Rula Khoury Mansour, (fifth from left), director of the Nazareth Center for Peace Studies and associate professor at Nazareth Evangelical College with board members (from left) Dr. Khalil Nasrallah, orthopedic surgeon; Shireen Giryes, lawyer; Remah Abdo, educational counselor; Rasha Saba, General Secretary of Fellowship of Christian Students in Israel; Khaloob Kawar, Coordinator of MA in Special Education at Beitberl College; Randa Elias, director of quality and monitoring at EMMS Nazareth Hospital; Ranaa Barhoum Haddad, school psychologist; Liza Nassar Shehadeh, vice principal of Nazareth Baptist Elementary School.

Former CJP visiting professor is founder and director of Nazareth Center for Peace Studies

by EMU Communications

Rula Mansour, a visiting scholar at Eastern Mennonite University’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding from 2015-17, has announced the founding the Nazareth Center for Peace Studies. Mansour will also direct the new nonprofit organization, which seeks to equip peacebuilders through learning, training and resources to understand and address the root causes of conflict.

The board of directors includes several educators, as well as representatives from the medical and law fields.

Mansour is also associate professor at Nazareth Evangelical College in Israel. She earned her PhD in peace studies and theology from the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies. In 2020, she published Theology of Reconciliation in the Context of Church Relations: A Palestinian Christian Perspective in Dialogue with Miroslav Volf (Langham Monographs).

For 13 years, Mansour was a public prosecutor and deputy head of the public prosecution office in Nazareth. She was the first Palestinian Arab to hold such a position in Israel.