Ana Villellas Ariño

Ana Villellas Ariño is a research fellow at the Conflict and Peacebuilding Programme in the School for Culture of Peace (ECP) at Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. She coordinates the area of conflict and peacebuilding in Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia. Her areas of expertise also include the gender, peace and security agenda, with specific attention to gender and mediation. She has carried our field research on gender and conflict in various countries, including Turkey, northern Iraq and the Balkans. 

Ana has participated in various research projects on conflict and peace processes and WPS, including the ECP Database on Conflict and Peacebuilding and the H2020 GPPAC-led "Whole of Society Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding" project. She has also been involved in Track II diplomacy initiatives. She participates on behalf of GPPAC in EPLO’s Gender, Peace and Security working group. Among her publications, she has co-authored the yearbook Alert! Report on conflicts, human rights and peacebuilding since 2007, as well as the Peace Talks in Focus yearbook, and written book chapters, reports and articles on conflict and peacebuilding. She is a lecturer on conflict & peacebuilding. Ana Villellas holds an MSc in International and European Politics by the University of Edinburgh, a Postgraduate Diploma on Peace Culture (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, UAB) and a BA in Journalism (UAB). She has worked in the past as a freelance translator of WPS-related books and as a local journalist. She speaks English, French, Spanish and Catalan. 

Region: Europe, Caucasus, Central Asia
Area of Expertise: conflict; social political crises; peacebuilding; WPS; gender and mediation