Emma Arcodia is Middle East and North Africa Senior Program Coordinator for Search for Common Ground (Search). Ms. Arcodia has worked extensively on preventing violent extremism and promoting youth engagement and women’s empowerment in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and West Africa regions. She has designed more than fifteen successful peacebuilding and conflict transformation projects, including in Yemen, Iraq, Tunisia, and Libya. Prior to joining the MENA team, Ms. Arcodia developed programs to mitigate intercommunal violence and prevent violent extremism in Nigeria, Niger, and Mali, and to enhance county-level reconciliation processes in Liberia for Search’s West Africa team. In 2015-16, Emma coordinated the “Bottom-up Approach to Countering Violent Extremism in Tunisia” project of Search in Tunisia, where she conducted thirty community dialogues across the country to research the push and pull factors to radicalization into violent extremism and briefed key government stakeholders with her findings. Before that, Emma worked on a women's empowerment project at Caritas Egypt in Cairo, which aimed at strengthening women's capacities in rural areas and increasing women's engagement in local affairs.
Emma holds a Master's degree in Middle East Politics from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) - University of London, and a BA in Political Science and International Relations from the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore - Milano. Emma is fluent in Italian, English, and French, and has basic working knowledge of Tunisian and Egyptian Arabic.