Human Rights & U.S. Foreign Policy Senior Fellow (2026-27)
Anna Cave is an international justice lawyer, atrocity prevention expert, and former senior policymaker with two decades of experience across government, academia, the private sector, and civil society. Her scholarship develops a human-centered, trauma-responsive, data-driven framework for policy-making, giving atrocity-affected communities a voice in decisions about them.
She co-founded and leads the Atrocity Response Coalition for Justice (ARC), a survivor-centered global consortium uniting organizations including the International Network of Victims & Survivors of Serious Human Rights Abuses, the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, the Center for Victims of Torture, and Kobo to advance victim-centered, evidence-based justice pathways. She also serves as Director for Civilians in Conflict at Kobo, building the community-driven data infrastructure needed for better humanitarian and human rights policy decisions, and continues to support a multi-university Cumulative Civilian Harm project addressing how military and civilian decision-makers account for harm to civilians in war.
Anna previously served as Executive Director of Georgetown Law's Center on National Security, where she designed a new ten-year strategy for the Center, raised over $13 million from foundations, individuals, law firms, and government, and led projects on civilian harm, tech governance, and justice for war crimes in Ukraine. Earlier, she founded the Ferencz International Justice Initiative at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, piloting locally-owned justice pathways in South Sudan, Myanmar, and Iraq. In government, she held senior roles at the White House National Security Council as Director of African Affairs, at the State Department's Office of Global Criminal Justice as Principal Deputy, and as Senior Advisor to the Under Secretary for Civilian Security helping establish the Department's Atrocities Prevention Secretariat. She began her career as a litigation associate at Davis Polk, where she launched the firm's international human rights pro bono practice and served on the trial team that won an acquittal for a client wrongly convicted of murder.
Anna holds a JD from Columbia Law School, where she was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and Skadden Fellow, and a BA from Duke University.
Fellowship Project: The humanitarian sector has made progress designing people-centered responses, but a gap persists in human rights and atrocity response policymaking: leaders who design interventions often lack foundational knowledge of community priorities and trauma science, producing cascading failures at the heart of violence cycles. With Harvard Humanitarian Initiative colleagues, Anna has led a multidisciplinary consortium over the past two years—the Atrocity Response Coalition (ARC) for Justice—bridging this gap by uniting survivor leaders, clinical psychologists, epidemiologists, transitional justice lawyers, and policy experts. With Professors Sikkink, Pham, and other ARC experts, Anna has two goals: (1) develop a human-centered, trauma-responsive, evidence-based ("HTE") framework for policymakers; and (2) build a training program helping survivor and policy leaders understand trauma's neurobiological and systemic dimensions and use community-based data more effectively in policy design.
Fellowship Project: The humanitarian sector has made progress designing people-centered responses, but a gap persists in human rights and atrocity response policymaking: leaders who design interventions often lack foundational knowledge of community priorities and trauma science, producing cascading failures at the heart of violence cycles. With Harvard Humanitarian Initiative colleagues, Anna has led a multidisciplinary consortium over the past two years—the Atrocity Response Coalition (ARC) for Justice—bridging this gap by uniting survivor leaders, clinical psychologists, epidemiologists, transitional justice lawyers, and policy experts. With Professors Sikkink, Pham, and other ARC experts, Anna has two goals: (1) develop a human-centered, trauma-responsive, evidence-based ("HTE") framework for policymakers; and (2) build a training program helping survivor and policy leaders understand trauma's neurobiological and systemic dimensions and use community-based data more effectively in policy design.