Learn about dialogue peace sustainability through the Ignitor Community
We want to secure qualified candidates for our leadership programme for master’s students worldwide. We believe that dialogue and engagement are key to creating skillful leaders. The goal of this community is to empower young, visionary changemakers to use dialogue to effectively and proactively prevent conflicts, solve problems and ultimately build a better world. We believe that dialogue makes us better together.
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Meet our team
There are many different elements to creating a platform and a community, and each member of the Ignitor team is a vital part in creating the Ignitor Community for you. The Ignitor team consists of professionals and university students who are all working to create the best possible experience for Ignitor students. The journey to becoming an Ignitor Fellow is filled with learning and evolving, and we are excited for you to get to know all of the people working with the community and programme better.
Petter Sørum
Lead programme manager
Petter is the head of the Igntior Initiative working with both the development of the Ignitor Community platform and the programme of the Ignitor Fellowship.
The Ignitor Community
The Ignitor Community functions as an interactive application process for the Ignitor Fellowship as well as a space for students to gather from all around the world. Through this community we want to create a global network of changemakers and provide you with the tools to become better dialogue practitioners. Meet the team who built it!
Racha Yacef Hanine
Platform manager
Racha is in charge of the Ignitor platform. She leads the work on content production and the overall development of the platform.
Abdulrahman Mohammed
Content producer
Abdul is working to ensure that the Ignitor community is healthy and happy as well as producing content for you to engage with.
Finn Lippestad
Technical assistant
Finn is working to keep the platform up on it’s feet and explores new technical solutions to make sure the platform is up to date.
Gustav Marøy
Partner contact
Gustav ensures that the Ignitor Fellowship has strong partnerships with universities and enterprises, while also creating content for the platform.
Solvår Wium
Content producer
Solvår is producing content on the platform and is responsible for the Library the Ignitor platform offers.
Robyn E. Hardy
Copy editor
Robyn is the copy editor of the Ignitor platform. As a native English speaker, she quality checks all content that is published across the platform.
The Ignitor Fellowship
Each year 30 students from universities globally are admitted to the Ignitor Fellowship. They get to deepen their understanding of dialogue, peace and sustainability through our 18-month leadership programme put together by dialogue experts and our advisory board. The programme kicks off with a bonfire week in Oslo. You can read more about the programme itself here.
Meet the people responsible below! We are proud of our advisory board consisting of professionals from various fields with different perspectives on dialogue.
Peter Nixon
Fellowship curriculum lead
Programme curriculum development lead and chair of the Advisory Committee for the Ignitor Fellowship Programme. Peter specializes in dialogue, negotiation, and the leadership of change and has trained and advised leaders from over 600 of the world’s leading organisations in 60 countries around the world. He is a professor of dialogue and negotiation at the Asian Institute of Technology and founding course director for the Financial Controllership Programme at the Hong Kong Institute of CPAs. Peter is an FCPA and spent his early career auditing MNC’s with PwC in Montreal, Geneva, and Hong Kong. He is the author of five books including Negotiation: Mastering Business in Asia, Dialogue Gap, and The Business Developer’s Playbook.
Chro Borhan
Dialogue advisor
Chro Borhan is an advisor to the initiative and manages the programme for the bonfire week of the Ignitor Fellowship. She holds an MA in Administration and Organization Theory from the University of Bergen. She has previously worked with unaccompanied underage asylum seekers, the Norwegian Social Welfare, human rights projects in the Middle East, and as minority advisor at the Directorate of Integration and Diversity in Norway. Chro is a qualified conflict mediator with the Norwegian Mediation Service, team leader in Help increase the Peace Program (HIPP) and Alternatives to Violence (AVP), and works with dialogue facilitation. She is also the author of Those who listen, change the world written for the Nobel Peace Center.
Rev Dr Canon Trond Bakkevig
Advisory board member
Retired pastor and Dean of the Lutheran Church of Norway. He is an associate senior researcher at the Peace Research Institute of Oslo and has served as general secretary of the Church of Norway Council on Foreign Relations, personal advisor to the Norwegian Minister of Foreign Affairs, and member of the World Council of Churches’ Central Committee. He has facilitated dialogue between Christian, Muslim, and Jewish religious leaders in Israel and the Palestinian Territories. His doctoral thesis was on theology and nuclear arms. His writing includes the struggle against apartheid, political ethics, the relationship between church, religion, and society, the role of religious dialogue and cooperation between religions in relation to peace negotiations and peace processes.
Dr Ada Elisabeth Nissen
Advisory board member
Ada Nissen is a Norwegian historian with expertise in diplomatic history and Nordic foreign policy. Her research focuses among other things on identifying and understanding key pathways involved in peacemaking. Ada’s PhD analyses Norway’s role as international mediator, facilitator, and peace builder in Guatemala, the Middle East, Sudan, and Sri Lanka. She currently works at the University of Oslo as a post-doctoral researcher ahead of becoming associate professor at the same university.
Dr Ide Katrine Birkeland
Advisory board member
Academic Program Director of Educational Leadership and Associate Professor in Communication and Leadership at BI Norwegian Business School. Her PhD is in Organizational Psychology and Leadership, and she specializes in challenging conversations and genuine inquiry. Most of Ide’s teaching and research revolves around how leaders can engage in conversations that maximize knowledge sharing, minimize misunderstandings, and elicit bilateral trust. Furthermore, she employs psychology and neuroscience to understand the challenges of vulnerability in leadership. Ide serves as an advisor to The Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training and The Danish Agency for Public Finance and Management.
Dr Mona Fixdal
Advisory board member
Senior Associate Director, Princeton University. Mona provides leadership and strategic direction for Princeton’s online and blended learning program at the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning.
Mona was a Fulbright Fellow at Yale University and has a PhD in Political Science from the University of Oslo. She authored Just Peace: How Wars Should End, edited Ways Out of War: Peacemakers in the Middle East and Balkans and has written a number of chapters and articles on postwar justice and third-party mediation.
Knut Vollebaek
Advisory board member
Retired Norwegian diplomat and politician. He is currently Chairperson of the UN Advisory Board on Human Security and member of the International Commission on Missing Persons Board of Commissioners. He is former High Commissioner on National Minorities for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). He has also been Ambassador to the United States, Ambassador to Costa Rica, Foreign Minister of Norway, and Chairman-in-Office of the OSCE, Assistant Secretary General at the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Deputy Co-Chairman of the International Conference on the Former Yugoslavia, Primus inter pares of the Panel of Eminent Persons on Strengthening the Effectiveness of the OSCE, Chairman of the Council of the Baltic Sea States, and Chairman of the Barents Euro-Arctic Council.
Student ambassadors
The student ambassadors are a valuable link connecting the Nobel Peace Center and students around the world. Our ambassadors promote the opportunities of the platform to their fellow students at their respective universities and provide the Ignitor project with valuable insight on their feedback.
Challenge committees
Some of the main events of the Ignitor year are challenges. Touching upon various topics, we challenge our students to reflect and express themselves. In relation to the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, we arranged an essay challenge encouraging the students to reflect upon the topic of the Prize; freedom of speech. The video shows the challenge winner’s experience.
The challenges are meant to motivate students to immerse themselves in important topics related to the Nobel Peace Prize. Winner’s are offered unique opportunities, such as a covered travel to Oslo for a Nobel event. For each challenge, we partner up with prominent professionals to review the work of the students. This way we ensure that all submissions that the students have worked hard on are reviewed by professionals within their field. We are proud to present our committees below.
The challenge invites students to immerse themselves in the topic of the Nobel Peace Prize 2022 awarded to Ales Bialiatski, Memorial and Center for Civil Liberties through photography or writing.
It is the committee that reviews the submissions and decide on the winners – the lucky students that get invited to Oslo to attend the main events related to the Nobel Peace Prize.
Photography committee
Daniel Sannum Lauten
Committee member
Photojournalist Daniel Sannum Lauten (b. 1984), based in Oslo Norway, has been working as photojournalist since the age of 15. He started his career in the local newspaper Romerikes Blad. Since 2001 Daniel has worked with daily Dagbladet, in Norway’s biggest daily newspaper VG, and today TV 2 Norway. Daniel has also been photojournalist for AFP-Agence France Press in the Nordic Region. Today Lauten is the editorial director in the photo department of TV 2. He oversees the photo coverage of news, sports and feature stories.
Nanna Heitman
Committe member
Nanna Heitmann is a German-Russian award-winning documentary photographer who often works with the issue of isolation, be it physical, social or spiritual. She also deals with the very nature of how people react and interact with their environs. In 2021 she portrayed Dmitry Muratov in Novaya Gazeta for the Nobel Peace Prize Exhibition.
Anthony Wallace
Committee member
Anthony Wallace is an award-winning photojournalist based in Seoul, where he is Agence France-Presse’s chief photographer for North and South Korea. Prior to this post, he spent five years as the agency’s chief photographer in Hong Kong. He was an editor at AFP’s Asia-Pacific Photo Desk from 2012 to 2016.
Hannah Reyes
Committee member
Hannah Reyes Morales is a renowned photographer in the Philippines, who has documented the recent “War on Drugs” launched by President Rodrigo Duterte in Manila. For the Nobel Peace Prize exhibition 2021, she portrayed Maria Ressa and has made a photo series about the role of social media in the Philippines.
Essay committee
Salam Omer
Committee member
Media Consultant and Trainer on conflict-sensitive journalism in Iraq with years of service in intercultural and interfaith settings. Salam Omer is the editor-in-chief of KirkukNow media outlet in Iraq. With over 19 years of experience in the media and business sectors, Salam has been involved in various media, education, and business projects in Iraq, implemented with the support of the international community.
Natalie Jesionka
Committee member
Natalie has worked in international development and non-profits around the world. She writes about the intersection of social impact, community and her work has been featured in The Toronto Star, National Post, and Washington Post.
Reza Fakhari
Committee member
Vice President for Internationalization and Strategic Initiatives and Professor at St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights, New York. Previous chair of Amnesty International USA. Iranian based in New York City, US.
Vedant Kulkarni
Committee member
Vedant is an advisor at the UN. He has engaged with Prime Ministers and Presidents from around 20 Countries, and impacted high level forums at the UN on recommending solutions on critical issues like Sustainable Economic Development, Negotiations on Climate Policy, Ocean ecosystem restoration, and accessible Drinking Water.
Furthermore, as a global leader at a Civil Society Organization: MUN Impact, he has helped mobilize thousands of youth across 171 countries to bring about advancements in their societies and communities to eliminate poverty, hunger, pollution and to enhance youth involvement, partnerships, innovation and sustainable governance.
Since 2021, he has evolved as an author and Opinion Contributor with the ‘World Economic Forum’, ‘UN Today,’ and ‘Illuminem’ on shedding light on the path of a Sustainable, Transparent, and Efficient World Order.
In relation to the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize we arranged an essay challenge encouraging the students to reflect upon the topic of the Prize; freedom of speech. The winner of the challenge was invited to Oslo in December 2021 and had the opportunity to join the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, as well as meeting both Peace Prize Laureates, Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov. You can watch her experience here.
This is the committee that reviewed the submissions and selected the winner.
Kjersti Fløgstad
Committee member
Executive Director of the Nobel Peace Center. Norwegian, based in Oslo, Norway.
Reza Fakhari
Committee member
Vice President for Internationalization and Strategic Initiatives and Professor at St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights, New York. Previous chair of Amnesty International USA. Iranian based in New York City, US.
Ellisiv Myrva
Committee member
Student at the University of Oslo. Journalist at the University’s student journal Universitas, as well as the Norwegian newspaper Klassekampen. Norwegian based in Oslo, Norway.
Salam Omer
Committee member
Media Consultant and Trainer on conflict-sensitive journalism in Iraq with years of service in intercultural and interfaith settings. Salam Omer is the editor-in-chief of KirkukNow media outlet in Iraq. With over 19 years of experience in the media and business sectors, Salam has been involved in various media, education, and business projects in Iraq, implemented with the support of the international community.
Natalie Jesionka
Committee member
Natalie has worked in international development and non-profits around the world. She writes about the intersection of social impact, community and her work has been featured in The Toronto Star, National Post, and Washington Post.
Peter Nixon
Committee member
Programme manager of the Ignitor Fellowship. Creator of Potential Dialogue System. Peter’s tagline, “The Solution is in the Dialogue” is motivated by the many social, economic, and environmental problems we see today.