About Opening Up: A Conflict Transformation Podcast
Opening Up is a podcast series that features faculty, staff, students, and community members engaged in the Conflict Transformation (CT) Collaborative at Middlebury. Learn more at our website: https://www.middlebury.edu/conflict-transformation
Mediator Julian Portilla shares personal and professional insights on mediation and conflict transformation, emphasizing perspective-taking, de-escalation, and the value of understanding conflict in this interview.
19 May 2025
From Post-Conflict Reconstruction to Democratic Dialogues
In this episode, we talk international post-conflict reconstruction, foreign aid, and domestic public policy dialogue with Dr. Naazneen Barma, a member of the External Advisory Board of the CT Collaborative.
Barma is the founding Director of the Doug and Mary Scrivner Institute of Public Policy at the University of Denver (DU) and is a professor in political science at the Korbel School of International Studies at DU. She has worked at the World Bank, taught at the Naval Postgraduate School, and was a co-founder of Bridging the Gap (https://bridgingthegapproject.org/), which brings scholarly research to global public policy.
We mention two of Naaz’s publications in our conversation:
The Peacebuilding Puzzle: Political Order in Post-Conflict States (2017) (link at Cambridge University Press)
Naazneen Barma, Naomi Levy, and Jessica Piombo. 2020. "The Impact of Aid Dynamics on State Effectiveness and Legitimacy." Studies in Comparative International Development 55 (2), June 2020: 184-203.
Learn about the members of the CT External Advisory Board at our website here: https://www.middlebury.edu/conflict-transformation/who-we-are#external-advisory-board
5 May 2025
Practicing Negotiation: Tools for Skill-Building
In this episode, we bring you a panel discussion with two practiced negotiators. In January, the CT Collaborative and MiddCORE each planned to bring an expert in to help build student skills - and so we decided to put our two visitors in conversation with one another.
Morgan Gaskin Thomas is Managing Director and Americas Lead for Accenture’s Resolution Excellence Center. She has previously served as an adjunct professor at South Texas College of Law. She has her undergraduate degree in philosophy from Southern Methodist University and her JD from Cornell.
Sarah Federman is associate professor of conflict resolution at the University of San Diego and author of the book Transformative Negotiation. She spent a decade as an international executive before changing careers to focus on corporate accountability, mass violence, and peacebuilding.
Learn more about MiddCORE and about our experts at the links below.
https://www.middlebury.edu/middcore
https://www.linkedin.com/in/morgan-gaskin-thomas/
https://sarahfederman.com/
Reach and audience
Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.
Apple Podcasts (US)
5.0 / 5
4 ratings
Podcast Authority Score: 39 / 100
A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.
Quality
50
Social presence
0
YouTube
0
Engagement
68
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