The United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS), in partnership with the United Nations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs (DPPA), seeks candidates for the: 

2025 Standby Team of Senior Mediation Advisers
(Application deadline: Friday, 26 July 2024 at 18:00 EDT)

in the following areas of specialization:  

·       Design and Conduct of Mediation, Facilitation and Dialogue Processes; 

·       Security Arrangements (with an emphasis on ceasefires); 

·       Gender and Inclusion; 

·       Constitution-making; 

·       Power-sharing; 

·       Climate Change, Environment and Natural Resources; 

·       Transitional Justice and Reconciliation. 

The Standby Team of Senior Mediation Advisers (SBT) consists of full-time experienced mediation practitioners who can provide remote assistance or deploy on very short notice to support the good offices, preventive diplomacy, and mediation efforts of senior envoys and representatives of the UN and its partners. The full-time team is supplemented by a pool of part-time experts that can be drawn upon for specific assignments in cases where support requests cannot be met from the full-time SBT. 

This mechanism complements the existing capacities of the DPPA Mediation Support Unit (MSU) which provides support to senior UN envoys and partners engaged in mediation and peace-making efforts and serves as a repository for mediation related expertise and knowledge.

DPPA and UNOPS seek applicants with significant mediation experience and a wide range of regional knowledge, technical skills, and language abilities. All applicants are expected to have some mediation process design skills and are required to demonstrate competence in mainstreaming gender into their work. Women are particularly encouraged to apply. Speakers of Arabic and French are also strongly encouraged to apply.

Applications are accepted for the SBT full-time and part-time modality. Following a written examination and further testing, interviews with short-listed candidates will take place in early October 2024. The exact composition of the full-time team will be defined depending on the requirements of the United Nations at the time of recruitment.

Full-time experts on the Standby Team of Senior Mediation Advisers are home-based and deploy to the field on short notice, as needed. Members of the 2025 full-time SBT are expected to take up their functions in late January 2025. Applicants should take note that positions on the Standby Team are full-time consultancies, not UN staff positions, and further do not allow for outside employment. Part-time experts are offered retainer contracts that allow DPPA and UNOPS to draw upon their services intermittently on an as-needed basis.  

All candidates for the 2025 Standby Team of Senior Mediation Advisers 
must submit an application via the recruitment portal of UNOPS.

The application page, and the Terms of Reference, can be found at: 
https://jobs.unops.org/Pages/ViewVacancy/VADetails.aspx?id=28274

The deadline for all applications is Friday, 26 July 2024 at 18:00 EDT.