The Responsibility to Protect at 10: Speakers and Organizers
Conference Speakers
(Bios are from the time of the conference)
Uriel Abulof is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Tel-Aviv University and a senior research fellow at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. Abulof studies political legitimation, nationalism, revolutions and ethnic conflicts in and beyond the Middle East. His first book Living on the Edge: The Existential Uncertainty of Zionism (forthcoming from Haifa University Press) received Israel's best academic book award (Bahat Prize). He recently completed his second book, The Mortality of Morality of Nations (Cambridge University Press). His articles appeared in journals such as International Studies Quarterly, International Journal of Social Research Methodology, Ethnic and Racial Studies, International Political Sociology, Nations and Nationalism, International Politics, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, and Rationality and Society.
Ofra Bengio is Senior Research Fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies and Senior Lecturer, Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University (emerita). She is Head of the Kurdish Studies Program at the Moshe Dayan Center. Her fields of specialization include contemporary Middle Eastern history, modern and contemporary politics of Iraq, Turkey and the Kurds. She is also interested in the Culture and literature of Middle Eastern societies. She has translated poetry and prose from Arabic and Turkish into Hebrew. She has been a visiting fellow at Emory, Beijing and Bogazici universities as well as The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. She is also a frequent commentator in Israeli and world media. Bengio's recent publications include The Turkish-Israeli Relationship: Changing Ties of Middle Eastern Outsiders (2nd edition 2010); (with Shmuel Regolant), Mahmoud Darwish: Like Almond Flowers or Further (2008, in Hebrew), Nazim Hikmet: Blue-eyed Giant (2009); Co-Editor (with Meir Litvak), The Sunna and Shi'a in History: Division and Ecumenism in the Muslim Middle East (2012); The Kurds of Iraq: Building a State within a State (2012); Editor, The Kurds: Nation-Building in a fragmented homeland (2014).
Christen Broecker is Associate Director of the Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights (JBI), based in New York. She carries out research and analysis aimed at strengthening the effectiveness of United Nations human rights mechanisms. Broecker is co-editor, with Felice Gaer, of The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights: Conscience for the World (Martinus Nijhoff, 2014), an edited volume of articles that is the first systematic examination of the High Commissioner's role and responsibilities. She is co-author, with Michael O'Flaherty, of “The Outcome of the General Assembly's Treaty Body Strengthening Process: An Important Milestone on a Longer Journey,” a 2014 policy brief of the Geneva-based Universal Rights Group. She is currently supervising the preparation of a Manual on Human Rights and the Prevention of Genocide, part of a project in cooperation with the UN Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect. The manual will identify guidance drawn from the findings of UN human rights treaty bodies and special procedures on steps that can aid in the mitigation of human rights-related risk factors for genocide. Broecker received a J.D. and LL.M. in international legal studies from New York University School of Law, where she was an Institute for International Law and Justice Scholar.
Rosa Brooks is a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, where she teaches courses on international law, national security, constitutional law, and other subjects. She also writes a weekly column for Foreign Policy, and serves as a Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. Brooks returned in July 2011 from a two year public service leave of absence, during which she served as Counselor to Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy. During her time at the Defense Department, Brooks also founded the Office for Rule of Law and International Humanitarian Policy, and also led a major overhaul of the Defense Department's strategic communication and information operations efforts. In July 2011, she received the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service. From 2005-2009, Brooks was a weekly op-ed columnist for the Los Angeles Times, and served as faculty director of GULC's Human Rights Institute. In 2006-2007, Brooks served as Special Counsel to the President at the Open Society Institute in New York. Her book, Can Might Make Rights? The Rule of Law After Military Interventions (with Jane Stromseth and David Wippman), was published in 2006 by Cambridge University Press. Her government and NGO work has involved field research in Iraq, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Israel, Palestine, Kosovo, China, Russia, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, and Sierra Leone, among other places. Brooks received her A.B. from Harvard in 1991 (history and literature), followed by a master's degree from Oxford in 1993 (social anthropology) and a law degree from Yale in 1996.
Steven Burg is the Adlai Stevenson Professor of International Politics at Brandeis University. He works to promote inclusive governance through the international NGO Council for Inclusive Governance, for which he serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors. He directs the Brandeis University Research Circle on Democracy and Cultural Pluralism. His recent publications and papers include: "Analytical Intelligence and Bosnia Policymaking in the Clinton Administration." Conference on Intelligence and the Transition from War to Peace: A Multidisciplinary Assessment of Recently Declassified Documents on the CIA and Bosnia in the 1990s, James Madison University, Harrisonburg, VA., March 19, 2014; "Intervention in Internal Conflict: Lessons from Bosnia and Kosovo." From Mediation to Nation-Building: Third Parties and The Management of Communal Conflict. Ed. William J. Lahneman and Joseph R. Rudolph, Jr.. Lexington Books, 2013. 273-302; (with Lachen T. Chernyha) "Asymmetric Devolution and Ethnoregionalism in Spain: Mass Preferences and the Microfoundations of Instability." Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 19.3 (2013); "Identity and Political Behavior in a Multilayered State: Activated Identity and the Politics of Devolution in the Spanish ‘State of Autonomies'." 19th International Conference of Europeanists, Boston, MA. 2012; "Popular Protest and the Future of Putin's Russia." World Affairs Council. Naples, FL. January 23, 2012.
Hans Corell served as Under-Secretary-General for Legal Affairs and the Legal Counsel of the United Nations from March 1994 to March 2004. In this capacity, he was head of the Office of Legal Affairs in the United Nations Secretariat. Before joining the United Nations, he was Ambassador and Under-Secretary for Legal and Consular Affairs in his native Sweden's Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 1984 to 1994. From 1962 to 1972, he served first as a law clerk and later as a judge in circuit courts and appeal courts. In 1972, he joined the Ministry of Justice, where he became a Director in 1979 and the Chief Legal Officer in 1981. Corell was a member of Sweden's delegation to the UN General Assembly (1985-1993) and has had several assignments related to the Council of Europe, OECD, and the CSCE (now OSCE). He was co-author of the CSCE proposal for the establishment of the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which was transmitted to the UN in February 1993. In 1998, he was the Secretary-General's representative at the Rome Conference on the International Criminal Court. Since his retirement from public service in 2004, Corell has been engaged in many different activities in the legal field, inter alia as legal adviser, lecturer, and member of different boards. Among other activities, he is involved in the work of the International Bar Association and the Hague Institute for the Internationalisation of Law.
Adrienne L. Fricke is a consultant specializing in human rights and refugee-related issues in the Middle East and Africa. Since 2007, she has worked with Physicians for Human Rights, serving most recently as its Syria Advisor, having previously assessed the health impacts on Sudanese refugee women living in Eastern Chad. For Refugees International, Adrienne traveled to Sudan and co-authored an analysis of its rape laws. She was a member of the Coalition for International Justice's Atrocities Documentation Team, for whom she traveled to refugee camps in eastern Chad to take witness statements from Darfuri refugees. From 2006-07, she was a Clinical Fellow at Harvard Law School's Human Rights Program. Adrienne is the co-author of a study for the Institute of International Education and the UC Davis Human Rights Initiative evaluating the impact of the Syrian conflict on access to higher education in Syria, as well as Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. She holds a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in Near Eastern Studies from New York University and a B.A. in African Studies from Yale University. Adrienne has lived and worked in Syria, Egypt and Lebanon and is fluent in Arabic and French.
Felice D. Gaer is director of the Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights. She is Vice-Chair of the UN Committee Against Torture (CAT), serving her fourth term as an Independent Expert. From 2003-2014, she was CAT's rapporteur on follow-up to country conclusions. From 2001-2012, Ms. Gaer served on the bipartisan U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, a federal body, including three times as its chair. Gaer is co-editor of High Commissioner for Human Rights: Conscience for the World, the first book-length analysis of this post, and author of numerous articles on the United Nations, human rights, women's rights, and related topics. She was appointed as Regents Professor at The University of California at Los Angeles in 2010. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Gaer is currently the Chair of the Leo Nevas Task Force on Human Rights of the United Nations Association of the USA. Gaer earlier was appointed a public member of nine U.S. delegations to UN human rights negotiations in the 1990's, including the Vienna World Conference on Human Rights (1993), the Beijing World Conference on Women (1995), and the UN Commission on Human Rights. She received Wellesley College's Alumni Achievement Award and the National Religious Freedom Award of the First Freedom Center.
Jared Genser is managing director of Perseus Strategies, a law and consulting firm that focuses on human rights, humanitarian, and corporate social responsibility projects. He is also founder of Freedom Now, a non-governmental organization that works to free prisoners of conscience worldwide. In addition, he is an Associate of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University and a columnist for The Diplomat, a current affairs magazine focused on the Asia-Pacific. Previously, Genser was a partner in the government affairs practice of DLA Piper LLP and a management consultant with McKinsey & Company. He has taught semester-long seminars about the UN Security Council at Georgetown University Law Center and the University of Michigan and University of Pennsylvania law schools. His pro bono clients have included former Czech Republic President Václav Havel and Nobel Peace Prize Laureates Aung San Suu Kyi, Liu Xiaobo, Desmond Tutu, and Elie Wiesel. Genser holds a B.S. from Cornell University, an M.P.P. from Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he was an Alumni Public Service Fellow, and a J.D. cum laude from the University of Michigan Law School. He is author of The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention: Commentary and Guide to Practice (Cambridge University Press, Forthcoming 2015). In addition, he is co-editor of The UN Security Council in the Age of Human Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and The Responsibility to Protect: The Promise of Stopping Mass Atrocities in Our Times (Oxford University Press, 2011). He is the recipient of the American Bar Association's International Human Rights Award, Liberty in North Korea's Freedom Fighter Award, and the Charles Bronfman Prize. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts.
Galia Golan is Darwin Professor of Soviet and East European Studies, emerita, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, formerly Chair of the Department of Political Science, Head of the Mayrock Center for Eurasian and East European Research, and of the Lafer Center for Women's Studies, all at the Hebrew University. Currently Prof. Golan is at the School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, where she is the head of the MA program in Government and the specialization in Diplomacy and Conflict Studies. She is also a member of the Board of the Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Studies. Dr. Golan is the author of 10 books, numerous monographs, articles, and chapters in edited volumes as well as co-editor with Walid Salem of a recent book on Non-State Actors in the Middle East for Democracy and Peace (Routledge). Her newest book, Israeli Peace-making since 1967: Factors Behind the Breakthroughs and Failures, has just been published by Routledge. She has been a consultant to the Israel Foreign Ministry and to the IDF, as well as a frequent radio and TV commentator.
Richard J. Goldstone is widely regarded by the international community as one of the leading advocates for justice and human rights in the world today. Judge Goldstone was the Chief Prosecutor of the United Nations Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. From 1991 to 1994, he chaired what became known as the Goldstone Commission, an independent judicial commission that investigated activities and people who posed a threat to the restoration of civil rights during the transition to post-apartheid South Africa. During his career, he has addressed problems of fidelity to law in unjust regimes and worked to define judicial ethics for international judges. He was educated at King Edward VII School and the University of the Witwatersrand, where he graduated in 1962. From August 1999 to December 2001, he was the chairperson of the International Independent Inquiry on Kosovo. He is the Honorary President of the Human Rights Institute of the International Bar Association, and he was also a member of the Independent Inquiry Committee into the U.N. Oil for Food Programme (the Volcker Committee). He chaired a United Nations Committee to advise on the archives of the Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Since 2002, he has been a faculty director of the Brandeis Institute for International Judges. He has served as a visiting professor at Harvard, Georgetown, Fordham, Stanford, Yale and New York University. In 2008, he was named the recipient of the MacArthur Award for International Justice and as the first “The Hague Peace Philosopher.” In April 2009, he was named to head a fact-finding mission investigating alleged war crimes during the conflict in Gaza from December 2008 to January 2009. He was a member of a Commission of Jurists appointed in 2012 to inquire into the cause of the death of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, who was killed in an aircraft crash in 1961. Judge Goldstone recently succeeded Kofi Annan as Chairman of the International Advisory Board of the Coalition for the International Criminal Court.
Chen Kertcher received his Ph.D. from Tel Aviv University in 2010 for his dissertation The United Nations and Peacekeeping in Cambodia, Former Yugoslavia and Somalia, 1988-1995. From 2010 to 2013 he worked on effects of peace-building measures during conflict for the Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research in Tel Aviv University. Currently he is a research fellow at Haifa University for the project of Liberal Democracies facing Asymmetric Conflicts. He is also a member of the Jerusalem-based Herzl Institute working on strategic alternatives for Israel. His research interests include Global history, international politics and security; comparison studies of conflicts; peace operations and peacebuilding measures. He is an author of several monographs and papers on peace operations and peace building issues. He lectures on Global History, Conflict Resolution, peacebuilding and Peacekeeping Operations in Tel Aviv University, Haifa University and the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya (IDC).
Naomi Kikoler is the deputy director of the Center for the Prevention of Genocide. For six years she developed and implemented the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect's work on populations at risk and efforts to advance R2P globally and led the Center's advocacy, including targeting the UN Security Council. An adjunct professor at the New School University, she is the author of numerous publications, including the 2013 Nexus Fund series on the emerging powers and mass atrocity prevention and the 2011 report Risk Factors and Legal Norms Associated with Genocide Prevention for the United Nations Office on the Prevention of Genocide and the Jacob Blaustein Institute. Prior to joining the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect in 2008, she worked on national security and refugee law and policy for Amnesty International Canada. She has also worked in the Office of the Prosecutor at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the Brookings-Bern Project on Internal Displacement at the Brookings Institution, and she worked as an election monitor in Kenya with the Carter Center. She holds common law and civil law degrees from McGill University, an MSc in forced migration from Oxford University, where her thesis was on the Rwandan genocide, and a BA from the University of Toronto in international relations and peace and conflict studies. She is a board member of the Canadian Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, a senior fellow at the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, and was called to the Bar of Upper Canada.
Mordechai Kremnitzer is Vice President of Research at Israel Democracy Institute, where he heads the projects "Constitutional Principles and their Implementation," "National Security and Democracy, "Arab-Jewish Relations," and "Proportionality in Public Policy." He is Professor Emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Faculty of Law and was Dean of the Faculty from 1990–1993. Born in Fürth, Germany, Prof. Kremnitzer studied law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, from which he received his PhD in 1980. During 1970–1977 he served in the Israel Defense Forces, inter alia as Deputy Chief Prosecutor and as a military judge. Prof. Kremnitzer served as chairperson of the Israeli Association of Public Law (2002–2004), as President of the Israeli Press Council (2000–2003), and as the academic head of the Minerva Center for Human Rights at the Hebrew University (2001–2003). In November 2012, he was elected to the board of Governors of the International Anti-Corruption Academy (IACA) of the United Nations. Prof. Kremnitzer has published extensively in the fields of criminal, military, and public law. His books deal with judicial activism; the offence of sedition, libel, official secrets, revocation of citizenship, disqualification of parties and lists, targeted killings, offences against the state, the offence of breach of trust, administrative detention, and Israel's Basic Law: The Army. He also co-authored a proposal for a new general part of Israel's penal code, which has been adopted by the Knesset.
Ephraim Lavie is Director of the Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research at the Tel Aviv University, and Research Fellow at The Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African History. He received his PhD from the Tel Aviv University for his thesis "The Palestinians in the West Bank: Patterns of Political Organization under Occupation and Self-Rule." While in the IDF he served as Head of the Palestinian Desk in the Military Intelligence Research Division. In addition, he served as adviser to the head of the Israeli delegation for negotiations on the final status agreement with the Palestinians (2000). His areas of expertise are Palestinian society, the Palestinian National Movement, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Arab society in Israel (social and political); radical Islam in the Middle East (ideology, organizational structure, methods of action); Jordan and Egypt: modern history (political, social). His recent publications include Nationalism and Morality - The Zionist Discourse and the Arabic Question, editor, Carmel-Jerusalem, 2014; "Palestine" – A State in the Making?, co-editor, Tel-Aviv University: The Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research and The Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African History, 2014; Israel and the Arab Peace Initiative, editor, Tel-Aviv University: The Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research, 2010; The Peace Process: Seventeen Plans in Ten Years - An Assessment of the Initiatives to Resolve the Israeli Palestinian Conflict over the Past Decade, co-author, The Palestine Center for Strategic Studies and the Peres Center for Peace, 2010.
Alain Lempereur, a mediator and negotiation expert, is the Alan B. Slifka Professor and Director of the Coexistence and Conflict Program at The Heller School for Social Policy and Management. He is an Affiliated Faculty and Executive Committee Member of the Program on Negotiation (PON) at Harvard Law School. He has published a dozen books, including the bestseller "The First Move. A Negotiator's Companion" that has appeared in ten languages. His PON research addresses responsible negotiation and leadership. For 20 years, in over 50 countries, he has run research, executive education and consulting missions for international organizations (EBU, OECD, UNDP, UNEP, UNITAR, etc.), national governments, global consulting firms (The Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey, etc.) or corporations (Airbus, EDF, Faurecia, Sanofi-Pasteur, Vivendi, etc.). He belongs to the UN mediators' network. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, and also taught at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (Tufts University), the Afghan Institute of Diplomacy, the Cameroon Institute of International Relations, the Cyprus International Institute for Management, the Lebanese University, the Universities of Brussels, Corsica, Mannheim, Mons and Paris II and V, and ENPC-ParisTech.
Rajan Menon is Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of Political Science at the Colin Powell School, City College of New York/City University of New York, and Senior Research Scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, Columbia University. He was an Academic Fellow and Senior Advisor at the Carnegie Corporation of New York for two years, where he played a key role in developing the Corporation's Russia Initiative. Dr. Menon was also a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and as Director for Eurasia Policy Studies at the Seattle-based National Bureau for Asian Research. He is the author of Soviet Power and the Third World (Yale University Press, 1986) and co-editor of Limits to Soviet Power (Lexington Books, 1989). His most recent book (co-authored with Eugene B. Rumer) is Conflict in Ukraine: The Unwinding of the Post-Cold War Order, MIT Press, 2015). He is a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times and has also written for The Financial Times, The Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, Foreign Affairs, The National Interest, Newsday, and World Policy Journal, among other publications. Dr. Menon received his doctorate in political science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Benjamin Miller is Professor of International Relations at the School of Political Sciences, The University of Haifa. During 2014-15 he is a Visiting Professor at the Government Department, Dartmouth College, and also an Israel Institute Faculty Exchange Fellow. In 2013-14 he was a Visiting Professor at the Dept. of Politics, Princeton University and an Israel Institute Research Fellow at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS). At the University of Haifa, Miller has been the Head of the International MA Program in Peace and Conflict Management. He has also been the President of the Israeli Association for International Studies (2008-2013). Among his publications: When Opponents Cooperate: Great Power Conflict and Collaboration in World Politics (Ann Arbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 2nd ed., 2002) and States, Nations and Great Powers: The Sources of Regional War and Peace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press—Cambridge Studies in International Relations, 2007). He also published numerous articles on international relations theory and international and regional security. Miller received a Ph. D. from the University of California at Berkeley (the dissertation chair was Prof. Ken Waltz) and he was a Research Fellow at Harvard University (the Olin Fellowship with Prof. Samuel Huntington), MIT (the Defense and Arms Control Program of the Center for International Studies with Prof. Barry Posen) and at the International Security Program of Princeton University (with Prof. Aaron Friedberg).
Karen Naimer is Director of the Program on Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones at Physicians for Human Rights. She is responsible for spearheading PHR's Program on Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones, a forensic training and advocacy initiative that helps to forge networks of collaboration among medical, legal, and law enforcement personnel to support prosecutions and accountability for sexual violence in East and Central Africa. She also leads PHR's international advocacy efforts for policy reforms addressing sexual violence. Naimer brings over 15 years of experience in international criminal law, international humanitarian law, human rights, national security, and anti-corruption. Prior to joining PHR, Naimer consulted to the Brandeis Institute for International Judges, and she served as an associate professor at New York University's Center for Global Affairs, where she taught international law. Naimer was also the Edmond J. Safra Faculty Fellow at Harvard University's Center for Ethics. Previously, Naimer served as deputy counsel at the Independent Inquiry Committee into the United Nations Oil-For-Food Programme ("the Volcker Commission"), where she investigated widespread corruption among the most senior UN personnel and Security Council member states. She clerked for Theodor Meron, president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, where she worked on cases of mass atrocities in both the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Naimer was an associate at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP in New York, and has worked on domestic violence issues at the Barbra Schlifer Commemorative Clinic in Toronto, Canada and at the New York Asian Women's Center. She is a Truman National Security Fellow. Naimer holds a JD and an MA in international relations from the University of Toronto, as well as an LLM in international legal studies from New York University.
Phillip Rapoza has been the Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Appeals Court since 2006. He started his legal career as an assistant district attorney in Suffolk and Bristol Counties in Massachusetts. He then worked in private practice until 1992, when he was appointed associate justice of the Fall River District Court. He was later appointed associate justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court. He held this position until he was appointed to the Massachusetts Appeals Court in 1998. From 2003 to 2005, he left the Court of Appeals to work for the United Nations, where he served as the chief international judge of the Special Panels for Serious Crimes in East Timor.
Chandler Rosenberger is Assistant Professor of International and Global Studies and Sociology at Brandeis University. A historical sociologist specializing in the cultural foundations of politics, Mr. Rosenberger is especially interested in the intellectual roots of political revolutions. Mr. Rosenberger studied History and Philosophy at Dartmouth College and Philosophy of Religion at the University of Oxford. From 1992 to 1994, he covered the collapse of Czechoslovakia and the war in Yugoslavia as a journalist and as a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs. After seven years in Europe, Mr. Rosenberger returned to the United States to write a dissertation at Boston University on the dissident intellectuals who led Czechoslovakia's “Velvet Revolution.” He then taught international relations at Boston University for nine years. Mr. Rosenberger has written about post-Communist Central Europe for scholarly journals and for such publications as Critical Review, Human Rights Watch, World Policy Journal, and The Wall Street Journal. He is now writing a biography of former Czech dissident and president, Václav Havel.
John Shattuck, President of Central European University, has a career that spans more than three decades in higher education, international diplomacy, foreign policy and human rights. Before coming to the Central European University, he was CEO of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, a national public affairs center in Boston; and Senior Fellow at Tufts University, where he taught human rights and international relations. Shattuck served as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor under President Clinton, playing a major role in the establishment by the United Nations of the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia; assisting an international coalition under UN authority to restore a democratically-elected government to Haiti; and negotiating the Dayton Peace Agreement and other efforts to end the war in Bosnia. Subsequently he served as US Ambassador to the Czech Republic, working with the Czech government to assist in overhauling the country's legal system, and with Czech educators to support innovative civic education programs in the country's schools and universities. In recognition of his human rights leadership, he has received the International Human Rights Award from the United Nations Association of Boston; the Ambassador's Award from the American Bar Association Central and East European Law Initiative; and the Tufts University Jean Mayer Global Citizenship Award. Prior to his government service, Shattuck was a Vice-President at Harvard University, taught at the Harvard Law School, and was a Research Associate at the Kennedy School of Government. His career began at the American Civil Liberties Union, where he served as Executive Director of the Washington Office and National Staff Counsel and helped enact federal legislation to protect individual privacy and to enforce civil rights in the election process. He also handled a number of prominent civil rights and civil liberties court cases, including the representation of persons who had been targets of illegal surveillance during the Nixon administration.
Gillian Sorensen has served the United Nations as Assistant Secretary-General; Senior Adviser at the United Nations Foundation; and New York City Commissioner for the United Nations and Consular Corps. She is a graduate of Smith College and studied at the Sorbonne. She has twice been a Fellow at Harvard – in 2002 at the Kennedy School Institute of Politics and in 2014 as an Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow. She is an experienced public speaker and advocate, mediator and bridge builder. Ms. Sorensen serves on the Board of the International Rescue Committee and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the International Women's Forum and the Women's Foreign Policy Group. She has been active in politics and was a delegate to three national presidential conventions. The Sorensen Fellowships are named for her late husband, Theodore C. (Ted) Sorensen, the Founding Chair of the Ethics Center's Board.
Timea Spitka is currently a Sophie Davis Post Doctoral Student in Gender, Peace and Conflict Resolution at Hebrew University, Israel. Her field of specialization includes international intervention in violent conflicts, gender, and intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Northern Ireland and Israel/Palestine. Formerly, Dr. Spitka worked as a Civil Affairs Officer for United Nations in Bosnia and Herzegovina and as a Gender Advisor for Oxfam in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. She has taught classes in conflict resolution, international mediation, gender and American Foreign Policy. Her book International Intervention, Identity and Conflict Transformation: Bridges versus Walls, will be published by Routledge in 2015.
Leigh Swigart is director of Programs in International Justice and Society at the International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life of Brandeis University. She oversees the Brandeis Institute for International Judges and the Brandeis Judicial Colloquia, as well as other programs for members of the judicial and human rights communities worldwide. She is the coauthor, with Center Director Daniel Terris and Cesare Romano, of The International Judge: An Introduction to the Men and Women Who Decide the World's Cases (2007). Her academic publications have focused on the international judiciary, the role of African languages in contemporary international criminal justice, language use in post-colonial Africa, and recent African immigration and refugee resettlement in the United States. She has also worked in the field of international literacy and indigenous language promotion. Swigart has wide experience in international education, including tenure as director of the West African Research Center in Dakar, Senegal. Holding a B.A. in anthropology from Smith College, and an M.A and Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology from the University of Washington, Swigart is a two-time Fulbright Scholar and recipient of the Wenner-Gren Foundation Fellowship for Anthropological Research.
Mordechai Tamarkin has been the head of the Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research at Tel Aviv University since 2005. He is Professor Emeritus of the Department of Middle East and African History at Tel Aviv University. His research interest is in African studies. His research has been mainly in the fields of ethnicity, nationalism and conflict resolution. In pursuing these interests he has also studied post-Communist East Europe. In Africa his research has concentrated on Eastern and Southern Africa. In the last 25 years, his main research interest has been the history of the Afrikaners. He has written two books about the Cape Afrikaners in the late 19th century. His current research is on the role of ethno-moral discourse in facilitating political change in South Africa.
Daniel Terris is the director of the International Center for Ethics, Justice and Public Life at Brandeis University. An intellectual historian, he has written on race and ethnicity in the United States, business ethics, and international law and justice. His books include Ethics at Work: Creating Virtue in an American Corporation and The International Judge: An Introduction to the Men and Women Who Decide the World's Cases (with Leigh Swigart and Cesare P.R. Romano). As an academic entrepreneur and leader, Dr. Terris has overseen the development of many signature programs of Brandeis University, including the Brandeis Institute for International Judges, the Brandeis-Genesis Institute for Russian Jewry, the Master's Program in Coexistence and Conflict, and the University's Division of Graduate Professional Studies. Dr. Terris has also served as the University's vice president for global affairs, building new connections for Brandeis in Israel, India, the Netherlands, and other countries. Dr. Terris received his Ph.D. in the history of American civilization from Harvard University.
Andreas Teuber is currently an Associate Professor of the Department of Philosophy of Brandeis University and served as its Department Chair from 2005-2010. He studied philosophy at Oxford with Paul Grice and at Harvard, where his Ph.D.advisers were John Rawls ("A Theory of Justice") and Robert Nozick ("Anarchy, State and Utopia"). Prof. Teuber's scholarship encompasses the internationalization of human rights, issues of social inequality, risk analysis, the nature and limits of democratic forms of deliberation, civic participation and renewal, cosmopolitanism, and the relation of U. S. Constitutional Law to international covenants, understandings and agreements as well as the relation of decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court to the opinions of international courts and tribunals. He has published in such journals as the American Scientist, Political Theory and Daedalus: the Journal for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as written for The London Review of Books, The New York Times and The Boston Globe. Prof. Teuber has been a member and fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and has received fellowships from the Fulbright Program and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is the recipient of two Brandeis teaching awards, the Michael Laban Walzer Award and the Kermit H. Perlmutter Fellowship Award for Excellence in Teaching. His syllabus for the Introduction to Philosophy course that he teaches here at Brandeis is listed among the Top Ten Most Popular Philosophy Syllabi in the world.
Benjamin Valentino is an Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. His research interests include the causes and consequences of violent conflict and American foreign and security policies. At Dartmouth he teaches courses on international relations, international security, American foreign policy, the causes and prevention of genocide and serves as co-director of the Government Department Honors Program. He is also the faculty coordinator for the War and Peace Studies Program at Dartmouth's Dickey Center for International Understanding. Professor Valentino's book, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century, received the Edgar S. Furniss Book Award for making an exceptional contribution to the study of national and international security. His work has appeared in outlets such as The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, The American Political Science Review, Security Studies, International Organization, Public Opinion Quarterly, World Politics and The Journal of Politics. He is currently working on several research projects focusing on public opinion on the use of force, civilian and military casualties in interstate wars and developing early warning models of large-scale violence against civilians.
Conference Organizers
- The International Center for Ethics, Justice and Public Life at Brandeis University
- The Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research at Tel Aviv University
- Cooperating Institutions
- The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- The Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights
- The Master's Program in Coexistence and Conflict at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University
- The Brandeis International Journal
- Conference Committee
- Steven Burg, Brandeis University
- Galia Golan, Hebrew University
- Ephraim Lavie, Tel Aviv University
- Alain Lempereur, Brandeis University
- Leigh Swigart, Brandeis University
- Mordechai Tamarkin, Tel Aviv University
- Daniel Terris, Brandeis University