Melanie Cohen Greenberg is President and CEO of the Alliance for Peacebuilding. Before joining the AfP, she was the President and Founder of the Cypress Fund for Peace and Security, a foundation making grants in the areas of peacebuilding and nuclear nonproliferation. From 2003 to 2004, she was a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, focusing on issues of justice in post-conflict peacebuilding. From 2000 to 2002, Melanie was director of the Conflict Resolution Program at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. She previously served as associate director of the Stanford Center for International Security and Cooperation and deputy director of the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation.
In her work on international conflict resolution, Melanie has helped design and facilitate public peace processes in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, and the Caucasus. She has taught advanced courses in international conflict resolution, multi-party conflict resolution, and negotiation at Stanford Law School and Georgetown University Law Center and is currently an adjunct faculty member at the Elliott School of George Washington University. She was lead editor and chapter author of the volume Words over War: Mediation and Arbitration to Prevent Deadly Conflict (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).
Melanie is a frequent writer, lecturer, teacher, and trainer in a broad range of areas related to international law, international security, and peacebuilding. In her training, she has led courses for Congressional staff, scientists at the National Institutes of Health, international lawyers, business executives, and graduate students from around the world. Recently, she helped facilitate government discussions on international legal protections for minorities in Tanzania and developed a set of training materials for government groups working on reconciliation in Kenya (both with the Public International Law and Policy Group).
Before beginning her work in international peacebuilding, Melanie practiced as a bankruptcy lawyer at Weil, Gotshal & Manges in Houston. She is a member of the International Advisory Board of the United States Institute of Peace and is on the board of the Institute of World Affairs. She served as board chair of Women in International Security and the Alliance for Peacebuilding and has sat on the boards of Dispute Resolution Magazine, Partners for Democratic Change, and the Lawyers Alliance for World Security. Melanie holds an AB from Harvard and a JD from Stanford Law School. She lives in Washington, DC with her husband and two teenagers.
Source: Alliance for Peacebuilding
