Olav Ofstad

Olav Ofstad is a Norwegian researcher, writer and trainer in the fields of conflict management and travel security. Early in his career he was police lawyer/public prosecutor, a deputy judge and a senior partner in a private law enterprise. He later moved on to become a diplomat serving at Norwegian embassies, followed by engagements with the UN, the Red Crescent in the Middle East and positions as Red Cross Head of Delegation in a number of countries in Asia and Europe. He has been responsible for the Red Cross International Disaster Response Law programme in Asia/Pacific. Ofstad’s vocation has implied conflict management, coaching of terror victims, and his research includes numerous interviews of kidnap victims and parties to conflicts. His work includes:

• Conflict management in International Peace Operations: A Handbook for Officers and Soldiers, written for the

Norwegian Defence International Center.

(Norwegian version in 2003 and an expanded English version in 2006).

• Conflict Management in International operations. A Field Guide. (2015) This book targets both civilian and military

personnel working in conflict areas.

• Surviving Kidnappers (2017)

• Kidnapping survival (2024), is an upgraded and expanded version of Surviving Kidnappers.

His books aim at bridging conflict management theory and practice and explaining how social psychology tools can be utilized both for peaceful conflict management and kidnapping survival.

A Working Paper by Ofstad published by Oxford University ELAC in 2012, offers a critical analysis of UN’s peacebuilding efforts in East Timor and compares these with UN approaches in Burundi and Central Africa where the Peacebuilding Architecture of 2005 had been applied. Finding basic flaws in the UN’s approaches in all three countries, Ofstad has offered a differently structured peacebuilding model, presented in his Field Guide of 2015.

Ofstad is the founder of KidnappingSurvival, a network of specialists that offers training in conflict management and travel security/ kidnapping survival.