Global Affairs. 

Hannah has over 15 years of communication administration experience in the nonprofit sector, and previously served as the executive director for The Mennonite, Inc., a print and multimedia publication connected to Mennonite Church USA, and as director of communications and convention planning associate for Mennonite Church USA.

Hannah holds a Master’s degree in leadership and theology from Claremont (California) School of Theology. She also graduated from Bluffton (Ohio) University with a B.A. in communications and a minor in peace and conflict studies. Hannah serves as a trustee on the board of the J.A. Schowalter Foundation in Newton, Kansas. She and her husband, Justin, have two children.

Meet the Speaker: Abba Hagos Hayish Fessuh

Abba Hagos Hayish Fessuh, C.M., is an Ethiopian Catholic Priest, a member of the Congregation of Mission (Vincentian). Fr. Hagos has vast experience in pastoral ministry in rural and urban settings and working with disadvantaged community groups, and accompanying people displaced by war. He has also led a team working on mediation and reconciliation between Communist perpetuators and victims of the “Red Terrorism” period in Ethiopia.

In his capacity as Secretary General of the Catholic Bishops Conference of Ethiopia, Fr. Hagos has gained rich experience working on the national and International level, particularly in promoting integral human development, working on anti-human trafficking, church and state relationships, and interfaith dialogue in Ethiopia.

Amid the ongoing socio-political tensions and conflicts in Ethiopia, religions have a special role in national peacebuilding efforts. Religious leaders in Ethiopia possess a wealth of resources for peace, including scriptures, deposits of tradition and teaching, cultural practices, and credibility with the people. They also have access to social and development infrastructures that can provide crucial foundations for peace, and a history of peaceful co-existence from which lessons can be learned. Drawing on these various resources, Ethiopia needs religious leaders to develop skills for peacebuilding and lead reconciliation and healing from the grassroots to the top levels of society.  

Meet the Faculty: Peter Wallensteen

Peter Wallensteen, a leading international peace researcher, joined the faculty of the Kroc Institute in 2006. He spends the fall semesters in residence at Notre Dame, where he consults and collaborates with faculty on research projects, teaches a graduate seminar on international peace research, and lectures on peace research topics.

Wallensteen is a Senior Professor in the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Sweden’s Uppsala University, where he directed the Uppsala Conflict Data Program until 2015 and continues to lead the Special Program on the Implementation of Targeted Sanctions. He was the first holder of the Dag Hammarskjöld Chair in Peace and Conflict Research (1985-2012). He is the author of the widely used Understanding Conflict Resolution: Peace, War, and the Global System, now in its fourth edition and published in English, Arabic, and Korean. He also is the author of Peace Research: Theory and Practice (Routledge), published in English and Chinese. In 2016, Wallensteen and Isak Svensson published Fredens diplomater: Nordisk medling från Bernadotte till Ahtisaari [The Diplomats of Peace: Nordic Mediation from Bernadotte to Ahtisaari, Stockholm (Santérus)], which analyzed the work of over 40 mediators. The book serves as a follow-up text to Wallensteen and Svensson’s The Go-Between: Jan Eliasson and the Styles of Mediation (U.S.Institute of Peace, 2010).

Wallensteen’s monograph Quality Peace: Peacebuilding, Victory and World Order (Oxford University Press, 2015) constitutes part of a multi-volume series on strategic peacebuilding developed by the Kroc Institute and Oxford University Press. Wallensteen is co-editor of Regional Organizations and Peacemaking: Challengers to the UN? (with Anders Bjurner, Routledge). His interest in targeted sanctions led him to publish the edited volume International Sanctions: Between Wars and Words in 2005 (with Carina Staibano, with contributions by Kroc Institute researchers). The report “Making Targeted Sanctions Effective” was the outcome of a large international process for improving sanctions and was presented to the UN Security Council in February 2003. The same year, Wallensteen’s edited book on Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Alva Myrdal, Alva Myrdal in International Affairs (Coronet), was published.