Carissa Western

Carissa Western is a PhD candidate at S-CAR. After earning her M.A. in Peace and Justice from the Joan B. Kroc Institute of Peace and Justice in 2010, she worked in Kenya as a project coordinator for Third World Tech, where she assisted in the development of alternative livelihood and conflict aversion programs for nomadic pastoralist communities in the Southern Rift Valley. She later worked for the Carter Center’s Conflict Resolution Program, implementing Access to Justice programs in rural Liberia, and as research fellow for the Consensus Building Institute, where she worked on promoting gender sensitivity in international development. For the past five years Carissa has worked as a dispute resolution consultant for CAO, the Independent Accountability Mechanism for the private sector arms of the World Bank Group. Carissa supports CAO’s dispute resolution team and has been assisting in the development of CAO’s mediator capacity building and training program for mediators in the community-company conflict space.