ISIM Faculty and Staff

Roberta Cohen
Senior Associate
rcohen@brookings.edu

Roberta Cohen, a specialist in human rights and humanitarian issues, is Senior Associate at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University. She is also a Non-Resident Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies program at the Brookings Institution and a Senior Adviser to the Brookings Project on Internal Displacement, which she co-founded and co-directed for more than a decade with Dr. Francis Deng, former Representative of the UN Secretary-General on Internally Displaced Persons. Together with Deng she co-authored the first major study of internal displacement, Masses in Flight (Brookings Institution Press 1998) and received the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. She remains a principal adviser to the Representative of the UN Secretary-General on the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons Walter Kalin.

Cohen served as a public member of the US Delegation to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in 2003 and as a public member of the US Delegation to the Commission on Human Rights in 1998. During the Carter Administration, she served as a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights in the Department of State and a Senior Adviser to the US Delegation to the UN General Assembly and Commission on Human Rights. She also served as Executive Director of the International League for Human Rights, Honorary Secretary of the Parliamentary Human Rights Group (London), and as a consultant on human rights and humanitarian issues to international organizations, governments and NGOs.

Cohen has published about 100 articles on human rights and humanitarian issues and in 2002 won the DACOR (Diplomatic and Consular Officers, Retired -- State Department) Fiftieth Anniversary Award for Exemplary Writing on Foreign Affairs and Diplomacy.

She received an Honorary Doctorate of Law from the University of Bern in 2006, has an MA with distinction from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a B.A. from Barnard College, which awarded her its distinguished alumna award in 2005.

rcohen@brookings.edu