Our Senior Staff

Dr. Tom Hill

Tom Hill (BA hons, MA, MRes, PhD) is President and Executive Director of the Center for Peace Diplomacy. He is also a Visiting Senior Research Fellow in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London, and a Deployable Civilian Expert for mediation at the Stabilisation Unit, the UK government’s conflict response organization. 

Tom was mentored and trained as a peace negotiator by Kofi Annan, the seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations. Tom assisted Annan with his memoirs, Interventions: A Life in War and Peace, and was appointed by Annan to be his special assistant when Annan served as Joint Special Envoy for Syria in 2012. Tom was also a political officer for Joint Special Representative Lakhdar Brahimi in the second United Nations Syria mission. Afterwards, Tom spent seven years as director of the Track II Mediation Unit at KCL.

Tom’s speciality is the strategic integration of the international and intrastate levels of peace negotiations. Tom has engaged in or led negotiations at all of the key levels of peace processes, including negotiations at the presidential level in the Kremlin, the White House, Tehran, Damascus, and Baghdad; at the UN Security Council in New York; at the League of Arab States; at major international peace summits in Geneva; and with front-line conflict actors, including running negotiations with more than thirty armed rebel groups.

As well as a practitioner, Tom is a scholar of war mediation. He has a PhD, awarded without corrections, from KCL on the history of international mediation in civil wars. From 2014-2016 he was a lecturer in international conflict resolution at the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), Columbia University in New York. He runs the mediation module and capstone exercise for the Diplomacy Training Course at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London, where he was an Associate Fellow.

Earlier in his career he was a New York-based associate at Macro Advisory Partners, the global strategic advisory firm, before which he was a strategic analyst for the UK Ministry of Defence. In 2006 he was awarded the Simon O’Dwyer-Russell Prize for best graduate in the Department of War Studies, KCL.

Andrew Long-Higgins

Andrew Long-Higgins (BSc, MPA) is the Special Assistant to the Executive Director at the Center for Peace Diplomacy. Andrew is a political and strategic advisor on peace negotiations and specializes in civil society dialogues. Andrew also manages CPD’s internal administration, coordinates its strategic partnerships and manages the supply of open source information to the Executive Director on CPD’s key files. 

Andrew has worked with several organizations in Lebanon and Syria on interfaith dialogues, peacebuilding programs and humanitarian assistance, including the Forum for Development, Culture and Dialogue in Beirut, where he was assistant to the Forum’s President. Prior to joining CPD, Andrew was the coordinator for international security policy and international conflict resolution at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, working closely with Professor Ed Luck. In this role he managed the Finnish government-funded “Hitting the Ground Running” conference for the member states of the United Nations Security Council.

Andrew has an MPA from Columbia University, with a concentration in international security policy. He has a BSc in political science from Heidelberg University.

Olga Abilova

Olga Abilova (BA, MIA) is a Senior Advisor at the Center for Peace Diplomacy. Based in New York, she coordinates project activities vis-a-vis the UN Security Council. Her specialties include strategic dialogue faciliation, UN peacekeeping, gender and inclusivity, and humanitarian protection.

Before joining CPD, Olga was a Middle East and North Africa adviser at the Norwegian Center for Conflict Resolution, where she managed track 2 dialogue projects in Iraq and Yemen. In addition to managing relations with external stakeholders and governments, she briefed the UN Security Council on inclusive track 2 approaches in Yemen. Prior to this, Olga headed the sub-office of Nonviolent Peaceforce in Mosul, Iraq, where she provided strategic guidance and operational support to local peace settlements in former ISIL-controlled areas.

She spent several years providing support to UN Peacekeeping, based with the peacekeeping missions in South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where she focused on community-based approaches to conflict management. She also previously worked for the Permanent Mission of Norway to the United Nations and the Brian Urquhart Center for Peace Operations at the International Peace Institute, where she carried out research projects and policy advocacy on UN conflict response and peacebuilding strategies, particularly on Mali and the broader Sahel.

Olga has an MIA in Economic and Political Development from Columbia University and a dual BA in International Studies/Law from the University of Oslo/Université Paris 2-Panthéon-Assas. She is a Fulbright alumni and a member of Nordic Women Mediators - Norway. She is fluent in English, French, Russian, Norwegian and has limited working proficiency in Arabic.