Our Experts Close-Up
Michel Noureddine Kassa
Through his Initiative pour un leadership cohésif, Michel Noureddine Kassa works as a catalyst for cohesion-building processes among influential Congolese actors, from the capital to the grassroots. This process aims to help address the country’s most entrenched crises: profound divisions and violent conflict based on rivalry, mistrust and sharply divergent perspectives.
The path to peace: negotiation < - > facilitation < - > mediation < - > arbitrage
Political Dialogue – Good offices / politics of good offices – Dialogue design and facilitation
Conflict resolution: the dilemma between “linguistic relativity” and “cultural relativism”
Conflict Assessment – Dialogue design and facilitation
Post-conflict Prevention: Remembrance or “Dealing with the Past”
Dealing with the Past – Stabilization – Community Violence Reduction – Transitional justice
“Fragile states”: between “peace” and “absence of war”
Conflict assessment – Political Analysis – Program design and facilitation
Michel Noureddine Kassa
Through his Initiative pour un leadership cohésif, Michel Noureddine Kassa works as a catalyst for cohesion-building processes among influential Congolese actors, from the capital to the grassroots. This process aims to help address the country’s most entrenched crises: profound divisions and violent conflict based on rivalry, mistrust and sharply divergent perspectives.
The path to peace: negotiation < - > facilitation < - > mediation < - > arbitrage
Political Dialogue – Good offices / politics of good offices – Dialogue design and facilitation
Conflict resolution: the dilemma between “linguistic relativity” and “cultural relativism”
Conflict Assessment – Dialogue design and facilitation
Post-conflict Prevention: Remembrance or “Dealing with the Past”
Dealing with the Past – Stabilization – Community Violence Reduction – Transitional justice
“Fragile states”: between “peace” and “absence of war”
Conflict assessment – Political Analysis – Program design and facilitation
Michel in his own words
My preferred penname is « Am I fair? »
I was conceived and delivered during the Algerian war of independence, by an Algerian metal worker and a French Post office employee, both opposed to colonial injustice – and later on, to post-independence oppression and dogmatism. Born in France, I spent my childhood in Algiers, learning the beauty of people’s self-determination and transcontinental fraternity, while quickly growing disturbed by the hiatus between false rhetoric, actual manipulations and genuine aspirations. As a student, I satisfied my gourmandise for hybrid educations: neo-Marxist reading of international economy in the morning at Parix X – Nanterre, intricacies of international relations at Sciences-Po Paris in the afternoon.
Realising that “real life” economy had taken an unpleasant turn towards financial performances, casting social justice ideals as backward thinking, I opted to search the fine line between empathy and complacency/weakness while vowing to help the world’s most destitute and abused, in Western Pakistan, Malawi or Haiti… As head of MSF in South Africa, my advocacy for a fair treatment of Mozambican war refugees not only guided me to two exceptional interlocutors – de Clerk and Mandela – but also gave me some clue about cohesive leadership as a constructive way out of national suicides.
In 1995, I headed to Zaïre and the UN, tasked to set up a coordination support office, which became OCHA DRC as the people of Zaïre/DRC faced the world’s direst humanitarian crises (from Ebola to volcano eruption to mass crimes – especially in war-torn Bunia in Ituri, in 2003).
Through those years of intense investment in “active advocacy” for access to, and protection of, civilians, I developed a habit of overcoming my frustrations over mechanical humanitarianism by “imposing” initiatives of national unity to all the war protagonists (reopening of air, river and rail, transfer of students and schools exams across the frontline). This is how, after two years at OCHA Geneva in charge of the Africa section, I quit the UN to go further in my quest for a fine line between humanitarian goodwill and the need to push key protagonists of a country in crisis – DR Congo – address their own responsibilities, rivalries and mistrust, and develop a shared desire to “make their country prettier than before” as the anthem promises. In the course of this endeavour, I learned much from empathetic figures such as Howard Wolpe (Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars), Alain Lempereur, Liz McClintock, Eric Blanchot, Aurélien Colson, and my road crossed that of Katharina Vogeli whose notion of Human security and common good further refined my practice of cohesive leadership.
It’s been thirteen years since Initiative pour un Leadership Cohésif started. The struggle goes on. Together. In one of the world’s most fractured “Nation-States”.
Michel in his own words
My preferred penname is « Am I fair? »
I was conceived and delivered during the Algerian war of independence, by an Algerian metal worker and a French Post office employee, both opposed to colonial injustice – and later on, to post-independence oppression and dogmatism. Born in France, I spent my childhood in Algiers, learning the beauty of people’s self-determination and transcontinental fraternity, while quickly growing disturbed by the hiatus between false rhetoric, actual manipulations and genuine aspirations. As a student, I satisfied my gourmandise for hybrid educations: neo-Marxist reading of international economy in the morning at Parix X – Nanterre, intricacies of international relations at Sciences-Po Paris in the afternoon.
Realising that “real life” economy had taken an unpleasant turn towards financial performances, casting social justice ideals as backward thinking, I opted to search the fine line between empathy and complacency/weakness while vowing to help the world’s most destitute and abused, in Western Pakistan, Malawi or Haiti… As head of MSF in South Africa, my advocacy for a fair treatment of Mozambican war refugees not only guided me to two exceptional interlocutors – de Clerk and Mandela – but also gave me some clue about cohesive leadership as a constructive way out of national suicides.
In 1995, I headed to Zaïre and the UN, tasked to set up a coordination support office, which became OCHA DRC as the people of Zaïre/DRC faced the world’s direst humanitarian crises (from Ebola to volcano eruption to mass crimes – especially in war-torn Bunia in Ituri, in 2003).
Through those years of intense investment in “active advocacy” for access to, and protection of, civilians, I developed a habit of overcoming my frustrations over mechanical humanitarianism by “imposing” initiatives of national unity to all the war protagonists (reopening of air, river and rail, transfer of students and schools exams across the frontline). This is how, after two years at OCHA Geneva in charge of the Africa section, I quit the UN to go further in my quest for a fine line between humanitarian goodwill and the need to push key protagonists of a country in crisis – DR Congo – address their own responsibilities, rivalries and mistrust, and develop a shared desire to “make their country prettier than before” as the anthem promises. In the course of this endeavour, I learned much from empathetic figures such as Howard Wolpe (Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars), Alain Lempereur, Liz McClintock, Eric Blanchot, Aurélien Colson, and my road crossed that of Katharina Vogeli whose notion of Human security and common good further refined my practice of cohesive leadership.
It’s been thirteen years since Initiative pour un Leadership Cohésif started. The struggle goes on. Together. In one of the world’s most fractured “Nation-States”.