Katherine Southwick

Katherine Southwick is a Visiting Scholar at George Mason University’s School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution. She is a Doctoral Candidate in Law at the National University of Singapore, where her dissertation research relates to theories of rule of law for ethnically divided societies. Before returning to graduate study, Southwick worked for a decade on human rights, humanitarian advocacy, and legal reform in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Islands. For three and a half years, she worked for the American Bar Association Rule of Law Initiative (ABA ROLI) in Washington, DC, and the Philippines on programs relating to judicial reform, anti-trafficking in persons, and the ASEAN human rights system. In 2008, she was the Robert L. Bernstein Fellow at Refugees International in Washington, DC, where she carried out research and advocacy on the global problem of statelessness. She has also clerked for a federal district judge and practiced international arbitration in a major law firm. She has worked in the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the State Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser, and for human rights organizations in India and Uganda. Southwick grew up in Africa as the child of U.S. Foreign Service parents and holds both a BA and JD from Yale University.

Recently, Southwick’s writing on the Rohingya crisis in Myanmarand Bangladesh has appeared in various international media and scholarly outlets. She has worked with civil society groups to promote the passage of legislation in the U.S. Congress’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee imposing sanctions on senior Myanmar officials implicated in violence against the minority group. She continues to serve as an expert witness in asylum cases in the United States and Europe involving persons of Eritrean-Ethiopian origin. As co-leader of the Truman Asia Expert Group, Southwick has also recently organized an event on reassessing Congress’s role in foreign affairs, under the Trump Administration and after the midterm elections. She is particularly focused on connecting Truman members with experts and activists from Asia and bolstering women’s engagement in the organization’s activities.