Brian Currin
executive directoR
Brian is a South African lawyer, activist and renowned international mediator, with decades of experience in the fields of mediation and conflict resolution.
Over his career he has worked with national and provincial governments, heads of state and various political groups. From playing a pivotal role in South Africa’s political stabilisation process during the 1990s, Brian has worked in numerous African countries, and advised parties to armed conflicts in Northern Ireland, the Middle East, the Basque Country, Turkey and Colombia.
At Concentric Alliance, Brian has applied his decades of experience in post-conflict trust building to the issues that surround the activities of business in complex social environments. Brian is a passionate agent for change, with a unique skillset and a wealth of experience.
Dr Renosi Mokate
chairperson
Dr Renosi Mokate is a highly experienced economist and policy analyst, who specialises in development economics and finance.
Renosi gained her academic qualifications in the USA before returning to South Africa in the early 1990s, serving in the multiparty negotiations process, and as Chief Executive of the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) in the run-up to South Africa’s first democratic election.
Renosi became a key adviser on macro-economic and fiscal policy to the government, and later was Chief Executive of the Central Energy Fund (SA government’s state-owned energy exploration, production, refining, and investment group).
She was Deputy Governor of the South African Reserve Bank from 2005 - 2010, and a key member of the Monetary Policy Committee and the G20 Group of Nations Central Bank forum. Renosi left the Reserve Bank to become an Executive Director of the World Bank Group (based in Washington, DC), where she represented the interests of Angola, Nigeria, and South Africa.
Renosi was, most recently, the Executive Dean of the Graduate School of Business Leadership at the University of South Africa.
Since joining Concentric Alliance, Renosi has been involved in strategy planning for clients, where her twenty years of global experience come into full play.
James Gordon
executive directoR
James is an experienced trial lawyer, communications specialist, and mediator. He has spent more than twenty years exploring different aspects of dispute and conflict resolution, and the means by which parties communicate their interests to each other. James has advised a range of international companies, industry bodies, public institutions, and charities on strategic and political communications, and spent ten years practising as a Barrister (Advocate) in the United Kingdom, before relocating to South Africa. After a decade representing parties in the courtroom, James decided to pursue his developing interest in alternative dispute resolution, becoming an accredited commercial mediator with the Centre for Effective Dispute Resolution in the United Kingdom (CEDR) in 2012. He has since become a certified advanced mediator, at Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation (2019).
James moved to South Africa in 2013 to work with Brian Currin in his international mediation practice, and to set up Concentric Alliance, in response to the increasing instance of business-related conflict in South Africa, following Marikana.
James’ particular interest is in complex multi-party negotiations and consensus building processes. He has facilitated multi-party negotiations at an industry level, and acts as a strategy and communications adviser to industry bodies that operate in a low trust environment, due to historic (and current) legacies. James has facilitated large-scale company-stakeholder engagements, commercial disputes, labour processes, and company-regulator disputes. He has been involved in projects in Mozambique and Zambia, as well as in South Africa, representing clients in the extractive, property, manufacturing and government services sectors. Working with Brian, James has also acted in an advisory capacity for peace negotiations in Colombia.