NARRATIVE BIO

Edward P. Joseph is a highly experienced field practitioner and expert/lecturer on conflict, stabilization and reconstruction.  In April, 2012, as Deputy Head of the OSCE Mission in Kosovo, he led the ‘technical team’ of OSCE negotiators and forged an eleventh hour breakthrough to run Serbian elections in Kosovo, averting a brewing crisis between Serbia and Kosovo.  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton specifically acknowledged Edward’s contribution in this role.

In more than a dozen years of experience in the Balkans, Edward compiled other notable distinctions:

• The only individual to serve as a senior official in all three of the region’s divided towns – Mostar, Brcko and Mitrovica.

• War-time experience in every conflict front (Serb-Bosniak; Bosniak-Croat; Bosniak-Bosniak; Croat-Serb; Serb-Albanian; Albanian-Macedonian.)

• The only official able to penetrate the Serb blockade of Bihac during the siege of 1994.  Edward’s reports on CNN, BBC and other media helped keep the focus on Bihac’s ‘safe area.’

• Coordinated the evacuation of the Zepa ‘safe area’ as UN civil affairs officer in July, 1995, contemporaneous with the massacres in nearby Srebrenica.  (Edward and his UN colleague dealt directly with Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic, in an effort to safely evacuate the women and children and spare Zepa’s men.)

• Played a vital role in the arbitration of the Brcko District in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

• Co-managed the ‘Stenkovec-I’ Kosovar refugee camp, which became a highly visible backdrop to the 1999 NATO air campaign.

• Author of an enduring Foreign Affairs article on the region, ‘Back to the Balkans’, and two of ICG’s most successful reports (on the link between corruption and conflict in Macedonia; and on the dispute with Greece over Macedonia’s name.)

Edward has written a number of articles and op-eds published in leading outlets including The New York Times, lectured widely on the region, been interviewed many times, and testified at the Hague Tribunal.

Edward has also served in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Haiti, where he served as Chief Election Observer for the USAID-funded observation mission in 2006.  While serving In Pakistan on 26 December, 2007, Edward held perhaps the final international meeting with Benazir Bhutto, a 90 minute conversation in Peshawar.  In late 2008-early 2009, Edward was a member of the three-person expert team that evaluated USAID’s largest local stability program in Afghanistan, visiting more than a dozen sites ‘outside the  wire’, including Kandahar.

Edward holds a J.D. from the University of Virginia, and a B.A. and M.A. from Johns Hopkins University and the School of Advanced International Studies, respectively.  He was a helicopter pilot in the US Army Reserve.  He speaks and has worked professionally in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian and French, Italian and Spanish.