Sanam Naraghi-Anderlini

Sanam Naraghi-Anderlini is the Co-founder and Executive Director of ICAN. For over two decades she has been a leading international peace strategist. In 2000, she was among the civil society drafters of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security. In 2011, Ms. Naraghi-Anderlini was the first Senior Expert on Gender and Inclusion on the UN’s Mediation Standby Team. She provides guidance and training to senior personnel in UN agencies, governments and NGOs worldwide, and has worked in conflict affected countries globally, including leading assessments in Maoist cantonments in Nepal.

Between 2002 and 2005, as Director of the Women Waging Peace Policy Commission, Sanam led ground breaking field research on women’s contributions to conflict prevention, security and peacemaking in 12 countries. Between 2008-2010 she led UNDP’s 10-country action research on men in crisis settings. She has served on the Advisory Board of the UN Democracy Fund (UNDEF), and was appointed to the Civil Society Advisory Group (CSAG) on Resolution 1325, chaired by Mary Robinson in 2010. Since 2013, she has served in the Working Group on Gender and Inclusion of the Sustainable Development Network.

Ms. Naraghi-Anderlini is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, and between 2004-15 she was Research Associate and Senior Fellow at the MIT Center for International Studies. She has published extensively on peace and security issues, including Women building peace: What they do, why it matters (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2007). She was the 2014 recipient of the UN Association of the National Capital Area Perdita Huston Award for human rights and the 2016 Greeley Peace Scholar at the University of Massachusetts. Ms. Naraghi-Anderlini holds an M.Phil in Social Anthropology from Cambridge University. Iranian by birth, she is a UK citizen, and has twin daughters.