About Me — Rachel Jamison.

I’m a pacifist human rights attorney and law professor who created the world’s largest funding system for military veterans to go Ukraine to fight. That might sound contradictory, but I don’t think it is.

I graduated from Berkeley Law and have spent my career in academia and working for small NGOs in post-conflict zones. I previously taught at Peking University in China and currently teach at New York University’s Abu Dhabi campus. I’ve worked on human rights and humanitarian law initiatives in Uganda, Sierra Leone, Lebanon, Cameroon, Ghana, and Afghanistan. I’m a pacifist. I think war should be avoided at all costs and I’ve seen the toll that war can take on people, even decades after it ends.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine doesn’t allow for a pacifist position, however. The options are only fighting or more fighting and so I’ve chosen the former option. The best way to end the war in Ukraine and stop violence is to arm Ukraine and get the best, most qualified people to help Ukraine so that is what I have chosen to do.

The night of Russia’s full-scale invasion I posted on Reddit that I would use my airline miles to fly a combat veteran or medic to Ukraine. That post went viral and attracted mass media coverage. I used the response to create a donor matching system for hundreds of people to use their airline miles to fly volunteers to and from…