Carr Center for Human Rights Policy

Directory | Contact Us | Harvard Kennedy School

2009-2010 Carr Center Fellows

2009 / 2010 Fellows

Ali A. Allawi served as the Interim Minister of Trade in the new Government of Iraq from 2003-2004 until he was appointed the first Interim Minister of Defense of Iraq. In April 2005 Mr. Allawi was appointed Minister of Finance in the Transitional Iraqi Government. Born in Baghdad, Iraq, Mr. Allawi graduated from MIT with a BSc in Civil Engineering and continued his postgraduate studies at the London School of Economics. In 1971 he received his MBA from Harvard University. He has just published The Crisis in Islamic Civilization (Yale University Press) and is working on another book that will be a comprehensive political biography of Faisal I of Iraq, set against the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the formation of the modern state system in the Middle East and Iraq.

Ali A. Allawi is a recipient of the
Gebran G. Tueni Human Rights Fellowship Program Award.

• Carnegie Council Web site
• Middle East Lecture Series Information

email:	ali_alawi@hks.harvard.edu
phone:	617.496.0351
office:	R-112

Paul Fishstein is a Fellow with the State Building and Human Rights in Afghanistan & Pakistan program. Mr. Fishstein (MS, Agricultural and Resource Economics; BA, English Literature) served as Director of the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU), a Kabul-based, policy research institution, from 2005 to 2008. Before joining AREU as Deputy Director in 2004, Paul worked in Kabul and at provincial levels on USAID-funded initiatives to strengthen the management of health care delivery, and from 1989-93 managed refugee assistance and “cross-border” reconstruction activities in Quetta and Islamabad, Pakistan. Paul first worked in Afghanistan during 1977-79 as a teacher trainer in Kabul and northern Afghanistan. Paul has also worked as a Researcher at the World Bank in Washington, focusing on agricultural policies and food security in India and Africa, and provided assistance on financial analysis, organizational development, and sustainability planning to health organizations in developing countries, including Bangladesh, Nepal, Romania, and Tanzania. Paul is currently involved in a research project looking at the relationship between aid and stabilization in Afghanistan.

Paul Fishstein's fellowship is co-sponsored with the Harvard Kennedy School's
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

email:	paul_fishstein@hks.harvard.edu
phone:	617.495.8158
office:	R-119

Siddharth Kara is an Affiliate of the Human Rights and Social Movements Program, and a Fellow with the Carr Center Initiative to Stop Human Trafficking. He is also the author of Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery. Kara first encountered the horrors of slavery in a Bosnian refugee camp in 1995. Subsequently, he traveled to fourteen countries across four continents to research these crimes, interviewing over four hundred slaves, witnessing firsthand the sale of humans into slavery, and confronting those who trafficked and exploited them. His book provides a rare business and economic analysis of the global sex trafficking industry, and recommends legal and tactical measures to help abolish slavery once and for all.

Kara advises on slavery for several organizations worldwide, including the Clinton Global Initiative and Humanity United. Since 2004, he has served on the board of directors of Free the Slaves. In 2005, he testified as an expert on human trafficking before the US Congressional Human Rights Committee. He serves on the committee founded by Kirk Douglas that is lobbying Congress to provide an official apology for pre-bellum slavery. In 2009, he was selected as a Fellow for the acclaimed TEDIndia conference.

Previously, Kara was an investment banker at Merrill, Lynch, then ran his own finance and M&A consulting firm. He holds a Law degree from England, MBA from Columbia University, and BA from Duke University.

email:	siddharth _kara@hks.harvard.edu
phone:	617.496.4494
office:	R-203

Gerald Knaus is founding chairman of the European Stability Initiative (ESI) since 1999. ESI, with 24 staff based in 10 cities from London to Baku, is today the largest think tank focusing on the Balkans, Turkey and the South Caucasus. Gerald studied in Oxford, Brussels and Bologna. He taught economics at the University of Chernivtsi (Ukraine) and worked for five years in Bulgaria and Bosnia for NGOs and international organizations, including the OHR in Sarajevo and as analyst for ICG. He was director of the Lessons Learned Unit of the EU Pillar of the UN Mission in Kosovo (from 2001 to 2004). Some of Gerald’s articles have triggered wide public debates, including "Travails of the European Raj" on Bosnia (2003) and "Member State Building and the Helsinki Moment" (2004). He co-authored more than 60 ESI reports as well as scripts for award-winning TV documentaries on South East Europe. He is a founding member of the European Council on Foreign Relations and a 2007/2008 Open Society Fellow. In 2004 he moved to Istanbul. He regularly writes for the Rumeli Observer.

email:	gerald_knaus@hks.harvard.edu
phone:	617.495.8331
office:	R-217

David Mansfield has been doing fieldwork in rural Afghanistan since June 1997. The evidence base he has produced has been at the forefront of policy development in drugs and development in Afghanistan and represents an important source of primary data for many policy analysts and academics. By examining the different factors that influence opium poppy cultivation, David's work has also documented the diversity in socioeconomic, political and environmental conditions across rural Afghanistan.

David has worked for a variety of different organizations in Afghanistan including the Afghan Research and Evaluation Unit, the Aga Khan Development Network and the United Kingdom's Afghan Drugs Inter Departmental Unit and Department for International Development. He has also supported the World Bank, Asia Development Bank and the European Commission in integrating the drugs issue into their rural development programmers in Afghanistan, including their support to National Priority Programmes.

Prior to his work in Afghanistan David worked in overseas drugs and development issues, working in each of the major drug producing regions of South and South East Asia, and Latin America. His published work has sought to contextualise drugs as a development issue, and in particular has focused on developing pro-poor approaches to development in drug producing areas. Copies of his reports can be found at www.davidmansfield.org.

email:	david_mansfield@hks.harvard.edu
phone:	617.495.8153
office:	R-119

Rima Merhi is a researcher, human rights activist, and freelance journalist with publications in leading newspapers and other media outlets. She recently conducted research at the Middle East Institute and the Library of Congress in Washington DC. Rima has a BA in public administration and MA in political science (emphasis international affairs) from the American University of Beirut (AUB), and an MBA from the Lebanese American University. In July 2005 she testified before the U.S. Congress on youth aspirations for political, economic, and social reform in Lebanon. Rima then worked for the UN to improve the humanitarian situation of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and participated in the media and relief committees organized by the prime minister's office to manage the crisis at Nahr el Bared Palestinian camp in May 2007. Rima acquired human rights education and training at Oxford and holds numerous certificates related to the field of human rights. Rima is currently enrolled in media and journalism classes.

Rima Merhi is a recipient of the
Gebran G. Tueni Human Rights Fellowship Program Award.

email:	rima_merhi@hks.harvard.edu
phone:	617.384.8151
office:	R-113

Nigel Pont is both a Fellow in and Program Director for the Sate Building & Human Rights in Afghanistan & Pakistan program. Nigel has recently completed two and a half years as Mercy Corps' Afghanistan Country Director, focusing primarily on rural agricultural development in Helmand and Kandahar provinces, natural resource management in the north east of the country and microfinance in Kabul and Jalalabad. He has extensive Afghanistan experience having managed a wide range of relief and development programs during the civil war, the Taliban era and post 9/11. Born in Iran and growing up in Pakistan he has in-depth knowledge of the region and speaks good Dari and Urdu. Between 1997 and 2008 Nigel played a leadership role for Mercy Corps in many of the major humanitarian crises of the past decade including Kosovo, Iraq, Pakistan and post Tsunami Aceh.

Nigel Pont's fellowship is co-sponsored with the Harvard Kennedy School's
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

email:	nigel_pont@hks.harvard.edu
phone:	617.495.8128
office:	R-118

Gerard Russell was a diplomat with the British Foreign Office for 14 years, heading one of its diplomatic missions and two of its largest political teams in Embassies overseas. He worked in Jerusalem, Baghdad and Saudi Arabia. Between 2001 and 2003 he designed and headed up the UK effort to reach out to opinion in the Arab and broader Islamic world, giving 200 interviews in Arabic to the Middle East satellite media. In 2005 he was adviser to the Iraqi Prime Minister. From 2007 to 2009 he worked in Afghanistan, latterly as a senior political adviser at the United Nations political mission there. He speaks Arabic and Dari.

Mr. Russell is presently in the Middle East and will come to Harvard in January 2010. His particular focus at the Carr Center will be on the future of humanitarian intervention, and religious beliefs in the Middle East and South Asia. He is keeping a blog: www.gerardrussellcom.

A more detailed biography, and links to recent published articles, is available here.

email:	mail@gerardrussell.com
phone:	617.495.8096
office:	R-117

Michael Semple is a leading expert on the Taliban, the Pashtun tribes and Afghan politics. He has worked in Afghanistan since 1989, most recently as Deputy to the EU Special Representative for Afghanistan, and has inter-acted with leading figures in the succession of Afghan regimes, and the different armed movements which have campaigned against them. He is recognized internationally as a key proponent of political approaches to dealing with the conflict in Afghanistan, including “talking to the Taliban”. His experience as development worker, political officer and conflict negotiator give him an unparalleled network into most elements of Afghan and Pakistani society. Michael’s understanding of Afghan political history and current Afghan political strategies, combined with an international community insiders perspective and access to politicians on all sides of the debate give him a unique ability to advise on the development of a realistic political strategy for a more stable and prosperous Afghan future.

email:	michael_semple@hks.harvard.edu
phone:	617.495.8450
office:	R-217

E. Benjamin Skinner, raised in Wisconsin and northern Nigeria where his father served as a British colonial administrator, Ben first learned about slavery as a child in Quaker meeting. In 2003, as a writer on assignment in Sudan for Newsweek International, Skinner met his first survivor of slavery. Having flown in along with an Evangelical group, purporting to buy slaves en masse to secure their freedom, he hitched a ride on a U.N. Cessna to the frontlines of the north-south Sudanese civil war. There he met Muong Nyong. Like Skinner, Nyong was 27 at the time, yet unlike Skinner, he had spent the first part of his life in bondage. Since that time, Skinner has traveled the globe to find others like Nyong, a task which would prove to be the most daunting challenge of his professional life. Going undercover when necessary, he has infiltrated trafficking networks and slave quarries, urban child markets and illegal brothels. In the process, he has become the first person in history to observe the sales of human beings on four continents. His book, A Crime So Monstrous tells the stories of the lives of a few of these slaves, as well as of his own often harrowing encounters with those who sell, own, and free them.

• Personal Web site

Rose Styron is a Carr Center Fellow with the Human Rights and Social Movements Program. Styron is a poet, journalist, and human rights activist. She has published three volumes of poetry: From Summer to Summer (Viking, 1965), Thieves' Afternoon (Viking, 1972), and By Vineyard Light (Rizzoli, 1995), and has collaborated in translations from Russian (Modern Russian Poetry and Poets on Street Corners, both published by Viking Press.) Her poetry appears in a variety of publications. Her articles on human rights and foreign policy have been published in periodicals such as The New York Review of Books, The Nation, and The New Republic, and her interviews, book reviews, and essays in American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Ms. Magazine, Vogue, Holiday, Ramparts, The Los Angles Times, New York Times, Chicago Sun Times, and other publications. “Voice of America” produced Writer's World, her international series of conversations with publicly-engaged novelists and poets, selections of which were subsequently syndicated in New Perspectives Quarterly. Styron recently wrote an introduction to William Styron's Letters to My Father (LSU Press), and is currently working on a collection of his letters.

In the field of mental health, Styron contributed a chapter to Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression (Harper Collins, 2002), edited by Nell Casey, and has spoken at Johns Hopkins Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital about her late husband William Styron's depression and its impact on the family.

In 1970, following an Afro-Asian writers conference in Moscow and Tashkent, Styron joined the founding group of Amnesty International USA and has since served on the board of many NGOs, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, The Reebok Human Rights Foundation, The Lawyers Committee For Human Rights, Equality Now, and the Project on Justice (based successively at the Harvard Kennedy School and at Tufts University), traveling widely on their behalf in Latin America, the USSR, Central Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Her most recent involvements have been South Africa, Cuba, and Northern Ireland. Styron has also chaired PEN's Freedom-to-Write Committee, AI USA's National Advisory Council, and the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Awards. Styron currently serves on the boards of the Academy of American Poets, the Association to Benefit Children, and The Brain and Creativity Institute at USC. Styron is an overseer for New York University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the Council of Foreign Relations. In Spring 2009, she was a Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Institute of Politics.

This spring, Timothy Patrick McCarthy and Carr Center Fellow Rose Styron will moderate a weekly Conversations Series, entitled “Making History: The Art and Politics of Human Rights.”

Leonardo Vivas is a Sociologist from Central University in his native Venezuela. He has published two books about Venezuela’s political crises and co-edited another about grass roots management. In the US, Leonardo has been a fellow and associate researcher at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, founder and Executive Director of Latin Roots, and Lecturer at Tufts University, where he has taught a course about the Chavez Era in Venezuela. He is also devoted to advocating for democracy in Venezuela, mainly through the Boston-based organization VENERED. He has published several articles at the Fletcher Forum of World Affairs about Venezuela and is finishing a forthcoming book provisionally titled, “Revolution vs. Democracy, Venezuela’s Ambiguous Journey under Hugo Chávez.”

email:	leonardo_vivas@harvard.edu
phone:	617.496.4120
office:	R-113

Matt Waldman was formerly Head of Policy and Advocacy for Oxfam International in Afghanistan, where he has worked for the past two and half years, and is the author of a number of reports on the country, including on peace-building, protection of civilians, civil-military affairs, development and aid effectiveness.

From 2004-2006 he was the Liberal Democrats Foreign Affairs and Defence Adviser based in the UK Parliament, with responsibility for formulating party policy on international affairs, including Iraq, Afghanistan, and human rights issues.

Matt has also worked as a foreign affairs adviser in the European Parliament, and was deputy director of overseas operations for a UK children's charity, which included work in post-conflict countries in Eastern Europe and Africa.

Prior to this he trained and practised as a lawyer with the London-based, international law firm, Norton Rose, which involved work in Europe and Russia. He holds a Masters Degree in Human Rights from London School of Economics. His current research focuses on the conflict in Afghanistan, in particular, the implications of reconciliation and negotiations with insurgents.

email:

mfwaldman@yahoo.co.uk

2009 Associate Fellows

Sarah Bouchat is an Associate Fellow with the Carr Center Human Rights and Social Movements Program, where she assists with various research projects, especially in the area of LGBT human rights issues. Bouchat earned an AB in International Studies with a focus in Human Rights from the University of Chicago in 2008, and is currently an MPP student at the Harvard Kennedy School. Bouchat's professional and research interests include the intersection of human rights, queer, and gendered experience, Asian Pacific Islander American histories, and transnational migration.

email:	sarah_bouchat@hks11.harvard.edu
phone:	617.496.4548
office:	R-201a

Abdulrazzaq al-Saiedi is an Associate Fellow. Mr. al-Saiedi is Middle East Policy analyst and human rights consultant. He spent four years covering the war and the political transition in Iraq for the New York Times. He covered the Saddam Hussein trial as a reporter and international observer for the international human rights organizations. As a consultant, al-Saiedi has helped formulate transitional justice policies in the Iraqi legal and political system. He has also helped to draw up policies for the Iraqi government and the civil society on issues such as reparations, accountability and verification standards, and truth-seeking processes. Originally trained as engineer, Al-Saiedi holds an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School, where he was a Mason Fellow. He was a Nieman Foundation for Journalism Fellow in 2008.

email:

al-saiedi_razzaq@hks.harvard.edu

Jasteena Dhillon is an international lawyer who has worked in international development and conflict environments since 1994. Over her years working in places like South Africa in the mid 90s, through the Balkans, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Iraq and Sudan, she has been confronted with the reality of how justice is done on the ground and who the local actors in this system really are, many times contrary to what the international community develops it’s policy around. Her work in Afghanistan, as it has been in Iraq and Sudan, is aimed at cultivating local systems of customary justice and building a state system that gives due regard to local values and conceptions of justice. Her nuanced and pragmatic perspective is rare to find in a field dominated by those more comfortable working with formal systems in the image of western institutions. Before joining Harvard, she was at NATO working as an advisor on justice & reconciliation and civil-military interaction in Afghanistan and Sudan as a way to facilitate civil-military interaction. More on this link: www.zolazen.org.

Jasteena Dhillon discusses her experiences managing legal aid programs for returnees and people who have experienced human rights violations in Afghanistan. Three short videos.

Go to Videos >

Jasteena is also an Affiliated Fellow with Harvard's South Asia Initiative,
a community of South Asian intellectuals at Harvard.

email:	jasteena_dhillon@hks.harvard.edu
phone:	617.495.8027
office:	R-117

Elliott Prasse-Freeman is currently an Associate Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University, where he is researching human rights movements; human trafficking/modern day slavery; and state power, development assistance, and human rights in Burma/Myanmar. An honors graduate of Harvard College, Prasse-Freeman spent five years working in international development for various agencies from the UN to international NGOs. He began working in communications and advocacy for a human rights organization focusing on ethnic cleansing in eastern Burma. He then lived in Burma for one year and worked for the United Nations system (UNICEF and UNDP), and then in Thailand for three years, where he was the Regional Project Coordinator for the International NGO Education Development Center (EDC). There, he managed domestic projects and also conducted regular field visits to China, India, Lao, Cambodia and Vietnam. His work for EDC also allowed him to participate in global initiatives, including consulting for PEPFAR (President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) and special assignments such as disaster recovery after the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2005. In May 2008, Prasse-Freeman returned to Burma after the devastating Cyclone Nargis, helping to coordinate the UN's early recovery efforts. His professional and research interests include public health (HIV/AIDS), microenterprise and microfinance, educational access, development, and human rights.

Ongoing Projects:

The Burma Activism Survey Project | Assessing Human Rights Project

email:	prasse@post.harvard.edu
phone:	617.496.4548
office:	R-201a

Courtney Hillebrecht, an Associate Reasearch Fellow with the Carr Center's Measurement and Human Rights Project, is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests include international relations, human rights, international law, Latin American politics and quantitative and qualitative research methods. As an Associate Research Fellow in the Measurement and Human Rights Program, her work focuses on developing a new rubric for measuring states' compliance with the rulings of international human rights tribunals. This project is related to her dissertation, “From Paper Tigers to Engines of Change: The Effect of Regional Human Rights Courts on Domestic Practice and Politics,” which examines patterns of compliance with international human rights tribunals.

Jianli Yang, is an Associate Fellow at with the Carr Center's Human Rights and Social Movements Program. After completing his Doctorate in Political Economy at Harvard, Dr. Yang returned to study the growing labor unrest in northern China. He was arrested and sentenced to five years imprisonment for spying. Following an international outcry for his release, including a UN Resolution and a unanimous vote of both houses of the United States Congress, Dr. Yang was freed in April of 2007. Immediately following his return to the U.S. Dr. Yang formed Initiatives for China, a pro democracy movement committed to a peaceful transition to democracy in China. He firmly believes that continued U.S. leadership in holding China accountable for respecting the human and political rights of its citizens is a critical component for world stability and for the peaceful transition to a democratic society in China.

A recipient of numerous awards, Dr. Yang is widely recognized as a leading architect for democracy in China. He established the Foundation for China in the 21st Century and is the co-author of a constitution for a democratic China. Dr. Yang created the Interethnic/Interfaith Leadership Conferences, last series of which was held at Harvard in November, 2008. He is also the founder of China E-Weekly magazine.

email:	jianli_yang@hks.harvard.edu
phone:	617.384.8464
office:	R-213

Past Fellows