Democratic Deliberation in Deeply Divided Societies:: From Conflict to Common Ground

Juan E. Ugarriza earned his PhD from the Institute of Political Science at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Previously, he received an MA in history at the University of North Carolina, United States. His areas of academic interest are the deepening of democracy in contexts of conflict and the role of ideology in the twenty-first century. His work has been published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, the International Journal of Conflict Management and the Journal of Public Deliberation. Currently, he is a faculty professor and researcher at El Rosario University (Bogota) and leads a team of researchers exploring the use of deliberative practices as a political reconciliation strategy in postconflict Colombia.

Didier Caluwaerts is a Democracy fellow at the Ash Center of the Harvard Kennedy School and a postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. His research focuses on deliberative and participatory democracy in ethnically divided societies, and his work has been published in the European Political Science Review and the Journal of Public Deliberation.