Keith Fitzgerald

Keith Fitzgerald is the Managing Director of Sea-Change Partners, in Singapore. He has three decades’ experience as a practitioner, trainer, and advisor in Negotiation, Influence, Conflict Management, and Crisis Leadership. Keith is a Conflict, Peace, and Development Advisor with the United Nations Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery and was a Conflict Advisor to the Asian Development Bank, where he was involved in designing and implementing ADB strategies for negotiations, conflict, crisis situations, and grievance redress mechanisms. He spent most of that time advising the international community in Sri Lanka, during the final, brutal years of the civil war. 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 Head of the Asian Programme on Negotiation & Conflict Management (APNCM) from 2002 - 2007. He is a former Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the National University of Singapore and a former Adjunct Lecturer at INSEAD. He is the co-author of the acclaimed book, Negotiating Hostage Crises with the New Terrorists (2007).

After surviving three consecutive years as an EPIIC recidivist at Tufts in the late-80s, Keith landed his dream job, working with Roger Fisher, author of Getting to YES and Founder of the Harvard Negotiation Project, where he was also a Teaching Fellow at Harvard Law School. In that role, Keith and Roger spent most of their time working on peace negotiations and conflict management efforts, worldwide; from Colombia, to Northern Ireland; from Angola to the Caucasus and the Balkans, to South Africa.

He says he was prepared for that work, and all its dilemmas and nuance, by his experiences at Tufts; especially the year-long EPIIC colloquium on “Confronting Political and Social Evil.” “Abandoning the search for easy answers and embracing the messy struggle with the world’s most frustrating challenges was the pre-requisite. And I don’t think any other university course or program, anywhere, teaches that.” With the support of EPIIC, he conducted field work in Northern Ireland, while a senior at Tufts, on the dilemmas police and security forces experience while trying to maintain civil liberties while conducting counter-terrorism operations. A few years later, while at the Harvard Negotiation Project, Keith became one of the first international consultants to work with the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Northern Ireland; negotiating security and policing inputs in the peace process that resulted in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

In the acknowledgements of Negotiating Hostage Crises with the New Terrorists he wrote: I would not have sought the experiences that allowed me to contribute to this work without the guidance and friendship of Sherman Teichman, Heather Barry, and my friends at EPIIC at Tufts University. Amid the complexities of the world’s conflicts and crises, conventional wisdom has a way of turning into a pillar of salt. We find only one conundrum after another; there are no easy answers, yet still we must ask the questions and question our assumptions. Crisis negotiators learn to appreciate that more than others.

Over the past thirty-plus years, he has been involved in negotiations and conflict management efforts in more than 136 countries and counting. In addition to peace process work, he has trained and advised governments, police, and security forces on several crisis and hostage negotiations around the world, and he trains and consults to private sector clients, because he enjoys working with just about everyone, and he also has bills to pay.

Keith holds 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 also a professional photographer and former martial arts champion, having been a martial arts instructor for over twenty years.