FCT DIRECTOR
Padraig O’MALLEY is the founding Director of the FCT with over 30 years experience specialising in the complications of divided societies, such as Northern Ireland, South Africa and most recently Iraq. He has written extensively on these subjects and has been actively involved in promoting dialogue among representatives of all factions.
The premise that underlies O’Malley’s work is simple: people from divided societies are in the best position to help people in other divided societies; that former protagonists, often former purveyors of violence and death who abandoned violence to resolve their differences, are best equipped to share their often tentative and difficult journeys to recognising the necessity to abandon violence as the instrument to achieve their political aims and open the gateways to recovery, reconstruction, and reconciliation.
Padraig O’Malley is the John Joseph Moakley Chair of Peace and Reconciliation at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and author of a number of prize winning books on Northern Ireland including:The Uncivil Wars: Ireland Today (1983) and Biting at the Grave (1990); South Africa: Shades of Difference (2006); and The Middle East: What the Future Tells Us; forthcoming (2012).
Professor O’Malley has monitored elections in South Africa, Mozambique, and the Philippines on behalf of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs. He is also a frequent contributor to The Boston Globe. O’Malley was born in Dublin. He was educated at University College, Dublin, and at Yale, Tufts and Harvard universities.