The Leadership Project has four major components:

1. A standing Working Group on Preventing and Rebuilding Failed States
   meets periodically to distill leading lessons from case studies in internationally-facilitated peace processes and high-level post-conflict interventions. Composed of distinguished diplomats, policymakers, trainers, and academic specialists—each with expertise in the political environment of states in crisis—the objective of the Working Group is to combine the skill-sets of diplomats and organizational specialists to yield a comprehensive and integrated understanding of the most effective ways to build cohesive states within divided societies.
   
   
2. The Leadership Project hosts thematic meetings, through which academics, trainers, diplomatic practitioners, and policymakers explore the multiple facets of conflict transformation. The Leadership Project pays special attention to the role of women, youth, civil society institutions, United Nations reform, and the international community in achieving sustainable peace. The Leadership Project’s public events serve to bring the issues of leadership and the social-psychological dimensions of peacebuilding and conflict resolution into the American policy arena.
   
   
3. The applied dimension of the Leadership Project features an ongoing series of workshops that seek to strengthen the facilitation capacities of both trainers and diplomatic practitioners. The workshops are designed to encourage effective collaboration in building state capacity and post-conflict reconstruction; and to expand the cadre of trainers available for deployment to states in crisis or societies engaged in post-conflict reconstruction.
   
   
4. The Leadership Project works closely with governments and international organizations to plan and implement country specific leadership training interventions. The success of the Burundi Leadership Training Program (BLTP), launched in war-torn Burundi in late 2002 by the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Africa Program, has led to the introduction of innovative capacity-building initiatives in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Liberia, and to broad international interest in the extension of this work to divided societies in other regions.
   
   These interventions are composed of training in interest-based negotiations, communication, mediation, conflict analysis, strategic planning, and the management of organizational change. Simulations and interactive exercises build a climate of trust, establish effective communication, and enable national and local leaders drawn from all social sectors to collaborate effectively across lines of ethnic or political division to prevent violent conflict, to reconstruct their societies, and to build cohesive, effective state institutions.

Project on Leadership and Building State Capacity
Woodrow Wilson Center
One Woodrow Wilson Plaza
1300 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20004-3027
Email: leadership@wilsoncenter.org
Tel: 202/691-4187