Berkley Center

Mohammed Badran is a co-founder of Syrian Volunteers in the Netherlands, an NGO with more than 600 volunteers helping older people with household tasks, caring for disabled children, tending public gardens, and bringing new ideas by and for newcomers. A Damascus native, when the war started in Syria he was studying interior design at Damascus University; he began to receive threats because of his humanitarian work with Syria Trust and UNHCR, eventually forcing him to leave. Badran's journey took him between the Middle East and West Africa, before he finally arrived in the Netherlands in 2013. He resumed his studies in cultural anthropology and development at the Free University in Amsterdam. As he gained a Dutch perspective on Europe’s struggle to support the growing number of Syrians and other nationalities fleeing war, he joined with friends to form Syrian Volunteers in the Netherlands. Badran was a participant in the International Higher Education Interfaith Leadership Forum.

Radia Bakkouch is the president of Coexister in France, an interfaith movement gathering youth of different faiths who are aged 15 to 35 years old. She is passionate about building bridges between communities, interreligious dialogue and actions, and peace education. Bakkouch previously interned for an NGO focused on Jewish-Muslim relations through education. She was a participant in the International Higher Education Interfaith Leadership Forum. Bakkouch graduated with a degree in international public management from the Paris School of International Affairs in Sciences Po Paris, where she specialized in Middle East studies and armed conflict.

Ertugrul Gokcekuyu is the vice president of the executive board of the Islamic University of Rotterdam, where he also teaches, and is a member of a research team studying human rights in the Netherlands. In the past, he was a member of the Interfaith Dialogue Program in the Netherlands, a researcher for the Dutch parliament studying the effects of public affairs and communications in the political arena, a lobbyist, and a communications specialist. He has also had his own company providing educational skills to minorities in the Netherlands. He was a participant in the International Higher Education Interfaith Leadership Forum. Gokcekuyu studied at the International School of The Hague and at the University of Leiden.

Amineh Hoti is the executive director of the Centre for Dialogue and Action. She was the co-founder of the first Centre for the Study of Muslim-Jewish Relations in Cambridge and of Dialogue and Action at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. She has conducted ethnographic field research and lectured across Europe, America, and the Muslim world. She has also worked on designing innovative courses and peacebuilding textbooks for students and teacher training in the United Kingdom and in Pakistan. She wrote Sorrow and Joy among Muslim Women: The Pukhtuns of Northern Pakistan (2008), which was nominated for the 2007 Kiriyama Prize. Hoti was a participant in the International Higher Education Interfaith Leadership Forum. She received her Ph.D. in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge.

Rabbi Dr. Daniel Roth is the director of the Religious Peace Initiative at Mosaica and a faculty member at Bar-Ilan University’s Graduate Program for Conflict Management, Resolution, and Negotiation and at Tel Aviv University’s International Program in Conflict Resolution and Mediation. He is the author of Third-Party Peacemakers in Judaism: Text, Theory, and Practice (2021).

Brette Steele serves as acting deputy director of the Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) Task Force at the U.S. Department of Justice. From 2013 to 2016, Steele served as senior counsel to the deputy attorney general and coordinated the Department of Justice’s efforts to build community resilience against violent extremism. Steele also chaired the Department of Justice Arab- and Muslim-American Engagement Advisory Committee and vice-chaired the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee on the Employment of People with Disabilities. Before joining the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, she coordinated departmental CVE policy through the Office of Legal Policy. Steele graduated with a B.A. from University of California, Berkeley, and a J.D. from the UCLA School of Law.

Priyankar Upadhyaya serves as the UNESCO Chair for Peace and Intercultural Understanding at Banaras Hindu University, where he has taught international relations and peace studies for over three decades. Upadhyaya also lectures at India's Foreign Service Institute, Naval War Academy, and National Defence College. He occasionally serves as a subject expert at news channels such as Star News and BBC. Upadhyaya has served as senior fellow at the Peace Research Institute Oslo and as resource person for the UN University of Peace and the Henry L. Stimson Center, as well as the chair of Indian studies at Dublin City University. He has served in various committees of the Indian government, including the Civil Service Examination Reform Committee and the National Mission on Education. Upadhyaya has publications in journals and books from Oxford University Press, Melbourne University Publishing, Cambridge University Press, Sage, Ashgate, and Routledge. He was a participant in the International Higher Education Interfaith Leadership Forum.