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Janine di Giovanni      

Author, Award-Winning Foreign & War Correspondent; Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School & Executive Director The Reckoning Project

Janine di Giovanni is Executive Director and CEO of The Reckoning Project, an organization dedicated to documenting war crimes in Ukraine and building cases for prosecution and international mechanisms. She is currently also the Tom and Andi Bernstein Visiting Fellow for Human Rights at Yale Law School, the Schell Center for Human Rights.

Di Giovanni’s human rights work draws on her experiences as an award-winning war correspondent, the author of nine books, and her academic career specializing in human rights, war crimes, and Women, Peace and Security. Previously, she ran a similar initiative for the UN Democracy Fund in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.

Currently, di Giovanni is a global affairs columnist at Foreign Policy and The National in Dubai, and a Contributing Editor to Vanity Fair. She is also a nonresident International Security Fellow at the New America Foundation and an Associate Fellow at The Geneva Centre for Security Policy. She is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations. A French, British and U.S. citizen, she is a Board Member of the Institute of War and Peace Reporting and Association of Foreign Press Correspondents.

From 2021 to 2022, di Giovanni was Visiting Fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s Stavros Niarchos SNF Agora Institute, leading initiatives on transitional justice. She was a Senior Fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs from 2018 to 2022, teaching courses on human rights. Prior to that, 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. Di Giovanni has won more than a dozen awards for her writing. In 2020, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded her its highest non-fiction prize, the Blake-Dodd, for her lifetime body of work.

A graduate of the elite Iowa Writer’s Workshop, di Giovanni received a Guggenheim Fellowship for her non-fiction writing in 2019. She chronicled the disappearance of Christian minorities in her most recent book, "The Vanishing: Faith, Loss, and the Twilight of Christianity in the Land of the Prophets," released in October 2021 and hailed by Salman Rushdie as “a tragic portrait of a disappearing world, created with all of the great Janine di Giovanni’s passion and literary grace.” Di Giovanni’s The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria has been translated into 28 languages, and was a Finalist for the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Prize, having been deemed “searing and necessary” by the New York Times.

During the Arab Spring and the Syrian war, di Giovanni was the Middle East Editor at Newsweek reporting on international security. She was the Senior Foreign Correspondent for The Times of London prior to that, reporting on more than 18 armed conflicts. As a 2016 Pakis Scholar at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, di Giovanni focused on international law. She was a contributing editor for two decades at Vanity Fair, where she won the National Magazine Award for Reporting during the war in Kosovo, along with many other awards.

Di Giovanni’s experience in war zones spans 33 years in the Middle East, the Balkans, and Africa. She has investigated human rights abuses on four continents. She is the subject of two long-format documentaries, including the widely acclaimed 7 Days in Syria and Bearing Witness. Her TED talk, “What I Saw in the War,” has received over one million views on YouTube. In 2016, she was awarded the International Women Media Foundation’s prestigious COURAGE Award. She is a former Ochberg Fellow at Columbia University’s School of Journalism, given in recognition of her work with victims of war trauma.

She is the mother of Luca Girodon, a pre-law student at Yale College.

Speech Topics


How to Change the World One Step at a Time: The Rise of Civil Society

Starting an NGO that has a real impact in a war zone documenting war crimes has shown Janine di Giovanni that community-based projects have the most effect on urgent issues. In this talk, di Giovanni shows how to start an NGO that has a real impact in communities and globally.

Documenting War Crimes in Real Time: How to Hasten Justice

The Executive Director of The Reckoning Project, Janine di Giovanni, explains how to bring criminals to justice by taking direct testimonies admissible in court.

Resilience and Youth in Gaza

The war in Gaza has thrown a light on a part of the world many Americans know nothing about. Janine di Giovanni has worked in Gaza for 33 years, watching entire families grow up. There is so much more to Gaza than Hamas. What is the history of the region, and how can it be rebuilt? Can a two-state solution ever work?

Women, Peace and Security

Why Can't Women End Wars? UN Statistics show that when women negotiate peace, they have far more long-term sustainable results. Janine di Giovanni digs more into this while referencing the article she wrote for Foreign Policy.

Is Ukraine a Forever War?

As an expert working in the field in Ukraine, Janine di Giovanni explains the humanitarian and military situation in Ukraine, what might happen in the future, and how it will affect all of Europe and the US. Is there a future for the US in NATO?

  • What Next for the Middle East? Syria after Assad

  • Gaza/Palestine - The Forever War?

  • How to Catch a War Criminal - international justice at work in Ukraine, Syria and beyond

  • Europe on the Edge- the rise of authoritarian regimes and how to bolster democracy

  • The Reckoning Project: how can journalists and lawyers work together to fight against impunity?

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