Annette Jansen has joined our Practitioner Expert program. While in residence, Annette will be reviewing and finalizing her thesis to prepare it for submission to the Promotion Committee, and to bring it towards publication. She has chosen to conduct this final stage of her PhD-project at Feinstein and in the greater ‘university area’ of Boston, because she expects this to be a stimulating environment that allows her to test and sharpen her arguments in interaction with a mixed audience of humanitarians-cum-academics.

Annette is a humanitarian practitioner-cum-academic from the Netherlands. For the past twelve years, Annette worked as an advocacy and policy advisor on conflict transformation and humanitarian crises for various international NGOs, such as Peace Brigades International, Oxfam International, the Interchurch Organisation for Development Cooperation ICCO (member of ACT alliance), Cordaid (member of CARITAS International) and PAX International (former Dutch IKV Pax Christi). In 2010, she started to work on a PhD at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the VU University Amsterdam, thus combining her work as a consultant with academic research. Her PhD thesis studies the views and practices of two groups of anti-genocide activists, notably: the international solidarity movement for East Timor (1990s), and the Responsibility to Protect-advocates who are affiliated to the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, the International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect (both located in New York), and the Asia Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect (Brisbane, Australia). During her field research, Annette observed and interviewed R2P-advocates in their working environment for a period of eight months in total, and conducted over forty in-depth interviews with (former) East Timor solidarity activists in the Netherlands, Portugal, the United States, Australia, Indonesia and East Timor. Annette’s recent consultancy work concentrated on the themes of gender in conflict and women, peace and security.

Annette has finished the draft manuscript of her dissertation. During her stay at the Feinstein International Centre (September thru November 2014), she will be