William G. O’Neill, Program Director

William G. O’Neill is a lawyer specializing in humanitarian, human rights and refugee law. He was Senior Advisor on Human Rights in the UN Mission in Kosovo, Chief of the UN Human Rights Field Operation in Rwanda and led the Legal Department of the UN/OAS Mission in Haiti. He has worked on judicial, police and prison reform in Burundi, Liberia, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Timor-Leste, Nepal and Bosnia-Herzegovina. He investigated mass killings in Afghanistan for the High Commissioner for Human Rights. He also conducted an assessment of the human rights situation in Darfur and trained the UN’s human rights monitors stationed there. At the request of the UN’s Executive Committee on Peace and Security, he chaired a Task Force on Developing Rule of Law Strategies in Peace Operations. He has created and delivered courses on human rights, rule of law and peacekeeping for several peacekeeping training centers whose participants have included senior military, police and humanitarian officials from dozens of countries. He has published widely on rule of law, human rights and peacekeeping, including, Kosovo: An Unfinished Peace and Protecting Two Million Displaced: The Successes and Shortcomings of the African Union in Darfur. In the spring of 2008, O’Neill was visiting professor of law and international relations at the Scuola Sant’Anna in Pisa, Italy.

Tatiana Carayannis, Associate Director

Tatiana Carayannis joined CPPF in September 2006 from the City University of New York's Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, where she directed the research of the United Nations Intellectual History Project. Until 2000 she was an adjunct instructor in international relations at CUNY and before that a researcher at the Carnegie Corporation of NY. In 1998, she served as rapporteur for the UN Secretary-General's Resource Group on the DRC, and between 1989 and 1995 as program officer at the Institute for International Education, where she worked on democratic transitions and security sector reform in West and southern Africa. She is co-author of UN Voices: The Struggle for Development and Social Justice (Indiana University Press, 2005). Her second book, on the first UN peacekeeping mission in the Congo, is under contract for 2007. Her research interests include wars and peacebuilding efforts in Central Africa, global-local conflict linkages, irregular armed groups, and the agenda-setting role of UN ideas. Her work has appeared in a number of books and academic journals, including the Journal of International Affairs, Journal of Asian and African Studies, Journal of Global Social Policy, and Forum for Development Studies. She has also consulted for a variety of multilateral and non-governmental actors, including UN DPKO, UNICEF, the Ford Foundation, and the International Peace Academy. Tatiana has been a Jennings Randolph Peace Scholar and is currently completing a Ph.D. dissertation on conflict networks and hybrid wars in Central Africa. She holds an M.Phil. from The CUNY Graduate Center, an M.A. from New York University, and a B.A. from Adelphi University. She received a Cértificat Pratique de français commercial et économique from the Chambre de Commerce et d'Industrie de Paris and training in elite interview methods from Columbia University.

Jim Della-Giacoma, Associate Director

Jim Della-Giacoma joined CPPF in October 2006. Previously, he was a senior advisor on global citizen participation programs at the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs in Washington, D.C. From 2000 to 2003, Jim helped set up NDI's office in Timor-Leste (formerly East Timor) managing programs related to civic participation, security sector reform, public opinion research, and the encouragement of peaceful political debate. In 1999 and 2000, he served in the Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General in the United Nations Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) as well as the mission's representative in Jakarta. Previously, he worked on the 1999 East Timor referendum in the UN Department of Political Affairs in New York. In addition to consulting with the Asia Foundation, World Bank and other UN agencies, Jim had a diverse career in journalism, including four years as a foreign correspondent in Jakarta with Agence France Presse and Reuters. He has written and worked on a number of public opinion research reports on post-conflict countries including Timor Lorosa'e is Our Nation, Carrying the People's Aspirations (with Alarico da Costa Ximenes) and Government Within Reach (on East Timor) as well as A Society in Transition (Afghanistan) and War is Behind Us Now (Liberia). He also wrote a short history of the UN's involvement in East Timor, Self-Determination Through Popular Consultation, and The Anti-Corruption Handbook (with Fred Wherry) for the World Bank. He holds an M.A. in Asian studies from the University of New South Wales and a B.Ec. in political economy from the University of Sydney.

Renata Segura, Program Officer

Renata Segura joined CPPF in June 2001. She has written on the contemporary relationship between decentralization and violence in her native Colombia, military reform, democratization, and institutional engineering. Renata has taught an undergraduate course, Political Violence in the 20th Century, at Parsons School of Design and served as Program Officer for the Janey Program in Latin American Studies at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research for several years. Prior to coming to the United States, she worked for the NGO and research center CINEP in Bogotá, where she was a researcher on several projects related to civil society, conflict and political crisis. In addition to her academic background, Renata worked for several years as a reporter for a nationally televised news program and a widely-read news magazine. Recent publications include "Ni Una Asamblea Más Sin Nosotros! Exclusion, Inclusion and the Politics of Constitution-Making in the Andes", co-written with Ana María Bejarano (Constellations, Vol. II, Issue 2, June 2004). Renata received her Ph.D. from the political science department, New School for Social Research; her dissertation focuses on constitution-making as a mechanism for inclusion and conflict resolution in Colombia and Ecuador. At the New School, she was a Louis Fischer Fellow, an Inter-American Foundation Fellow, and a Colfuturo grant recipient. She holds an M.A. in comparative politics from the New School for Social Research and a B.A. in political science from the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá.

Brittany Gleixner-Hayat, Program Assistant

Brittany joined CPPF in September 2008. A New York native, she earned her BA degree in Political Science and French from Hunter College as a member of the Thomas Hunter Honors Program. Prior to joining CPPF Brittany worked as a Fellowships Assistant at the SSRC. In 2006 she was awarded a Jeannette K. Watson Fellowship to conduct six months of research in rural India on girl child rights initiatives under the auspices of the M. Venkatarangaiya Foundation, a NGO that fights child labour by advocating for universalisation of education. In 2005, Brittany was the co-coordinator for an international conference on conflict prevention at the United Nations.

Amelia Hight, Program Assistant

Amelia joined CPPF in July, 2008. She earned a B.A. in International Relations and Politics from Scripps College. Previously she served as the Thailand Refugee Legal Aid Program Associate at Asylum Access. She has worked with CorpWatch and the ACLU of Northern California Field Department and currently volunteers for the Peacebuilding Initiative, a project of HPCR-International. A recipient of the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, she completed a year of independent travel and research on the politics behind genocide memorials and museums in Cambodia, Rwanda and Central Europe.

Mario Patiño, Program Assistant

Mario joined CPPF in July 2008. He earned his B.A. in International Studies with a concentration in development, Summa Cum Laude, from The City College of New York. In 2007 he was a recipient of the Dobrich New American Fellowship with The Colin Powell Center for Policy Studies. Prior to joining CPPF Mario worked in Sierra Leone with Fambul Tok, a grassroots peacebuilding initiative that promotes local practices of conflict resolution. Mario is fluent in Spanish and conversant in Krio.