Human Rights / Norms

Research Interest

Matthew Kovac

Graduate Student
History

Matthew Kovac is PhD student in History at the University of California, Berkeley. His current research focuses on the Irish republican movement, decolonization, and the Global Cold War.

Kovac is the recipient of the 2021 IIS Pre-Dissertation Research Grant.

Blaze Joel

Graduate Student
History

Blaze Joel is a Ph.D. student in the History Department at the University of California Berkeley. His research focuses on nationalism, memory, violence, and national identity in twentieth-century Europe. He studies these issues in the successor states of the former Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland, and the Basque Country, as well as in an international, trans-European framework. He also studies the Cold War in a global perspective.

Joel is a recipient of the 2021 IIS...

Scott Straus

Professor
Political Science

Scott Straus (Ph.D. Berkeley, 2004) is a Professor of Political Science who studies political violence, genocide, human rights, and post-conflict politics with an empirical focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. He is the author or editor of nine books, including Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership, and Genocide in Modern Africa (Cornell, 2015), which won the Grawemeyer Award for Improving World Order, the...

Amy Benziger

Graduate Student
Goldman School of Public Policy

Amy Benziger is an experienced strategist whose work has focused on the intersection of technology, social impact and advocacy. She is pursuing a Master of Public Affairs at the Goldman School with a focus on technology policy.

Shawn Ewbank

Graduate Student
Goldman School of Public Policy

Shawn Ewbank is an MPA Candidate at the University of California, Berkeley's Richard and Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy. He is focused on societal transformation towards peace, specifically in the context of climate change, technology, democracy and economy.

Laura Lyons

Graduate Student
Goldman School of Public Policy

Laura Lyons is a Master of Public Affairs candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, Goldman School of Public Policy. She studies corporate sustainability, climate change, and human rights.

Karely Ordaz

Graduate Student
Goldman School of Public Policy

Karely Ordaz is a public sector leader with close to a decade working for the public good in both local government and community-based organizations. She holds a B.A. from UC Berkeley in American Studies with a concentration in Environment, Policy and Public Health. She was born in Mexico and immigrated to the U.S. at age 4.

In her role as Chief of Staff at a community development corporation (CDC), she leads the organization’s policy and advocacy priorities focused on achieving social equity. Prior to that she worked for an anchor institution in San Francisco...

Stephanie Jones-Rogers

Associate Professor of History
History

Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers is an Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses primarily upon women, slavery, and colonial and 19th-century legal and economic history. She is currently completing a book that reorients our understanding of the British Atlantic slave trade by centering the lives and experiences of free and captive women living on three continents in its telling.

Tara Chandra

Graduate Student
Political Science

Tara Chandra is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on gender and international security, particularly why and how insurgents target women. She is also interested in the causes and consequences of political violence more generally across different contexts.

Saira Mohamed

Professor
Law

Saira Mohamed is a Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining the Berkeley faculty, she served as Senior Advisor in the Office of the U.S. Special Envoy for Sudan and as an Attorney-Adviser in the Office of the Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State. Her research focuses on criminal law and human rights, with an emphasis in recent years on conceptions of responsibility and culpability in mass atrocity crimes.