Najeeba Syeed

Bio

Najeeba Syeed is the inaugural El-Hibri Endowed Chair and Executive Director of Interfaith at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, a role she has held since 2022. A scholar, mediator and peacebuilder with two decades of experience, she previously served roughly a decade as a professor at the Claremont School of Theology and held faculty posts at Starr King School for the Ministry and Chicago Theological Seminary. She holds a law degree from Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law and a B.S. from Guilford College. Her work in gang intervention, school-based conflict resolution and community peacebuilding earned the Southern California Mediation Association’s 'Peacemaker of the Year' award. She writes on interfaith just peacemaking, restorative justice and community-based conflict resolution.

The big questions

The kind of questions this session opens up.

1. It is far easier to grow an economy than to lower the temperature between two neighbors. Why is the cheaper problem the one we can’t solve?
2. Is peace the absence of conflict, or the presence of something we have forgotten how to build?
3. Can people who disagree about almost everything still build something together, and what does it cost each of them?
4. What if reconciliation is not the soft part of development, but the hardest infrastructure of all?