Padraig O'Malley

Padraig O’Malley is the John Joseph Moakley Distinguished Professor of Peace and Reconciliation at the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies of UMass Boston. 

There are few people who over thirty years have had a more intricate and direct relationship with the Institute for Global Leadership.

Padraig is an award-winning facilitator and convener, author and expert, on democratic transitions and divided societies, with special expertise on Northern Ireland, South Africa, Iraq, and Israel. His unique fifteen-year documentation of the transition from Apartheid to democracy in South Africa, “The Heart of Hope,” is available at through the website of the Nelson Mandela Foundation.

During the very first EPIIC colloquium, on International Terrorism, I assigned Padraig’s 1983 book The Uncivil Wars: Ireland Today, which I admired, and invited to speak at our symposium.

Since, we became involved in many of his research projects and publications, and he in numerous Institute projects. 

Padraig is the founding editor of the New England Journal of Public Policy, a publication of the McCormack Graduate School. Several Journal volumes were collaborations with our Institute – including a ceremonial bound set of journals WAR 20/20, with NEJPP and EPIIC celebrating both of our twenty-year anniversaries. Many of the articles were derived from presentations given at the EPIIC 2003 Sovereignty and Intervention symposium, and the EPIIC 2004 Dilemmas of Empire and Nation building.

On that occasion, Padraig said of us: The EPIIC program is truly an inspirational educational achievement. The students who participate in it are provided with the tools to play active roles in their communities, whether at the local, national or global level. Its graduates can be found in Kosovo, Iraq, Sri Lanka – wherever there is the need for man to reach out to his fellow man.”

Our Institute’s our first immersive experiential research effort occurred in 1986, the first of several thousand, when Padraig took one of our EPIIC International Terrorism symposium program chairs to Belfast to interview the families of the IRA hunger strikers seeking status as political, and not criminal, prisoners. He was acknowledged in O’Malley’s book Biting at the Grave: The Irish Hunger Strikes and the Politics of Despair, a New York Book Review Top 10 Book of 1990. 

When Padraig published Sticks and Stones: Living with Uncertain Wars in 2006, many of the chapters were contributed by EPIIC participants – and he acknowledged EPIIC this way: for it is certainly through their long-term acquaintance and friendship with many of our authors that we were able to proceed. Among them were Jonathan Moore, Brian Urquhart, Michael Glennon, Cornelio Sommaruga, Stanley Heginbotham, Romeo Dallaire, Robert Jackson, Gwyn Prins, Alfred McCoy, and John Shattuck.

His Shades of Difference: Mac Maharaj & the Struggle for South Africa (with a 15,000 word introduction by Nelson Mandela) came alive when together we brought Mac to discourse with Hentjie Botha, a Durban South Africa police torturer, at the EPIIC Politics of Fear symposium in 2006. It was an extraordinary confrontation of reconciliation, as Mac was identified by Mandela in his forward as the most tortured man in the Anti-Apartheid struggle.

Deliberate, thoughtful, and determined in his efforts over many years, Padraig is an extraordinary courageous facilitator/convener. 

From the mid 1970’s onwards, he brought significant leaders across all sectarian lines, including Irish paramilitaries and British Ministers, and facilitated the landmark Anglo-Irish Agreement, giving the Republic of Ireland a say in how Northern Ireland was to be administered. He also brought senior Irish figures and members of the African National Congress (ANC) constitutional committee to Boston to discuss “The Role of a Bill of Rights in a Divided Society.” 

Padraig carefully established connections between key individuals from divided societies deep in conflict, relationships which continued to result in follow-up conferences in each of their jurisdictions. 

He brought chief negotiators Cyril Ramaphosa (ANC) and Roelf Meyer (former National Party’s Apartheid government), who had successfully concluded a historic settlement in South Africa (SA) two years earlier, to Northern Ireland to meet with leaders of all political parties, including leading members of the paramilitary militias, helping to facilitate the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 and bring peace to Northern Ireland.

In 2007, I asked Padraig to head our Institute’s track-two diplomatic project Iraq: Moving Forward, which we constructed with The Project on Justice in Times of Transition and ultimately with the Crisis Management Initiative (an NGO established by former president of Finland and Nobel Prize winner Martti Ahtisaari). Beginning at Tufts with a major multi-day forum including representatives from Bosnia, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, and South Africa, we secured the confidence of senior Iraqi officials, including Iraqi National Security advisors, and a future President of Iraq. We convened in Helsinki, bringing together Iraqi officials and chief negotiators from Northern Ireland and South Africa to share experiences of conflict and the processes of peace negotiations and reconciliation. 

Participants included 16 senior officials from all Sunni and Shia parties, the Minister of National Reconciliation Akram al Hakim, former chief of staff of the IRA Martin McGuinness, and Nelson Mandela’s chief negotiator, Cyril Ramaphosa. The result was an extraordinary agreement – The Helsinki Principles - which was submitted to Iraqi political leaders for ratification. Padraig then orchestrated a follow up conference in Helsinki attended by 37 of the most senior leaders in Iraq, representing all political factions, parties, and tribal sheikhs, including the Awakening 5 Councils. “The Helsinki II Conference on Iraq,” the product of six weeks of intensive work in Iraq facilitating the final framework for future inclusive negotiations, was signed by all 37 political leaders and tribal sheikhs. Its principles, outlining the code of political behavior for participation in future negotiations, as well 15 implementation mechanisms to ensure compliance, were announced in Baghdad on July 5, 2008. Throughout, Institute students were engaged in creating forums, background research, policy papers, and traveling to Helsinki and Iraq to facilitate and record the proceedings.

Padraig was always innovative. In April of 2009, following the EPIIC Global Cities symposium,  he worked with our students to convene a three-day conference, Forum for Cities in Transition from Conflict, at UMass Boston. Participants included representatives from four participating cities: Derry and Londonderry, Northern Ireland; Mitrovica, Kosovo; Nicosia, Cyprus; and Kirkuk, Iraq. This program grew to include Mostar, Beirut, Jerusalem and Haifa, Ramallah, Mitte, Kaduna, Tripoli, and Baghdad. The concerns discussed included ways to assist each other in areas such as policing, water infrastructure, and business development, and talks on power sharing among the political parties and the public sector.

Padraig has garnered many significant awards, including the Peacemaker’s Award of Association of Dispute Resolution, and the Liberal International Freedom Prize of the European Union, and is the protagonist of the documentary film on his life, The Peacemaker. 

We have talked, conferred and collaborated innumerable times over the years. At his last formal presentation for the Institute, on his prescient book, The Two-State Delusion: Israel and Palestine – A Tale of Two Narratives, we presented him with our Dr. Jean Mayer Award. 

Given this intimate background, I asked Padraig O’Malley to present at our 30th Anniversary Gala.