People

Hiba Qasas

Palestine

PeaceTalks_Hiba Qasas

Biography

Ms. Hiba Qasas is a development leader, peacebuilder and changemaker, who is the Head of Secretariat of the Principles for Peace Initiative, a collective effort to develop a new set of principles, standards, and norms to better enable national and international actors to craft more effective and inclusive approaches to peace. Hosted at Interpeace, the Secretariat is the operational arm of the International Commission on Inclusive Peace.

Ms. Qasas dedicated 16 years of service at the United Nations with a focus on crisis countries. Ms Qasas has been working passionately to advance women’s rights and gender equality across various regions worldwide. She served as the Chief of the Crisis Prevention and Response Office in Geneva, as the UN Women Country Representative in Iraq, and as the Head of the Middle East and North Africa Section at Headquarters in New York. Ms. Qasas also worked at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) at the country and HQ levels and as part of the Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Response. Before joining the UN, Ms Qasas worked for a Palestinian NGO with a focus on micro finance and rural development.

Ms. Qasas is an executive member of the IDEAL Society, a leadership initiative supported by the University of Sydney and Harvard University, and is a visiting lecturer at the University of Sydney and at the European School for Advanced Studies in International Development.

Ms Qasas is a Palestinian national and holds a Master of Sciences in International Cooperation for Development from the European School for Advanced Studies, University of Pavia, Italy.

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“We believe that peace is more than political peace. We believe that peace is more than the absence of violence and we believe it’s rooted both in social foundations and national responsibility.”

Hiba Qasas