Shai Tamari

Shai Tamari is the Director of the Conflict Management Initiative and the Associate Director of the Center for Middle East & Islamic Studies at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill. In addition, he is a Professor of the Practice under the Department of Public Policy and the Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense at UNC, and an Adjunct Instructor at Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University, where he teaches both undergraduate- and graduate-level skills-based courses in Conflict Management.

Prior to his above appointments, between 2008 and 2010, Shai was the foreign policy adviser for Congressman James P. Moran at the U.S. House of Representatives, where he focused on issues such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, human rights in Iran, and parental child abduction to Japan.

Born and raised in Jerusalem, Shai earned a B.A. in Journalism from the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and a Master’s degree in Near and Middle Eastern Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London in the UK. In 2006, Shai was awarded a Rotary Peace Fellowship and studied for a second Master’s in Global History, along with Arabic and Conflict Resolution, at UNC. While a Rotary Peace Fellow, Shai worked in the summer of 2007 with the Cooperative Housing Foundation International in Amman, Jordan. Shai is a native speaker of Hebrew and co-facilitates restorative circles at prisons in North Carolina.