Program archives

Paula Newberg, currently Dean of Special Programs at Skidmore College, is a longtime scholar of human rights and a specialist in governance, development and democracy. She has worked for more than twenty-five years in a host of countries caught in the web of complex political change and crisis including: Afghanistan, Kosovo, Palestine, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Tajikistan, Turkey and Yemen and across the transition states of central and eastern Europe, and south and central Asia. Dr. Newberg was special advisor to the United Nations in Afghanistan from 1996 through 1998, and has returned to work in Afghanistan on a number of occasions since the Bonn Agreement was signed in 2001 as an advisor to the interim government, the UN, the World Bank and various non-governmental organizations. She is also an advisor to non-governmental and non-profit organizations working in south and central Asia, with a particular interest in electoral politics, and has led a number of electoral delegations to the region in recent years.

Dr. Newberg taught for many years in the graduate faculties at Columbia, Rutgers and Johns Hopkins, and was a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the 1990s. She has spent most of the past nine years as a special advisor to the United Nations and the United Nations Foundation. A frequent commentator, lecturer, and regular columnist for The Los Angeles Times, Dr. Newberg is the author of books and monographs on justice and politics in Pakistan (Judge the State: Courts and Constitutional Politics in Pakistan), conflict in Kashmir (Double Betrayal: Human Rights and Insurgency in Kashmir), the politics of assistance to Afghanistan (Politics at the Heart: The Architecture of Humanitarian Assistance to Afghanistan) and a wide range of publications on human rights and democracy. She is a graduate of Oberlin College and received her doctorate in politics from the University of Chicago.