Dr. Catherine Barnes has worked for conflict transformation and social justice for more than thirty years. She is an affiliate faculty member of the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University and a freelance facilitator, trainer and researcher. Catherine has extensive experience facilitating conversations on challenging topics, in locations ranging from the UN General Assembly Hall to village gathering places. She is increasingly focused on designing whole-of-system deliberative dialogue processes and training other practitioners in these skills.

Examples of recent processes she has helped to design and facilitate range from workshops for the Afghan High Peace Council, the Mennonite Church USA’s Future Church Summit, a multi-stakeholder process to develop a vision for the Shenandoah River Watershed, a sustained public dialogue for ‘culture war’ conflict in a Virginia public school system, and ongoing bridge building and community dialogue for racial healing in her home town in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. She finds that underlying process design principles can span these widely divergent contexts.

As teacher, trainer, researcher, policy advocate and consultant, she has worked with civil society activists, diplomats and politicians, and armed groups in more than 30 countries to support their capacities for preventing violence and using conflict as an opportunity for addressing the underlying systems giving rise to grievance.

She has written widely on peace processes, civil society roles in peacebuilding, and on issues related to statebuilding, conflict prevention, genocide and minority rights. She is currently writing a book entitled: Ending Our Addiction to Coercion: Understanding Conflict Habituated Systems and How to Transform Them.

Catherine holds a doctorate in Conflict Analysis and Resolution from George Mason University. She has worked with numerous peacebuilding and human rights organizations, including Conciliation Resources and Minority Rights Group International.

She now lives in Staunton Virginia with her husband and son, and extended family and friends, with whom she loves to garden, to cook, to make music and to retreat into the wilds of the surrounding mountains.