Dr. Lara Scarpitta is a gender expert with over a decade of experience on Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) and the role of women in conflict and post-conflict countries of the Balkan region and the Middle East, especially Bosnia, Syria, and Yemen. In May 2022, she joined the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) as Senior Adviser on Gender Issues in the Office of the Secretary General.
Previously, she worked for over 15 years for the EU (European Commission and the European External Action Service) and served in Bosnia and Herzegovina (2008-2012), Turkey (2012-2017), and Brussels (2017-2019). From 2020 to 2022 she worked as Political Adviser on Peace, Mediation and Gender at the EU Delegation to the United Nations in Geneva, focusing on the MENA region. While working for the EU she consistently integrated gender issues and women’s political participation in peace processes within the work on mediation and peacebuilding. She was instrumental in the creation in 2018 of the Syrian Women Platform (also known as the Gaziantep Women Platform), an EU-supported initiative linking Syrian grassroots female activists with negotiators in the UN-led Syria Peace Process.
As a trained mediation expert, Dr. Scarpitta has also delivered extensive capacity-building on mediation, negotiations, conflict resolution, and peace-building to grassroots activists and human rights defenders from countries in conflict.
Born in Sanremo, Italy, she was educated in the U.K. and holds a Ph.D. in Russian and East European Studies and an M.A. in European Studies from the University of Birmingham.