Upcoming Human Rights Events at Columbia University

October 13. Kathryn Sikkink, “The Justice Cascade.”

5:30 p.m., Kraft Center, 606 West 115th Street.

Kathryn Sikkink, the seminal figure in the creation of the modern field of international human rights in political science, will preview her forthcoming book on the turn to individual criminal accountability for crimes against humanity and genocide, The Justice Cascade (Norton). Sikkink, the Regents Professor and holder of the McKnight Presidential Chair in Political Science at the University of Minnesota, is the co-author of Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics, which won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Sikkink earned her Ph.D. in political science at Columbia University in 1988.

Discussants: Richard Dicker, director of Human Rights Watch's international justice program; Robert O. Keohane, Professor of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, and past president of the American Political Science Association.

Beverages and hors d’oeuvres at 5:30; Sikkink’s presentation at 6.

October 20. Beth Simmons, “Mobilizing for Human Rights.”

5:30 p.m., 1501 International Affairs Building, 420 W. 118th Street.

Beth Simmons, the Clarence Dillion Professor of International Relations in the Harvard government department, will present her 2009 book, Mobilizing for Human Rights, which Kathryn Sikkink praised as “the most important new work by a social scientist on international law and human rights.” Her previous book, Who Adjusts? Domestic Sources of Foreign Economic Policy, won the 1995 American Political Science Association Woodrow Wilson Award for the best book in government, politics, or international relations. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Simmons earned her Ph.D. in government at Harvard University in 1991.

Discussants: Kenneth Roth, President, Human Rights Watch; Professor Alexander Cooley, Barnard College political science department.

Beverages and hors d’oeuvres at 5:30; Simmons’s presentation at 6.

November 11. The Politics of International Corruption Ratings.

4:00 p.m., International Affairs Building, 420 W. 118th Street.

Mlada Bukovansky, is Associate Professor of Political Science at Smith College. Her work examines the role of evolving norms and institutions in the international system. She is the author of Legitimacy and Power Politics: the American and French Revolutions in International Political Culture (Princeton University Press 2002) and is currently working on a book Hypocrisy and Legitimacy in International Institutions: Hegemony, Contestation, Corrosion. Bukovansky has published extensively on the rise of the “anti-corruption” regime.

Nathaniel Heller is Managing Director of Global Integrity, a leading non-governmental organization that generates, synthesizes, and disseminates information on governance and corruption trends around the world, including the annual Global Integrity Index. Heller is an award-winning journalist who has also worked at the State Department and served as a foreign policy fellow to the late Senator Kennedy. He oversees the methodology development and recruitment of experts for the Global Integrity Index.

Tim Frye is the Marshall D. Shulman Professor of Post-Soviet Foreign Policy and Director of Columbia University’s Harriman Institute. His research and teaching interests are in comparative politics and political economy with a focus on the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. He is the author of Brokers and Bureaucrats: Building Markets in Russia, (Michigan Press 2000) and Incredible Transformation: Building States and Markets after Communism (Cambridge University Press 2010). He is currently working on a book manuscript, Property Rights and Property Wrongs: What Russia Teaches Us About the Rule of Law. He has worked as a consultant for the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Feb. 10. New Research on Transitional Justice.

5:15 p.m., 1501 International Affairs Building, 420 W. 118th Street.

Aryeh Neier, founder of Human Rights Watch and currently President of the Open Society Institute, and Tina Rosenberg, winner of the 1995 National Book Award for “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts after Communism,” serve as discussant for new scholarly research on transitional justice, with an emphasis on the post-communist states. Discussing their new or forthcoming books are:

Monika Nalepa, professor at Notre Dame University, author of Skeletons in the Closet: Transitional Justice in Post-Communist Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2010), answers the puzzle of why so many transitional justice laws were passed by neo-Communist parties and explains how lustration strategies dealt with the unreliability of information in the archives.

Lara Nettelfield, professor at Simon Fraser University and a post-doctoral fellow at the Harriman Institute Columbia, is the author of Courting Democracy in Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Hague Tribunal's Impact in a Postwar State (Cambridge University Press, 2010), which former Hague prosecutor Richard Goldstone has called “essential reading, well balanced and realistic.”

Ruti Teitel, Ernst C. Stiefel Professor of Comparative Law, and Associate Director, Center for International Law, at New York Law School, and Visiting Professor, London School of Economics, coined the term transitional justice in her book, Transitional Justice (Oxford 2000). She will preview her forthcoming book, Humanity’s Law.

Leslie Vinjamuri, professor at the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies, author of “Trials and Errors: Principle and Pragmatism in International Justice,” International Security, winter 2003-04, and a forthcoming book on transitional justice.

Beverages and hors d’oeuvres at 5:15; panel begins at 5:45.