South Asia Leadership Team

Bio of Zahid Shahab Ahmed

He is the Executive Director of the South Asia Centre for Peace based in Islamabad, Pakistan. Since June 2008, Zahid Shahab Ahmed of Pakistanis a Ph.D. scholar at the University of New England(Australia) specializing in the area of political and international studies. Prior to this, he worked for the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) as a Program Officer. He joined the FES Pakistan office, soon after completing Masters in Peace Education from the United Nations accredited University for Peace (UPEACE), Costa Rica in August 2006. He has also participated in a summer course on “Advanced Study of Non-violent Conflicts” from the Fletcher school, Tufts University (USA) in 2006. Zahid has travelled to over 15 countries across the world to promote peace and human rights through collaboration with international organizations, lectures, workshops and paper presentations. In February 2009, he was invited to the World Conference on Humanitarian Studies in the Netherlands to present a paper on peace and conflict impact assessment in Pakistan. Previously, in July 2006, he was invited to Brazil to offer a workshop on “Youth Cooperation in Peace Education”. He has been conducting researches and publishing on issues of peace building and conflict in South Asia. In 2007, he co-authored the following study: Attitudes of Teachers in India and Pakistan: Texts and Contexts, Women in Security, Conflict Management and Peace (WISCOMP), New Delhi.

Vision of COE South Asia

To unite the efforts of different chapters in the region so as to implement some joint COE projects for the children of this region. I strongly believe that such joint ventures will facilitate children from different countries, religions and ethnicities to get to know more and more about the others in the same region, and that is the primary goal to expand the horizons of the children of this region.