Elizabeth Sellwood is non-resident fellow at the Center on International Cooperation. She is based in Beirut, Lebanon, and has worked for several years in the Middle East region. She was Special Assistant to the United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process from 2005-07, and prior to this she worked for the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the occupied Palestinian territory. She has also worked closely with the Palestinian Authority and international donors, and in 2007 she was head of the Aid Coordination Secretariat in Ramallah.

Elizabeth has also worked on UN reform issues, including the use of information in peacekeeping operations, practices of political analysis in the UN, internal management issues, and implementation of the Secretary-General’s High Level Panel recommendations. She co-founded and ran a “low level panel” of UN staff members and others, which contributed analysis to the UN reform team led by the Deputy Secretary-General in 2005.

Between 2001-03 Elizabeth was an adviser to the Foreign Affairs Committee in the UK House of Commons. She also worked for Oxfam in the Balkans in the aftermath of the Kosovo war, and in 1995-99 held research positions at Chatham House and Cambridge University.

Selected publications:

• The Role of the United Nations in Middle East Conflict Prevention, Center on International Cooperation, New York University, 2009
• Chapter on Middle East peacekeeping operations in the Annual Review of Global Peacekeeping Operations, New York University, 2009
• Informing the United Nations: The Practice of Analysis in the Department of Political Affairs, December 2002;
• ‘Post conflict reconstruction in South Eastern Europe’ in Enhancing the EU’s response to violent conflict, Brussels: ISIS-Europe, 2001;
• Knowledge and multilateral interventions: the UN’s experience in Cambodia and Bosnia-Herzegovina (with Thant Myint-U), London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 2000;
• ‘Transnational democracy’ (with G Prins) in D Held et al (eds), Re-imagining political community, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998

Return to Staff Index.