Dr. Béatrice Pouligny is the founder and co-director of Rewiring the Brain for Peace: Bridging Neuroscience, Spirituality and Peacebuilding. She bridges the fields of political science, peacebuilding and neuroscience in her experience as an academic at the highest levels of the political science community, as a human rights and peacebuilding practitioner with 30 years of field experience in more than 30 conflicts around the world (in Central and South America, Haiti, Africa, Asia, the Balkans and the Middle East), and in her training and ongoing practice as a shamanic healer and mindfulness meditation teacher, collaborating with neuro-pshychologists and integrating the results of ongoing research into her healing work. Béatrice also brings strong knowledge of the literature on peacebuilding, trauma, resilience and spirituality, as well as her expertise in developing case studies and research agendas across disciplines, and the theory-practice divide. From 2000 to 2009, she developed and led an international and inter-disciplinary research-action program called “Re-imagining Peace” (seven countries on four continents) which addressed the individual and collective traumatic consequences of war and mass crimes, outlining culture-based resilience processes. Since then, her work has focused on individual and societal resilience capacities in the aftermath of violence. She has contributed to the first European Report on Development which focused on fragility (2009) and is the author of a report on “Violence, Trauma and Resilience” as part of the World Bank flagship study on “Societal Dynamics and Fragility” (2012); it is the first comprehensive and systematic effort to articulate the individual traumas and their collective dimensions in violent and post-violent contexts. She has designed and led training programs on this subject for different intergovernmental and governmental agencies as well as local networks of community leaders (most recently in Libya and Syria).

She holds a doctorate in political science from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po/International Relations). She is the winner of many awards, including two consecutive Fulbright Commission awards and a former grantee of different public and private foundations in North America and Europe. She is the author of numerous reports, articles and contributions (in French, English, Spanish and Dutch) as well as two main books: Peace Operations Seen from Below: UN Missions and Local People, London: Hurst / Bloomfield (CT): Kumarian Press, 2006 (Ils nous avaient promis la paix : ONU et populations locales, Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2004) as well as After Mass Crime: Rebuilding States and Communities, Tokyo/New York/Paris: United Nations University Press, 2007. She is fluent in French, English, Spanish and Haitian Creole and speaks a number of local languages.