Carr Center Welcomes Human Rights Fellows

Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy recently announced its new crop of fellows—a group including a variety of human rights practitioners, policy makers, authors and advocates.

The Carr fellows will spend the year at center, located at the Kennedy School of Government, examining human rights issues around the world.

Binaifer Nowrojee, author of Shattered Lives: Sexual Violence During the Rwandan Genocide and Its Aftermath, will examine how international tribunals can seek justice for rape survivors.

Nowrojee will be the first person to hold fellowships simultaneously at the Carr center and the Boston Consortium for Gender, Peace, Security and Human Rights.

Other Carr fellows include Ivan Arreguin-Toft, who served as an intelligence analyst in the United States Army in Germany and will spend the year focusing on human rights violations during wartime.

Arreguin-Toft said he feels that his work is even more important in light of recent military activity around the world.

“The current political climate places too much weight on the use of military force to solve what are essentially law-enforcement and political problems,” Arreguin-Toft said.

“The center holds out the possibility of informing and ultimately changing U.S. foreign policy in constructive ways,” he added, “and for that reason its work is vital. I wanted to be a part of that.”

Arreguin-Toft and Nowrojee are accompanied by four other newcomers to the Carr center, including Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf, a Sudanese anthropologist and visiting professor of African and gender studies at Brown University; Robert Choo ’90, a former worker at Save the Children Vietnam and Myanmar; Vjosa Dobruna, a Kosovar pediatric neurologist and human rights activist; and Max Glaser, a former senior policy maker at the humanitarian relief organization Doctors Without Borders.

Glaser, who said he hopes to publish an essay during his fellowship, added that he was eager to begin work at the Carr center.

“Having recently left Doctors Without Borders, I was looking to reconnect with my academic background and spend a bit of time reflecting on my humanitarian experience,” he said.

This year’s fellowship will give Glaser the opportunity to do just that, said the Carr center’s Executive Director Michelle Greene.

“I am very excited about this year’s fellows,” Greene said. “They seem to be a strong group and are a nice mix of practitioners, activists and academics.”

The fellows will begin internal colloquia this week at the Kennedy School and Jill Clarke, a staff assistant at the Carr center, said discussions are currently underway regarding the scheduling of forums at which students may speak directly with the fellows.

The Carr center was established in 1999 through an $18 million gift from Kennedy School graduate Gregory C. Carr.

Now in its fourth year, the fellowship program annually gives between six and 10 fellows the opportunity to study at Harvard.