Peacebuilding, relief work and reconstruction
Sir Charles Petrie Bt, OBE, having acquired an MBA at INSEAD and following a short stint as an investment banker, has had close to 30 years’ experience working in contexts of conflict and famine, much of it within the UN system. With the UN, he has assumed senior level operational and policy responsibilities in Afghanistan, Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gaza and the Palestinian Territories, Myanmar/Burma, Republic of Congo, Rwanda (during the 1994 Genocide), Somalia, South Africa and the Sudan. Charles Petrie resigned from the UN at the end of 2010 as the Secretary General’s representative to Burundi.
Since leaving the UN, Charles Petrie was the special policy advisor to the President of Somalia (2011/12) and later the Syrian opposition (2017/19). He also established and coordinated a mechanism to test the credibility of the ceasefires in Myanmar (2012/15). In March 2012, Charles Petrie was designated by the UN Secretary General to lead an internal review of the UN’s actions in Sri Lanka during the last phase of the conflict, which subsequently led to the Secretary General’s Rights-up-Front policy. In the first half of 2015, Charles Petrie was designated as a member of a group of experts commissioned by the UN Secretary General to review the UN’s Peacebuilding Architecture.