Around the 10th anniversary of 9/11, faculty and staff of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice traveled around the world promoting its latest report: A Decade Lost: Locating Gender in U.S. Counter-Terrorism. On September 15, 2011 in New York, CHRGJ launched its 163-page report, the first global account of how the U.S. government’s counter-terrorism efforts profoundly implicate and impact women and sexual minorities and often squeeze them between terrorism and counter-terrorism. A Decade Lost co-authors CHRGJ Research Director Jayne Huckerby (LL.M ’04) and Gender, Human Rights, and Counter-Terrorism Fellow Lama Fakih ’08 were joined by Arun Kundnani and Christopher Rogers of the Open Society Institute, to discuss these impacts in the United States, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East and North Africa—ranging from the impact of anti-terror cuts in humanitarian aid to Somalia on women and girls to the experience of Iraqi gay men in the aftermath of the U.S. invasion to the effects of targeted killings on female family members in Pakistan.
A few days later, on September 19, the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute hosted the Middle East launch of A Decade Lost, with Huckerby and Fakih being joined by Sari Kouvo, co-director and co-founder, Afghanistan Analysts Network, to discuss the significance of A Decade Lost for the region. Both launches were each attended by people coming from a range of academic, policy, non-government, and U.N. backgrounds. The Middle East launch also coincided with a NYU Abu Dhabi workshop on September 19-20, convened by CHRGJ Faculty Director Margaret Satterthwaite ’99 and Huckerby to bring together scholars and policy analysts to discuss complex legal and social issues that are addressed in their forthcoming edited volume Gender, National Security, and Counter-Terrorism: Human Rights Perspectives.
Earlier in the month, Huckerby and Fakih also presented A Decade Lost’s findings and recommendations at a series of meetings in Stockholm, Sweden, culminating in a September 1, 2011 panel, Terror, Gender and Power—10 years post 9/11, featuring Lena Ag, secretary general of the Kvinna till Kvinna Foundation; Hans Blix, former executive chairman, UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission; Hanaa Edwar , founder and secretary-general, Iraqi Al-Amal Association, Iraq; and Huckerby. The report’s findings were also extensively covered in key Swedish print and radio media.
Posted October 11, 2011