Dr Joana Amaral

About

Dr. Joana Amaral is the Project Manager for the Resistance and Liberation Movements (RLMs) Negotiation Support project at the Berghof Foundation. She holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of Kent, United Kingdom, and was previously a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Conflict Studies at the University of Marburg, Germany, leading a project funded by the German Foundation for Peace Research. Her work in peace processes has focused on the study of peace negotiations and mediation, particularly in Colombia, Northern Ireland, Cyprus and Sierra Leone. During the course of her work, she has engaged with numerous negotiators, stakeholders and civil society activists in several peace processes and has worked and collaborated with different peace institutions and NGOs around the globe, such as the United Nations University Policy Center, the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) in Cyprus, the German-Colombian Peace Institute CAPAZ in Bogota, and The Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace Security and Justice at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland.

The author of Making Peace with Referendums: Cyprus and Northern Ireland (Syracuse University Press: New York, 2019), her publications focus on several issues related to peace negotiations, such as public communication, peace referendums, the inclusion of armed and non-armed opposition movements in peace negotiations, civil society inclusion, and the use of sanctions with mediation.