Jacqueline Nolan

Communication trainer and facilitator

Thesis : Born on One Side of Partition: Reassessing Lessons of Northern Ireland’s Conflict from a 21 st-Century Multidisciplinary Perspective

Biography

Ms. Jacqueline Nolan comes from Dublin, lives in Amsterdam, and works as a communication trainer and facilitator, and writer. She has a background in performance arts and broadcast journalism at Irish television and Dutch radio, and uses the creativity, curiosity and rigour of both disciplines in her current work during leadership, communication and intercultural programmes. Following the closure of Radio Netherlands Worldwide in 2013, she started collaborating with universities, writing teaching cases and articles to make theory and concepts more accessible and experiential; for example, in 2019, cases for Erasmus University MSc students on the Sustainable Development Goals’ ‘grand challenges’. Besides being the author of dozens of articles published for the radio’s website, and a number of teaching cases at the Case Centre global database, she is published in the Harvard Business Review, NRC Handelsblad and The Irish Times.

Jacqueline is regularly commissioned as a storyteller at company events to tackle and present organisational challenges with humanity and humour. In 2019, with her children settling into university life, she decided to go back to school herself. Originally intending to do a master’s in psychology, she felt an intuitive calling for International Relations. She was awarded a Magna cum Laude in International Politics by CERIS-ULB Diplomatic School of Brussels in December 2020. She would like to branch into the field of International Relations, with a particular interest in conflict negotiation. For her master’s thesis, Jacqueline revisits Northern Ireland’s lessons from a multidisciplinary and 21st-century perspective, contending that to make sense of and resolve a conflict in a sustainable way, you have to not only understand it through substantive lenses, but also through emotional and behavioural ones ­– and likewise the interconnectedness between those lenses. Her thesis supervisor is Guy Olivier Faure, Professor of International Negotiation and Conflict Resolution at the Sorbonne University. Professor Faure is an active practitioner in the field, and a prolific author on negotiation and terrorism.