The MARO Project will be hosting Prof. Susan Benesch, Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute and Director of the World Policy Institute’s Dangerous Speech on the Path to Genocide Project. Prof. Benesch also teaches advanced international human rights at the School of International Service at American University.

Prof. Susan Benesch’s will present on her work focusing on inflammatory public speech. Speech is a key part of the social process that catalyzes mass violence, as in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Kenya in 2007, or in other countries such as the Ivory Coast today. In collaboration with Dr. Francis Deng, the UN Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide, Prof. Benesch is working to refine international law on dangerous speech, and to identify the best policy options for limiting the violent effects of such speech.


Speaker Biography:

Susan Benesch is the Project Director for World Policy Institute's “Dangerous Speech on the Road to Genocide,” an 18-month project which began in February 2010. Principally funded by the MacArthur Foundation, the project will identify policy responses to inflammatory speech, for the U.N. Special Adviser for the Prevention of Genocide.

Benesch also teaches advanced international human rights at American University's School of International Service. She has taught human rights and refugee law at Georgetown and Princeton, among other universities, and has lectured at schools including Yale, Duke, Johns Hopkins, Virginia, and Humboldt University in Berlin. A human rights lawyer trained at Yale, she has also worked for the Center for Justice and Accountability, Amnesty International, and the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (now Human Rights First).

Her publications related to speech include "Propaganda, War Crimes Trials & International Law: From Speakers’ Corner to War Crimes (Routledge, 2011 – forthcoming chapter); The ICTR’s Prosecution of a Pop Star: The Bikindi Case, African Yearbook of International Law (forthcoming); Vile Crime or Inalienable Right: A Model to Distinguish Hate Speech from Incitement to Genocide, 48 Virginia Journal of International Law 485 (2008); and Inciting Genocide, Pleading Free Speech, World Policy Journal, Summer 2004.

Benesch’s interest in speech dates back to her first career as a journalist. Before law school, she was chief staff writer for the Miami Herald in Haiti. She also covered wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala, and reported from many countries for the New Republic, the Columbia Journalism Review, and the Crimes of War website, among other publications.