Hilde Frafjord Johnson is an Associate Researcher. She was Practitioner in Residence at PRIO in the Autumn of 2019. From January 2020, she is Senior Advisor at the European Institute of Peace.
Hilde Frafjord Johnson served as Norway’s Minister of International Development for two terms (1997-2005). As minister she was actively involved in building coalitions for change, both of the UN, the Bretton Woods Institutions (BWIs) and bilateral aid. Johnson initiated the Utstein-group, a group of female likeminded development ministers from the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and Norway to spearhead this agenda. She worked closely with the senior leadership of the UN, the International Financial Institutions and leaders of developing countries, to bring about better pro-poor development policies.
Hilde F. Johnson also played a key role in the Sudan peace negotiations that led to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in 2005. She was the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General (SRSG) and head of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) 2011 – 2014 and was subsequently appointed as member of the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (2015-2015).
Prior to her tenure in South Sudan, Ms. Johnson was Deputy Executive Director of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), where she was in charge of the organization’s humanitarian operations and crisis response (2007-2011). Following her extensive work on fragile states she was Senior Adviser to the President of the African Development Bank, to develop the Bank’s institutional response to fragile states. Hilde F. Johnson was a Senior visiting fellow at the Norwegian Institute for International Affairs (NUPI) 2014-2015 and Practitioner in Residence at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) August-December 2019. As part of her political career in Norway Hilde Frafjord Johnson was an elected member of Parliament from 1993-2001 and was Secretary General of the centrist Christian Democratic Party of Norway (2016-2019).
Hilde F. Johnson is a development anthropologist, fragile states specialist, and an author of three books on Sudan, South Sudan and peace building, including *South Sudan, The Untold Story – from Independence to Civil War (*IB Tauris, London, 2016) and *Waging Peace in Sudan, The Inside Story of the Negotiations that Ended Africa's Longest Civil War (*Sussex Academic Press, 2011).
