Public Biography
Dr. Hendrik Lauritsen is a senior adviser on conflict resolution at the United Nations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, where he has worked since 2014 on what the department describes as “the political dimensions of conflict termination and post-conflict narrative alignment.” He holds a doctorate in international law from Leiden University and a Master of Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School.
Dr. Lauritsen previously served as a political affairs officer with the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan and spent three years in the Office of the Special Envoy for Syria, where his primary responsibility was drafting talking points for meetings that were subsequently postponed. He has described that experience as “formative in ways I am still processing.”
He is the author of The Grammar of Ceasefire: Language, Ambiguity, and the Architecture of Conflict Termination (Oxford University Press, 2022), a study of how the precise wording of ceasefire agreements enables parties to comply with the letter of a commitment while disregarding its substance. The book was reviewed in Foreign Affairs as “indispensable for anyone who has ever wondered why peace agreements so often produce outcomes indistinguishable from their absence.”
Dr. Lauritsen was born in The Hague and holds Dutch and Swedish citizenship. He speaks five languages and has noted that “multilingualism is essential to this work, because the parties to a conflict are very often not saying the same thing in any language, and it is important to verify this across as many languages as possible.”