20 Years After 9/11: Human Rights

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. As the anniversary approaches, SIS is hosting an event series to discuss and reflect upon how the attacks have reverberated over the past two decades and continue to impact global and domestic affairs.

During the third event of this series, SIS professor Shadi Mokhtari will moderate a panel discussion on the impacts of 9/11 on the human rights landscape in both America and the Middle East. Panelists include Nadje Al-Ali, a professor at Brown University; Jamil Dakwar, director of the ACLU’s Human Rights Program; and Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN). An audience Q&A will follow the conversation.

Registrants will receive an email confirmation containing the Zoom webinar link.

Biographies

Nadje Al-Ali is Robert Family Professor of International Studies and Professor of Anthropology and Middle East Studies at Brown University’s Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs. Her main research interests revolve around feminist activism and gendered mobilization, with a focus on Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, and the Kurdish political movement. Her publications include What Kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq; Women and War in the Middle East: Transnational Perspectives; Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present; and Secularism, Gender and the State in the Middle East. Her co-edited book with Deborah al-Najjar, We are Iraqis: Aesthetics & Politics in a Time of War, won the 2014 Arab-American book prize for non-fiction. Professor Al-Ali is on the advisory board of kohl: a journal of body and gender research and has been involved in several feminist organizations and campaigns transnationally.

Jamil Dakwar is the Director of the ACLU’s Human Rights Program. Before he joined the ACLU in 2004, he worked at Human Rights Watch and before he moved to the United States he was senior attorney with Adalah: the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel. Mr. Dakwar is member of the New York State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. He teaches human rights courses at Hunter College, Bard College and John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Sarah Leah Whitson is the Executive Director of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN). Previously, she served as executive director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa Division from 2004 – 2020, overseeing the work of the division in 19 countries with staff located in 10 countries. She has led dozens of advocacy and investigative missions throughout the region, focusing on issues of armed conflict, accountability, legal reform, migrant workers, and human rights. Previously, she worked in New York for Goldman, Sachs & Co. and Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and is on the boards of the Artistic Freedom Initiative, Freedom Forward, and ALQST for Human Rights.

SIS Professor Shadi Mokhtari (moderator) specializes in human rights, Middle East Politics and Political Islam. She has an extensive background in human rights and women’s rights issues in the Middle East and Muslim World. She is the author of After Abu Ghraib: Exploring Human Rights in America and the Middle East, which was selected as the co-winner of the 2010 American Political Science Association Human Rights Section Best Book Award. From 2003 to 2013, she served as the Editor in Chief of The Muslim World Journal of Human Rights. Since 2011, she has been looking at how human rights dynamics and discourses have changed in and vis-a-vis the Middle East in the wake of unfolding popular protests and political transitions.

Consider joining us for the last event in this series:

US Domestic Response: https://sis911usresponse.eventbrite.com