A highly qualified team

John Bell has worked for over 25 years on Middle East politics, policy development and mediation. Today, he is Director and Co-Founder of The Conciliators Guild, an organization dedicated to excellence in the craft of diplomacy, and to highlighting the role of critical underlying motivations in political decision-making. Mr. Bell is also Director of the Middle East and Mediterranean Programme at the Toledo International Centre for Peace (CITpax) in Madrid, a mediation and Track II organization, and advisor with Geopolitical Advisory Services (UK) on Yemen. He was also formerly the Middle East Director for Search for Common Ground.

He is also a former United Nations and Canadian diplomat who served as a political officer at Canada’s embassy in Cairo, a member of Canada’s delegation to the Refugee Working Group in the peace process of the 1990s, Political Advisor to the Personal Representative of the Secretary-General of the United Nations for southern Lebanon (2000-2001), advisor to the Canadian Government during the Iraq crisis in 2002-03, and consultant to International Crisis Group on developments in Jerusalem in 2004. 

Mr. Bell is also a founding member of the “Jerusalem Old City Initiative” (University of Windsor), an effort to find creative options for this contentious issue. Mr. Bell is fluent in English, Arabic and French, and currently resides near Oxford in the United Kingdom.