Scholars

Tine Destrooper is the director of Justice Visions and a professor at the Faculty of Law and Criminology of Ghent University. She is also a member of the Human Rights Centre at Ghent University.

Her research focuses on victim engagement in transitional justice. She currently carries out a cross-case analysis of the role of documentation in transitional justice. She is also the coordinator of a cross-institutional project on future-proofing human rights accountability, and is engaged in various case studies regarding transitional justice in aparadigmatic contexts.

Her research has been supported by three European Research Council grants (Starting Grant 804515, Consolidator Grant 101171170, Proof of Concept 101212937), as well as several grants by the Flemish Foundation for Scientific Research and the Special Research Fund of Ghent University.

In 2023 she was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to undertake research at Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights, and she was a Marie Sklodowska Curie fellow at the Institut d’Études Avancées in Paris the following year.

Prior to this, she held academic positions at various European and American institutions, including Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin (2016-2017), New York University’s Law School (2015-2016), the Universities of Antwerp and Leuven (2013-2015), Leiden University (2012-2013), and the European University Institute (2008-2012). Here she conducted research on the consequences of violent conflict and the role of civil society in dealing with the aftermath of violent conflict.

Before joining Ghent University, she was the managing director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice in at New York University, where she gained experience in managing and publishing policy-oriented research, and where she worked together with researchers, civil society organisations and policymakers at various levels; and the director of the Flemish Peace Institute – an independent research centre with the Flemish Parliament.

Dr Tendayi Bloom is a Political and Legal Theorist who is interested in questions of noncitizenship, statelessness, and human mobility. Her current work explores these themes in the context of Global Migration Governance.

She is author of Noncitizen Power: Agency and the Politics of Migration (Bloomsbury, 2023) and Noncitizenism: Recognising Noncitizen Capabilities in a World of Citizens (Routledge, 2018). She is co-editor most recently of Statelessness, Governance, and the Problem of Citizenship (Manchester University Press, 2021) and Understanding Statelessness (Routledge, 2017). She also writes a range of academic articles and policy documents. Downloadable versions of most of her publications are available from her academia profile. She is currently researching aspects of noncitizenship in global governance and implications of theoretical noncitizenism for understandings of citizenship.

Ngozika Anthonia Obi-Ani is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History and International Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. She did her PhD on “the Nigeria-Biafra war and the Occupation of Nsukka and Enugu Areas:1967-1979”. Her research focuses on social and political history, women, gender and conflict studies. Ngozika Anthonia is currently working on, “Uneasy Peace since the Civil War: A Bottom-Up Approach Perspective”. She is a member of Historical Society of Nigeria, Lagos Studies Association (LSA), Conflict Research Network West Africa (CORN) and an African Humanities Program (AHP) fellow. She is also an alumni of Partnership for African Social & Governance Research (PASGR), Nairobi, Kenya.

Michael Richard Katagaya is a governance practitioner and social entrepreneur whose work sits at the intersection of democracy, social justice, technology, and livelihoods. As Co-Founder and Team Leader of Evidence and Methods Lab (EML), a Ugandan civil society organisation that has implemented projects across the continent, he has spent nearly a decade building the civic infrastructure that connects citizens to the decisions made in their name — tools that open up public spending and government information to ordinary people, carry citizen feedback to those in office, and measure whether anyone answers. Much of this work concerns public service delivery: where it fails, why, and what it takes to make institutions respond to the people they serve. That body of work has reached more than five million citizens across a number of African countries.

His research at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights asks how human rights frameworks should respond as democratic life moves onto digital infrastructure — infrastructure that is increasingly the site of deliberate state intervention. Drawing on EML’s monitoring and survey work in Uganda and comparative cases across the continent, he examines state-directed digital suppression as a violation of the right to political participation under Article 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and is developing a documentation framework designed to give these violations the same evidentiary rigour long applied to physical ones. His wider interest is in the conditions under which digital civic infrastructure enables or forecloses participation, extending beyond elections to how citizens access services, shape policy, and hold institutions to account between electoral cycles, and to what accountability is owed them when that infrastructure is withdrawn.

That work rests on a career in evidence and public administration, built inside government and across regional civil society - among them Uganda’s Office of the Prime Minister, where he supported the DFID-funded Strengthening Evidence-Based Decision-Making programme across ministries and districts, and Twaweza East Africa, where he designed the monitoring and learning systems behind citizen engagement and education programmes reaching millions in the region. He is also Co-Founder of Makanika Dot Com, a social enterprise creating livelihoods, training and market access for mechanics and garage owners in Uganda’s automotive sector.

Michael is a Ford Global Fellow and completed the 2025–2026 Obama Foundation Scholars Programme at Columbia University. Earlier recognition includes the HiiL Justice Innovation Challenge in Uganda and a place at the Innovating Justice Forum in The Hague, selection as a UNESCO SDG Innovator through the UNLEASH Global Innovation Lab, and a Top 40 Under 40 profile by New Vision, a leading Ugandan daily. He serves on the board of the Agora Center for Research, and is a charter member of the Mastercard Foundation’s Young Africa Works Youth Advisory Group. He holds an MA in Social Sector Planning and Management and a BA in Adult and Community Education from Makerere University, Kampala.

Maria Rohani is a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University's Institute for the Study of Human Rights (ISHR) for the 2026-2027 academic year.

Her project, 'Synthetic Protest, Authentic Unrest,' explores how the proliferation of AI-generated content is shaping the way uprisings and protests are documented, understood, and perceived. 

This project builds on over a decade of work as a practitioner at the intersection of human rights, technology, and social movements. Maria currently serves on the Case and Policy team at Meta's Oversight Board, where she works on freedom of expression and platform governance. She has previously held roles at Google, UN Women, CARE and UNFPA, and independently consults on technology and gender for philanthropic organizations.

Maria is a Junior Fellow at the Internet Law and Policy Foundry. She holds a Master of Arts in Human Rights Studies from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and Peace and Conflict Studies from UC Berkeley. She is based in Brooklyn, NY.

Hiromi Hosoya, PhD is a cultural anthropologist and Professor in the Faculty of Letters at Seikei University, Japan. She has also served as Professor at Kobe University, Graduate School of Intercultural Studies, and held academic appointments including Fellow at the Human Rights Program, Harvard Law School, Visiting Scholar at The New School for Social Research, and Visiting Research Fellow at National Museum of Ethnology.

Her research centers on Indigenous cultures in the Peruvian Andes and, more broadly, across Latin America. Her early work on Andean mountain worship, published as The Religious World of the Andes: Contemporary Significance of Mountain Deity Worship in Peru, brought analytical attention to mountain deities—central to Andean belief systems yet previously underexamined—by examining them in relation to Indigenous peoples’ changing lived experiences.

Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in regions where large-scale massacres of Indigenous populations occurred during Peru’s internal armed conflict, she has investigated Indigenous experiences of violence and survival. Drawing on these empirical studies, she has theorized transitional justice and memory by introducing postcolonial perspectives that critically interrogate the colonial assumptions embedded within these fields.

In a related line of research, she has examined the relationship between emerging Indigenous art and contemporary art, analyzing processes of institutionalization and appropriation in relation to art systems and the global art market.

She has published numerous books and edited volumes in multiple languages, including The Anthropology of “Justice” in a Globalizing World: Legal Formation and Locality in International Society, an interdisciplinary work engaging anthropology and international law.

During her time as a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights, she conducted research on how United Nations initiatives on Indigenous rights shape concepts of Indigeneity and have implications for Indigenous peoples.

Dr. Elvira Domínguez-Redondo (LLB, Dip. Business Management, M.Phil, PhD) is Associate Professor of International Law at Middlesex University, London (UK) and Adjunct Lecturer of the Irish Center for Human Rights (NUI Galway, Ireland).In the past, Dr. Domínguez-Redondo held different academic positions, at the Transitional Justice Institute (University of Ulster); the Irish Centre for Human Rights (NUI, Ireland); the University of Alcalá de Henares (Spain); and University of Carlos III de Madrid (Spain). She has worked as a consultant with the Special Rapporteur on torture at the Office of the High Commisisoner for Human Rights (Switzerland).

Dr. Domínguez-Redondo specialises in international law and human rights legal theory. She is the author of two books, Public Special Procedures of the UN Commission on Human Rights and Minority Rigths in Asia (co-authored with Prof. J Castellino). She has also written a wide range of articles on international law and human rights topics for academic journals. Her current research focuses on the impact of politicization and cooperation between States on the growth and efficiency of the United Nations human rights system.

Benjamin P. Davis is a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights (ISHR) for the 2026-2027 academic year. 

He visits Columbia from Texas, where he is assistant professor of Africana Studies and Hispanic Studies at Texas A&M University. 

Working with Bernard Harcourt, Davis joins ISHR to conduct archival research about the human rights work of Franz Boas and Zora Neale Hurston. He is also writing a short book on desire and an essay returning to Edward Said’s Orientalism. 

His most recent book is Another Humanity: Decolonial Ethics from Du Bois to Arendt (Edinburgh UP, 2025). Davis is also the author of Simone Weil’s Political Philosophy: Field Notes from the Margins (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) and Choose Your Bearing: Édouard Glissant, Human Rights, and Decolonial Ethics (Edinburgh UP, 2023). He co-edited Creolizing Critical Theory: New Voices in Caribbean Philosophy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024) with Kris F. Sealey. 

Davis is a Fellow at the Center on Modernity in Transition and the President of the Simone Weil Society. He also works as Director of Global Partnerships for the UNESCO Chair on Health, Race and Human Rights, held by Ireh Iyioha. 

You can follow his work on his website and Academia page.

Banu Pekol, a 2020 Alliance for Historical Dialogue and Accountability (AHDA) Fellow, is an independent senior advisor and built environment expert specializing in the intersection of human rights, spatial justice, and minority heritage protection. Utilizing a unique methodology that overlays conflict analysis onto the systemic destruction of cultural spaces, she advises international bodies on navigating contested environments and rights-based spatial challenges.

Banu’s pioneering research on conflict analysis methods applied to the destruction of minority heritage in Turkey, alongside her recent publications on the socio-spatial politics of the cemeteries of Berlin, highlights her ability to translate complex historical friction into actionable frameworks for future-facing community dialogue.

A former AHDA Fellow at Columbia University’s ISHR, Banu’s distinctive approach was recently recognized on the global stage when she was named a finalist—and the sole woman in the top three—for the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to Adequate Housing. As the only non-lawyer in the final shortlist, her candidacy championed a crucial paradigm shift: treating the built environment not merely as legal infrastructure, but as a critical, living vector for human dignity and identity rights.