Center for
International Studies
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02139-4307

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phrj@mit.edu

Past Fellows

Anat BILETZKI

Professor Anat Biletzki has been teaching at the philosophy department in Tel Aviv University since 1979. She has traveled widely, as a visiting scholar and fellow at, among others, Cambridge University, Harvard University, Boston University, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the Wittgenstein Archives in Bergen, Norway. Her publications include Paradoxes (1996), Talking Wolves: Thomas Hobbes on the Language of Politics and the Politics of Language (1997), What Is Logic? (2002), (Over)Interpreting Wittgenstein (2003), and articles on Ludwig Wittgenstein, Thomas Hobbes, analytic philosophy, political thought, digital culture, and human rights. She has served as chair of the Graduate School of Cultural Studies and of the Philosophy Department at Tel Aviv University and is a member of Israel's Ministry of Education committee for teaching philosophy in high-schools.

Outside academia Biletzki has been active in the peace movement and in several human rights projects in Israel for over 25 years. During the first intifada she was one of the founders of the peace movement "The Twenty-First Year" – a group devoted to promoting civil objection to the occupation. In those same years she also worked with the Beta Committee which attempted to coordinate rehabilitation efforts for the West Bank village, Beta. In 1997-1998 Biletzki helped establish the human rights movement "Open Doors" which worked on liberating Palestinian administrative detainees in Israel – especially 11 detainees who had been incarcerated, without trial or due process, for over five years. Since 1996 Biletzki has been active as one of the leaders of Hacampus Lo Shotek – The Campus Is Not Silent – the most vociferous and influential campus group, made up of faculty and students at Tel Aviv University. She is on the board of FFIPP-Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, was chairperson of the board of B'Tselem - the Israeli Information center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories (2001-2006), and is often invited abroad for public lecturing, for seminars at human rights conferences, for interviews, and for meetings with human rights counterparts. In 2005 she was chosen as one of "50 most influential women in Israel" by Globes, the Israeli business monthly, and was nominated among the "1000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize 2005." She has presented the issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with emphasis on the evils of occupation, all over the world (Boston, Princeton, Atlanta, London, Oslo, Bergen, Helsinki, Munich, Berlin, Istanbul); but it is in Israel – in the school system, in youth movements, and in public arenas – that she invests most of her efforts in public education for human rights and peace.

Dr Jung-Hoon KIM

Dr. Jung-Hoon Kim is Associate Professor of Law and Social Science College, Seo-Kyeong University in Seoul, Korea. He has been researching on the issues of Environmental Justice and Civil Society. As one of his recent books, Resource –Recycling society and NGO (Dae-Young Publishing Co., 2006) was focused on both new environmental value and NGO’s policy participation. He was a senior researcher in Seoul Metropolitan Government, a member of Presidential Policy Committee of Central Government in Korea. He was also involved at Citizens’Coalition for Environmental Justice (NGO) and Korea Waste Movement Network (NGO). As a Fulbright scholar, he researched at Harvard University in 2007. He is now researching into “Environmental Conflicts in Asia” and “Renewing Urban Waste Management System from the Environmental Justice and Human Rights Point of View” at MIT in 2008. The first study will be focused at the environmental conflictions and human rights problems in the transboundary movement of electronic waste (e-waste) with respect to the process of the importation and treatment of e-waste. The second study will be focused at municipal solid waste (MSW) management renovation for reducing global warming risk from the point of environmental justice.

Dr. Florian WETTSTEIN

Dr. Florian Wettstein is currently a Sessional Assistant Professor in the Business and Society Program in the Division of Social Science at York University in Toronto. As per July 2007 he will be an Assistant Professor in the Department for Ethics and Business Law at University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis. Before joining the PHRJ, Florian was a research associate at the Institute for Business Ethics at University of St. Gallen in Switzerland and a visiting scholar at Carroll School of Management at Boston College. His PHRJ research focused on human rights obligations of multinational corporations, derived from a framework of rights-based cosmopolitan justice.

Dr. Louise DRUKE

Dr. Louise Druke is Visiting Professor at the New Bulgarian University, Sofia and a senior executive with UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) with more than 30 years of international human rights and refugee work. Since 1974 with Amnesty International and since 1977 with UNHCR, she has headed up offices/missions in Europe, South East Asia and Central Asia, Latin America, Africa and is currently involved in multilateral affairs and public policy in Bulgaria, focusing on refugee protection and human rights. Dr. Druke will come to MIT initially on a part-time basis in Spring 2004 as a PHRJ Fellow to research “Human Rights and Justice in the 20th and 21st Centuries in International Affairs and Refugee Policy with an Emphasis on Post-Communist Countries in Transition.”

Miriam ZOLL

PHRJ Fellow, 2005

Miriam Zoll has more than 20 years experience in the public policy and international development sector, with expertise in HIV/AIDS, orphans and vulnerable children, gender equity and human rights. She worked for the United Nations from 1999-2005 on such initiatives as the Beijing Plus-5 Review and the UN Millennium Peace Prize for Women. From 2004-2005 she was the lead author and analyst for the Rapid Country Assessment, Analysis and Action Planning Process for Orphans and Vulnerable Children in Sub-Saharan Africa. Sponsored by USAID in partnership with UNICEF, UNAIDS, WFP and The Futures Group, this unprecedented initiative was the first consolidated effort in the history of the HIV/AIDS pandemic to track orphan policies and programs at the global, state, donor and local level in 17 sub-Saharan African nations.

Zoll's PHRJ research illustrates how international donors can improve support and care to millions of African OVC by shifting significant funds from the national to the community level, where the vast majority of orphan care is delivered by a predominantly impoverished female volunteer labor force. Zoll has presented papers on this subject at Oxford University, the London-based Voluntary Services Organization and the American India Foundation. Her articles are scheduled for publication in the Royal Tropical Institutes Gender, Society and Development journal and the Feminist Economics journal.

Zoll is also the founding co-producer of the Ms. Foundation for Womens Take Our Daughters To Work program, an annual event since 1992 focusing public attention on girlsdevelopment and gender inequity in the work place. To contact her, please email miriamzoll@mac.com.

Dr. Gary TROELLER

Dr. Troeller is a senior executive with the Office of UN High Commissioner for Refugees with over 30 years of experience in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe and North America where he has been principally involved in diplomatic/multilateral affairs, focusing on humanitarian issues and human rights in practice as well as policy formulation. Prior to joining UNHCR he worked in journalism, banking and applied research in Brussels, Frankfurt and Geneva. While completing his Ph.D. at Cambridge University he was a Research Associate at Oxford University. Before joining UNHCR and concurrent with his work with the Refugee Agency he has held teaching appointments in international relations in US, Japanese and Korean universities and been a guest lecturer at over 50 research and policy institutes, universities, international conferences and business fora in 16 countries. Publications in several languages which he has authored, edited or contributed to, include books on the Middle East, energy policy, and international relations, as well numerous articles on current affairs in academic/ policy journals and the media. At MIT he will focus on the subject of "Migration Politics, Refugees and International Relations in the Post Cold War Era.

Professor Obiora Chinedu OKAFOR

Obiora is an AssoJune 1, 2008 Toronto, Canada, as well as a faculty member at York’s Centre for Refugee Studies. He has previously taught at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada; Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada; and the University of Nigeria, and served as a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program. Also, he has recently served an SSRC-MacArthur Foundation Fellow on Peace and Security in a Changing World. He holds a Ph.D and an LL.M from the University of British Columbia, and an LL.M and LL.B from the University of Nigeria. He was awarded the Governor-General’s Gold Medal for his doctoral work, and was conferred with the Teaching Excellence Award of the Osgoode Hall Law School in 2002. Dr. Okafor is the author of Re-Defining Legitimate Statehood (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 2000) and two other forthcoming monographs. He is also a co-editor of Legitimate Governance in Africa: International and Domestic Legal Perspectives (The Hague: Kluwer, 1999); Humanizing Our Global Order: Essays in Honour of Ivan Head (University of Toronto Press, 2003); and The Third World and International Order: Law, Politics and Globalization (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2003). He has published widely in learned journals including Human Rights Quarterly, the Harvard International Law Journal, International Journal of Refugee Law, International Journal of Minority and Group Rights, Buffalo Human Rights Law Review, Netherlands International Law Review, and the Journal of African Law. He teaches international human rights, advanced public international law, refugee law, and immigration law and during the Fall 2004 semester joined MIT’s Program on Human Rights and Justice to pursue a research project entitled “Refugee Rights after 9/11: A Comparative Analysis of the Canadian and USA Regimes.”

Arturo Alvarado MENDOZA (2003-04) is a sociologist whose recent work has focused on issues of justice, insecurity human rights, and policing in Mexico. His work draws on substantial experience in this area and contributes to the diagnosis of the administration of justice and police organization in Mexico, as well as the mapping of the law enforcement agencies and special units at the federal, state, and local levels. Of particular concern for Alvarado's work is the monitoring and regulation of police corruption, as well as the institutional limitations of police organizations. Some attention will also be given to police-civilian relations and countervailing efforts to "militarize and civilianize" police institutions.

Shahid NANAVATI

An architect by profession, Shahid is a director of an NGO in India which works in collaboration with the Aga Khan Foundation. He holds Master’s degrees from both MIT and Osmania University in India and additionally studied Planning at the University of Waterloo, Canada. Shahid has worked on various architectural projects in India, Africa and Canada. At MIT, his research on “Village Adoption Schemes for the Developing World” earned him recognition at the International Sustainable Development Forum–Sweden and at the World Bank. He received the Carroll Wilson Award in 2003 for his efforts to save the artists of Gujarat during and after the ethnic riots of 2002, and he served as President of the U.S. students’ Human Rights and Justice Campaign for Bhopal in 2003-2004. In 2004, Shahid will spearhead the housing campaign for new immigrants in Canadian cities.

Gabrielle WATSON

PHRJ Fellow, May 2003-May 2004

Gabrielle is a former MIT Urban Planning graduate student and was Co-Director of the Centro de Derechos Económicos y Sociales in Quito, Ecuador. She is the co-author of Advocacy for Social Justice: A Global Action and Reflection Guide (Kumarian, 2001), a book project carried out with Oxfam America and the Advocacy Institute. She has joined the PHRJ to work on her research, "Promoting Export Credit Agency Accountability to International Human Rights Law," developing a proposal for ECAs to adopt human-rights impact assessment as part of their project approval and monitoring protocols.

June-Ho JANG

PHRJ Fellow, ltgrey to December 2003.

Professor Jang is the Head of the Department of Urban Information at Anyang University in South Korea. His research focus for the year at MIT is "A Study on Public Participation as an Organizational Development Process for Community Plannings and Activities in the U.S.A., Japan, and Korea," which is being supervised by DUSP Professor Alice Amsden. He has studied community planning based on public participation in Tokyo University, during the master and Ph.D. programs in the University. After his Ph.D. course, he has studied and planned many community development programs in Korea.

Flore TRAUTMANN

PHRJ Fellow, September to December 2002.

Flore is allocataire de recherche at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques (Paris, France). She studies political consumerism; her dissertation focused on political boycotts in France. Ms.Trautmann is particularly interested in understanding the complex relationship between individual and collective forms of boycotts and works on labor unions' and civic associations' utilizations (and non-utilizations) of boycott. She also tries to understand, at an individual level, the motivations and representations of boycotts. Other research interests include globalization and social movements.

Flore Trautmann has also worked on Internet uses inside ATTAC (Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens, a well-known French 'antiglobalization' organization) and has published Internet at the Service of Democracy? The Case of ATTAC, Cahiers du Cevipof, October 2001, n.30 (published in French, available at

http://www.cevipof.msh-paris.fr/publications/cahiers/C30.html)