Dr. Sarah E. Mendelson

Dr. Sarah E. Mendelson was appointed the Director of the Human Rights and Security Initiative in January 2007 at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC. She is also a senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Program. Since coming to CSIS in 2001, she has led a wide range of projects concerning the security implications of human rights abuse. She has collaborated on a dozen public opinion surveys in Russia, tracking views on the war in Chechnya, military and police abuse, health, religious identity in the North Caucasus, youth politics, and most recently, young women's knowledge and experiences with human trafficking. She has written on the links between human trafficking and peacekeeping operations in the Balkans, and her research helped shape U.S. legislation and policies at NATO on this issue. In 2007-2008, she led a Washington-based working group on how to close the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility.

Before coming to CSIS, she was a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. She has worked since the early 1990s on issues related to human rights and democracy including in Moscow as a program officer with the National Democratic Institute in 1994 and 1995. Mendelson received her B.A. in history from Yale University, and her Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University. She held fellowships at Stanford University and Princeton University. Her current research is supported by grants from the Ford Foundation. She serves on the editorial board of International Security and is a member of the advisory committee for the Europe and Central Asia Division of Human Rights Watch, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

A frequent contributor to the media, she is the author of numerous peer-reviewed and public policy articles and Changing Course: Ideas, Politics and the Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Princeton University Press, 1998); The Power and Limits of NGOs: Transnational Networks and Post-Communist Societies (Columbia University Press, 2002), Barracks and Brothels: Peacekeepers and Human Trafficking in the Balkans (CSIS Press, 2005) and Closing Guantánamo: From Bumper Sticker to Blue Print (CSIS Press, 2008). For more on her work, visit, http://www.csis.org/hrs