Charles “Chip” Hauss is currently Senior Fellow for Innovation and emeritus member of the Board of Directors of the Alliance for Peacebuilding (AfP) where his main job is to help lead the Peacebuilding Starts at Home initiative. He is also a Visiting Scholar at George Mason University’s Carter School for Peace and Resolution and an active member of the Rotary e-Club of Global Peacebuilders

Peacebuilding Starts at Home is his nineteenth book and pulls together everything he has learned as a peacebuilder and political scientist, educator and actvist, author and community builder. 

All of those strands in his life are important because each serves as one of many springboards for building a movement that could spark a paradigm shift in the way Americans deal with their problems—something he has worked on since his undergraduate days.

After majoring in ending the war in Vietnam, Hauss largely took a sabbatical from activism and advocacy while launching his academic career. In the 1980s, however, he became active in the Beyond War movement. Among other things, he facilitated hundreds of workshops, helped lead the movement in New England, and spent a year on its national staff as part of its academic outreach team. After moving to Washington (with a sojourn in the United Kingdom), the peacebuilding component of his career took off after two trips to train young Palestinian professionals in conflict resolution. That experience convinced him that he had to make a professional commitment which led to five years at Search for Common Ground beginning in 2000. 

Since 2005, he has served as AfP’s Senior Fellow for Innovation and as a member of its Board of Directors has helped it grow into one of the largest and most influential peacebuilding networks in the world.

In everything he has done, Hauss has tried to be a political bridge builder who brings “strange political bedfellows” together to help solve problems that can only be effectively addressed if people with different viewpoints work together. In that work, he relies heavily on complexity theory and other holistic approaches that stress the long-term costs of actions that harm others and the potential long-term gains that can be achieved through collaboration.

And brings them down to earth because he no longer works much with academic audiences that love theoretical discussions!

After four decades focusing on global politics, his emphasis has shifted toward changing the way Americans deal with conflict. In 2016, he began representing AfP in a number of initiatives designed to enhance peacebuilding and democracy in the United States.

Hauss is also a veteran author. He began his writing career as a political scientist and enjoyed success with his textbook, Comparative Politics: Domestic Responses to Global Challenges, the tenth edition of which was published in 2017. The volume was long one of the market leading texts in the field Chip and his publisher decided to put it out to pasture Each new edition included as much new material as a standard trade press book on politics. He also is the author of six books on conflict resolution and peace building and three more on French politics. 

Although no longer teaching, Hauss spent almost forty years in the classroom, most notably at Colby College, George Mason University, and the University of Reading (UK). He taught a wide variety of courses in comparative politics, international relations, and peace studies. In one form or another, each explored aspects of the political implications of globalization and ways individuals can take personal as well as political responsibility for their lives and for the world.

In the most recent addition to his professional life, he has become a small scale investor in peacebuilding and related startups through the Sandles-Hauss Family Trust. It provides seed funding for new projects at AfP and beyond, helps fund at least one new peacebuilding initiative a year, and serves as an angel investor in Mission Transcend, an AI driven peacebuilding initiative.

Hauss holds a BA in Government form Oberlin College and a PhD in political science from the University of Michigan. He and his wife, Gretchen Sandles, live inside the (in)famous Beltway in Falls Church VA. In his spare time, he reads mystery novels, watches entirely too much sports on television, and enjoys explaining the rules of soccer, cricket, and rugby (both codes) to bewildered Americans.