Manu Bhagavan
Senior Fellow, RBI
manu.bhagavan@hunter.cuny.edu

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Manu Bhagavan is Professor of History and Human Rights at Hunter College and the Graduate Center-The City University of New York, and Senior Fellow at the Ralph Bunche Institute.   He is the author of The Peacemakers (2012, 2013) and Sovereign Spheres (2003), the (co-) editor of 4 books, and is currently writing a biography of Madam Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, the world’s first celebrity diplomat from the Global South.  His edited volume on India and the Cold War is in production with the University of North Carolina Press and is expected in 2019.  Manu’s Quartz essay on global authoritarianism went viral internationally and was translated into German as the lead, cover article of the May 2016 Berliner Republik magazine.   He is the recipient of a 2006 Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and is an elected member of the Pacific Council on International Policy.   He regularly appears in the media to comment on global affairs. Follow @ManuBhagavan.

Deborah Dwork
Senior Scholar-in-Residence, RBI
ddwork@gc.cuny.edu
CV

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Debórah Dwork is Senior Scholar-in Residence at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Pathbreaking in her early oral recording of Holocaust survivors, Dwork weaves their narratives into the history she writes.  Among her award-winning books, Children With A Star introduced a child-centered approach to historical investigation; Flight from the Reich opened the geographic view of the Holocaust and integrated the refugee experience into its history; Auschwitz drew the crucial connection between industrial killing and a society that believed it was involved in constructive activity; and Holocaust was the first book to negotiate the chasm between two histories: that of the perpetrators and that of the victims; the Nazis’ push towards a “Final Solution,” and the Jews’ reactions and responses.  Internationally renowned for her scholarship on Holocaust history, she is also a leading authority on university education in this field. As the Founding Director of the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and the Inaugural Rose Professor of Holocaust History at Clark University, she envisioned and grew the Strassler Center into an eminent institute for doctoral training in Holocaust History and Genocide Studies.

A member of the American delegation to the 34-state International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, she has been, inter alia, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Shapiro Senior Scholar at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Bildner Scholar at Rutgers University.

Ellen Chesler
Senior Fellow, RBI
ellen.chesler@gmail.com

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With over thirty years of experience in government, philanthropy, and academia, Ellen Chesler is widely respected for the practical and intellectual perspectives she brings to public policy. Ellen is author of the critically celebrated Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America. A finalist for PEN’s 1993 Martha Albrand award in nonfiction, the book was released in a new paperback edition in 2007. She is co-editor of Women and Girls Rising: Progress and Resistance around the World, a volume in RBI’s Global Institutions Series, and he is co-editor of Where Human Rights Begin: Health, Sexuality and Women in the New Millennium, Rutgers University Press, 2005. She has also written numerous essays and articles for academic anthologies and for prominent newspapers, journals, periodicals, and blogs. For many years she was a Senior Fellow and Program Director in Women’s Rights and Reproductive Health at the Open Society Foundations.

Ellen has extensive experience as a voluntary leader. She is a member and former chair of the Advisory Committee of the Women’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch. She served two terms on the board of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (2006-2013) and chaired the board of the International Women’s Health Coalition (1997-2003). She has also long been active in Democratic politics, especially on behalf of women candidates, including New York Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Kirsten Gillibrand. She served as a U.S. public delegate to the 2009, 2010, and 2015 meetings of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.
Early in her professional career, Ellen was chief of staff to New York City Council President Carol Bellamy, who was the first woman ever elected to citywide office in New York.

Lydia Wilson
Senior Fellow, RBI
lydia.wilson@hmc.ox.ac.uk

Lydia Wilson’s main affiliation is research fellow at the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict at the University of Oxford, and also holds affiliations at the University of Cambridge (Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies) and the International University of Erbil, Iraq. Current research involves projects throughout the MENA region in the field of Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism, with recent and current clients including UNICEF, UNDP, the State Department, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (UK government), and various international NGOs. Outputs include policy white papers, research reports, academic papers and journalism, with a book for Penguin currently being written (on global violent extremism of various ideologies). She is also in the middle of filming for a 3-part documentary series on the history of writing, from Aboriginal rock art in Australia to hieroglyphics, the birth of the alphabet, calligraphy, printing – all the way up to digitisation and emojis. This will be broadcast on the BBC and PBS (and Arte in Europe, though without a presenter).

Peter J. Hoffman is Assistant Professor of International Relations in the Graduate Program in International Affairs at The New School and Research Fellow at the RBIIS. His research and writing focus on the dynamics of war and global responses, concentrating primarily on the international humanitarian system. Other major areas of his work encompass the private military and security sector; the United Nations; human rights; U.S. foreign policy; and, global commodity chains. His publications include numerous policy reports for organizations such as the National Committee on American Foreign Policy and Médecins Sans Frontières. Hoffman’s first book, Sword & Salve: Confronting New Wars and Humanitarian Crises (co-author, Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), was a political history of the interaction between security and humanitarianism. His current project examines changing beliefs of humanitarian agencies regarding the use of private security contractors to protect aid workers and scrutinizes the consequences of the increasing use of hired guns by relief organizations, and will be published as Mercy and Mercenaries: The Politics of Private Security Companies Protecting Humanitarian Agencies (Routledge, forthcoming).

James O.C. Jonah retired as under-secretary-general for political affairs (1992-94) after more than three decades in the UN secretariat, including as political adviser in the Office of the Secretary-General (1970-79), assistant secretary-general for personnel services (1979-82), of the Office for Field Operations and External Activities (1982-87), and for special political questions (1991-2). After leaving the UN, he became Sierra Leone’s permanent representative to the UN (1996-98) and minister of finance, development and economic planning (1998-2001). He was born in Sierra Leone and educated at Lincoln University, Boston University, Harvard Law School, and MIT. He is currently a senior fellow at the Ralph Bunche Institute. His publications include his autobiography, What Price the Survival of the United Nations? Memoirs of a Veteran International Civil Servant.

Non Resident Research Fellows

Luca Storti
Research Fellow, RBI
Associate Professor of Economic Sociology at the University of Torino
luca.storti@unito.it

Luca Storti is an Associate Professor of Economic Sociology at the University of Torino (since November 2018). His main research interests involve Mafia’s processes of territorial expansion at both national and international level, and the topic of international organized crime groups at the boundaries between legal and illegal markets. Among his recent publications: “The territorial expansion of mafia-type organized crime. The case of the Italian mafia in Germany”, in Crime, Law and Social Change (2014, with R. Sciarrone); “Social class and wealth inequality in Italy over 20 years, 1993-2014”, in Journal of Modern Italian Studies” (2018, with J. Dagnes and M. Filandri), and “Undisciplined, selfish big Babies? The cultural framing of the Italian financial crisis”, in Modern Italy (2018, with J. Dagnes and J. González-Díez).

Stephen Browne is Fellow at the Ralph Bunche Institute and Director of the FUNDS project. He worked for more than 30 years in different organisations of the UN development system. More recently he was convenor of the UN system poverty task-force, and focal point in UNDP, New York, for poverty and social policy, finance for development and capacity development. His last UN job was Deputy Executive Director of the International Trade Centre in Geneva. He was trained as an economist at Cambridge and Paris Universities and worked as an economic consultant in London before joining the UN. He has researched, written and published books and articles on aid and development throughout his career. His latest books include The United Nations Industrial Development Organization (Routledge, 2012), The UN Development Programme and System (Routledge, 2011), and The International Trade Centre (Routledge, 2011).

Álvaro de Soto is a Peruvian diplomat and renowned international mediator. He led the negotiations which brought an end to the war in El Salvador; he has also served as the political advisor to Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Special Envoy for Myanmar, the Special Advisor on Cyprus, and the Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process.

Louis Emmerij is a Senior Research Fellow at the RBIIS, and was a Co-Director of the United Nations Intellectual History Project from 1999-2011. He has served as Director of the World Employment Programme of the International Labour Organization (ILO), Rector of the Institute of Social Studies at The Hague and Professor of Development Economics, President of the OECD Development Center, and Special Advisor to the President of the Inter-American Development Bank. Emmerij has published more than 130 articles in the fields of the economics of education, labour market questions, economic and social policy, and development studies. Among his more recent books are UN Voices: The Struggle for Economic Development and Social Justice (with Tom Weiss, Tatiana Carayannis and Richard Jolly), Indiana University Press, 2005. The Power of UN Ideas: Lessons from the First 60 Years (with Richard Jolly and Tom Weiss), United Nations Intellectual History Project, 2005.

Sir Richard Jolly is Honorary Professor at the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex and from 2000 to 2010 was Senior Research Fellow and co-Director of the UN Intellectual History Project at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Before this, Richard Jolly was for nearly 15 years an Assistant Secretary-General of the UN as Deputy Executive Director of UNICEF and from 1996 to 2000, Principal Coordinator of the widely-acclaimed Human Development Report. He has co-authored some 20 books and over 100 articles on development and on UN history, including UN Contributions to Development Thinking and Practice and UN Ideas That Changed the World. His most recent book is UNICEF: Global Governance that Works (Routledge, 2014).

Rama Mani directs the project on “Ending Mass Atrocities: Echoes in Southern Cultures.” She is a Senior Research Associate of the Centre for International Studies at the University of Oxford and a councilor of the World Future Council, Hamburg. She previously was Executive Director of the International Centre for Ethnic Studies in Colombo, Director of the New Issues in Security Course at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, and a policy advisor and strategy manager on conflict in Africa to Oxfam (GB), with postings in Ethiopia and Uganda. She has a PhD in Political Science from the University of Cambridge, and an MA in International Affairs from Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Beyond Retribution: Seeking Justice in the Shadows of War (2002 and 2007), and several journal articles and book chapters.

Mónica Serrano is Professor of International Relations at El Colegio de México, Senior Research Associate at the Centre for International Studies at the University of Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies. She was the founding Executive Director of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect (2008-11), Research and Honorary Fellow at the Institute of Latin American Studies, University of London (1990-97), Research Associate at the IISS (1996), and a MacArthur Research Fellow at Oxford University´s Centre for International Studies (1999-2002). She has written extensively on international security and Latin America, with particular reference to international institutions, security, human rights, transnational crime, and civil-military relations. Her recent books include: Human Rights Regimes in the Americas (2009); Mexico’s Security Failure: Collapse into Criminal Violence (2012); Transitional Justice and Democratic Consolidation: Eastern Europe and Latin America (forthcoming); and The Responsibility to Protect in Latin America: The New Map (forthcoming).