Janine di Giovanni

Janine di Giovanni is a Senior Fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute of Global Affairs, and a Professor of Practice, Human Rights. In 2017-18, she was the Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and a Professor of Practice in Human Rights at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). She is most recently the author of three-time award winning book, The Morning They Came For Us: Dispatches from Syria, which was deemed “searing and necessary” by the New York Times, named one of the best human rights books in 2016, and has been translated into 30 languages.

Before joining CFR in 2017, Di Giovanni was the Middle East Editor at Newsweek reporting mainly on human rights abuses and investigating war crimes. A recent Pakis Scholar at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Di Giovanni has extensive experience focusing on international law and international security.

She is a leading expert analyst on the Middle East, conflict prevention, strategic communications, human rights, and global terrorism. She has investigated war crimes and reported war on four continents over the past three decades. She is the subject of two long-format documentaries, including the widely acclaimed 7 Days in Syria. Her TED talk “What I saw in the War” has received nearly 1 million hits on YouTube.

Di Giovanni has reported widely on war, conflict, and its aftermath in the Middle East, the Balkans, and Africa. She has witnessed the siege of Sarajevo, the fall of Grozny, the destruction of Srebrenica and Rwanda in 1994 as well as more than a dozen active conflicts where she was a front-line witness. Her documentation of war crimes has resulted in seven books and her work has been used to cite atrocities in later tribunals.

She is also non-resident International Security Fellow at the New America Foundation and an Associate Fellow at The Geneva Centre for Security Policy. She is a former Ochberg Fellow at Columbia School of Journalism, given in recognition of her work with victims of war trauma.

As a communicator, she is a frequent moderator of high-level panels and roundtables, an analyst on foreign policy at conferences and on major international news channels (CNN, BBC, France 24) and has worked for the Council on Foreign Relations, the World Economic Forum, the World Bank, the UN, Harvard’s Kennedy School, Princeton, the LSE, and many other institutions. In 2014, she also worked for the Center for Conflict, Negotiation and Recovery at Central European University with a focus on transitional justice in Aleppo.

Di Giovanni has won more than twelve major awards for her extensive work in war and conflict zones and during humanitarian crisis in Palestine/Israel, Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Albania, East Timor, Zimbabwe, Somalia, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Rwanda, South Africa, Egypt, Syria, Libya, Tunisia, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bahrain, UAE, Algeria, Turkey, Greece, Vietnam, and other countries. She is the 2016 recipient of the IWMF Courage Award, in recognition for her long body of work in war zones.

She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Di Giovanni currently lives in NYC and holds American, British, and French nationalities.

For more information and for her archives, please visit her website.