Keith Fitzgerald is the Managing Director of Sea-Change Partners, and has more than two decades’ experience as a practitioner, trainer, and advisor in Negotiation, Influence, Conflict Management, Leadership, and Crisis Management. From 2008 – 2011, Keith served as Senior Conflict Advisor to the Asian Development Bank, where he was involved in designing ADB strategies for dealing with negotiations, conflict, crisis situations, and grievance redress. Keith was a Senior Fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) and the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, where he was Director of the Asian Programme on Negotiation & Conflict Management (APNCM) from 2002 – 2007. He served as a Visiting Lecturer at the National University of Singapore’s Public Policy Programme (from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University) from 1999-2000. He is the co-author of Negotiating Hostage Crises with the New Terrorists (Praeger, 2007). Keith was the Special Assistant to the Director of the Harvard Negotiation Project (Professor Roger Fisher, author of the international best-seller, Getting to YES: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In) where he was also an Associate from 1994 to 1999. He has been a Teaching Fellow in Negotiation at Harvard Law School and in International Mediation & Conflict Resolution at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
Keith specializes in providing strategic assistance and training to executives and public officials in effective negotiation skills, conflict management, crisis leadership, communication, facilitation, and joint decision-making skills and processes. He has worked with a long list of leading corporations, and in nearly every industry; including finance, IT, telecommunications, energy, law, manufacturing, and services. In the public sector, he has trained several Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Ministries of National Planning, interior ministries, central banks, and Ministries of Trade around the world. He has been a trainer and strategic consultant to the United Nations, the World Bank, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the World Health Organization (WHO), and many international foundations and NGOs. He has been involved in negotiations and conflict management efforts in over 120 countries and territories, including Northern Ireland, the Middle East, the Balkans, Korea, Canada and the United States, Afghanistan, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, India and Pakistan, Cambodia, Nepal, Bhutan, Singapore, Sri Lanka, East Timor, the Philippines, Sudan, South Africa, and throughout the Former Soviet Union. He has advised governments, families, and security forces on several crisis and hostage negotiations in Latin America, the Former Soviet Union, and Southeast Asia.
He worked with the nonprofit Conflict Management Group, and Conflict Management, Inc., both professional outgrowths of the Harvard Negotiation Project, from 1991 – 1999. Keith has worked as a counter-terrorism analyst in Washington, DC. He was a member of the International Human Rights Mission to the Former Yugoslavia (1993-1995) and worked with World Monitor and Monitor News in Boston. He wrote and co-produced the documentary, The Face of Human Security for the United Nations in 1994. He was involved in a US – Soviet student diplomacy program from 1985-1986. He serves as one of the “Voices from the Field,” a round-table advisory group on complex humanitarian emergencies in areas of conflict; a project of EPIIC (Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship) at Tufts University. He is a Founding Member of the Council for Emerging National Security Affairs (CENSA) based in Washington, DC, and an associate member of the Singapore Institute for International Affairs.
Keith has a B.A. from Tufts University, has studied and taught negotiation at Harvard Law School, and holds a Master’s degree in Public Administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He is a former martial arts champion and has been a martial arts instructor for over twenty years.
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