Jeffrey R. Seul

Lecturer on the Practice of Peace

Education

MTS, Harvard Divinity School
LLM, Harvard Law School

Profile

Jeff Seul has served on the adjunct faculty as Lecturer on the Practice of Peace at Harvard Divinity School since 2016–17. He also serves as co-chair of the Peace Appeal Foundation and is a partner in the international law firm Holland & Knight. The Peace Appeal Foundation, which was founded with a mandate from five Nobel Peace Laureates, including Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and F. W. de Klerk, is an international NGO that helps local stakeholders launch and sustain broad-scale peace and national dialogues processes to end or avoid war.

Jeff earned an MTS at Harvard Divinity School and an LLM in international law at Harvard Law School. After graduating from HDS, Jeff taught negotiation and conflict resolution courses for several years at Harvard Law School, where he developed Harvard's first course on complex, multiparty negotiations. He was also a senior associate of the Program on International Conflict Analysis and Resolution at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

Jeff’s scholarship is focused on religion and peacebuilding, including the role of identity dynamics in violent conflict involving religious groups and approaches to transformation of conflicts with a religious dimension. He also writes about possibilities for consensual resolution of legal disputes involving deeply-held moral values. His 1999 article “'Ours is the Way of God': Religion, Identity, and Intergroup Conflict” in the Journal of Peace Research was among the first to combine work in the social sciences and religious studies to offer an explanation about why religion and conflict sometimes become entangled. His 2018 article in The Journal of Interreligious Studies, entitled "Trust the Stranger as Your Own: Religious Prosociality and Conflict Transformation," draws upon recent social scientific work to suggest ways in which religion can contribute to peacebuilding. A 2019 article in The Journal of Interreligious Studies, “Inclusion of Religious Actors in Peace and National Dialogue Processes,” explores possibilities for more formal involvement of religious actors as stakeholder-participants in official conflict resolution processes.

Jeff is a Zen teacher, having received Dharma transmission from the Zen teacher and Trappist monk and priest Kevin Jiun Hunt, O.S.C.O., Roshi.