Noor Ghazi
Noor Ghazi is an international peace activist. She was born and raised in Baghdad, Iraq, and after a time in Syria, immigrated to the United States as a refugee in 2008. Ghazi is a Visiting Research Scholar with a Masters Degree in Peace and Conflict Studies from UNC-Greensboro. She is also the Arabic lecturer at UNC-Greensboro and Arabic Instructor at Durham Technical Community College.
Noor has recently translated Preparing for Peace into Arabic, for the eminent peace scholar John Paul Lederach. The translation of the book was part of a multi-faceted peacebuilding project in Iraqi higher education. In addition, as a Professor of the Practice, she teaches special topic courses on Iraq under the Curriculum in Peace, War and Defense at UNC-Chapel Hill. To make the learning experience more effective, Noor has been working with major universities in Iraq, Baghdad, Mosul and Anbar, on international conferences and events to build bridges between students and scholars, and to have her students learn through firsthand experience.
Living her first years of life under the Gulf War, growing up under the economic sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s, witnessing the US invasion in 2003, and being displaced with her family in 2006, became her inspiration to take on the peace-building mission. Noor received an invitation from Al-Amal Association in 2019 to facilitate peace building workshops in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme and Innsbruck University in Austria in Iraq, targeting youth from across the country. She is currently working closely with Mosul University in Iraq to monitor the development of the Peace Studies program, which is considered to be the first Peace Studies program in the Middle East.
Professor of the Practice, Curriculum in Peace, War and Defense
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill