Past INSPIRE Fellows

2014-15 EPIIC Russia: In the 21st Century:

Justine Hardy
As a writer and journalist, Justine has reported on, and written about, South Asia for twenty-five years. Simultaneously she set up, and continues to run an organisation in Kashmir, North India, rehabilitating those suffering from the psychological fallout of conflict. In short, Justine works as both writer and mental trauma specialist. Having completed her training in conflict trauma therapy, Justine founded Healing Kashmir in 2008, an integrated mental health project addressing the debilitating mental health situation in the region. This project is now expanding rapidly, with a main base in Kashmir's summer capital, Srinagar, outreach centres around the state, a suicide helpline, a primary mental health care programme, also across the state, and an internship programme. During her training in this field Justine worked with New Bridge in the UK for twenty-two years, a foundation focusing on the rehabilitation of life sentence prisoners before release.  She is an IGL INSPIRE Fellow.


Robert Legvold
Robert Legvold is the Marshall D. Shulman Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University, where he specialized in the international relations of the post-Soviet states. He was Director of The Harriman Institute, Columbia University, from 1986 to 1992. He also served for six years as Director of the Soviet Studies Project at the Council on Foreign Relations. His most recent books include: Russian Foreign Policy in the Twenty-first Century and the Shadow of the Past and Thinking Strategically: The Major Powers, Kazakhstan and the Central Asian Nexus.

Joshua Rubenstein
Joshua Rubenstein was on the staff of Amnesty International USA from 1975 to 2012 as New England Coordinator and Northeast Regional Director.  He was also Scholar-in-Residence at Facing History and Ourselves in 2012 and 2013. He is a long-time Associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University.  Working as an independent scholar, Rubenstein is the author of Soviet Dissidents, Their Struggle for Human Rights and Leon Trotsky: A Revolutionary’s Life.  Mr. Rubenstein is the co-editor of Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and of The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov.

Nikos Passas
Nikos Passas is a professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University. He specializes in the study of corruption, illicit financial/trade flows, sanctions, informal fund transfers, remittances, white-collar crime, terrorism, financial regulation, organized crime and international crimes. He has published more than 140 articles, book chapters, reports and books in 13 languages. In addition, he has edited a volume on the regulation of informal remittance systems for the IMF, co-authored a World Bank study into migrant labor remittances in the South Asia region, authored two reports to FinCEN on the trade in precious stones and metals and completed studies on procurement fraud, corruption asset recovery, as well as on governance, development and corruption international policy. He serves as editor-in-chief of the international journal Crime, Law and Social Change and associate editor of the Asian Journal of Criminology, the International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice, the Open Criminology Journal, and the European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research. He served as chair of the Am. Soc. of Criminology International Division and as ASC’s liaison to the United Nations. He serves on the Board of Directors of the International Society of Criminology. He regularly serves as expert witness in court cases or public hearings and consults with law firms, financial institutions, private security and consulting companies and various organizations, including the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), OECD, OSCE, the IMF, the World Bank, other multilateral and bilateral institutions, the United Nations, the Commission of the European Union, the US National Academy of Sciences, research institutions and government agencies in all continents. He is currently working on corruption asset recovery, assessment of anti-corruption measures and governance, trade facilitated financial crimes and WMD proliferation, money laundering and terrorist finance, the implementation of the UN conventions against transnational crime and against corruption, and the regulation of remittances.

Carol R. Saivetz
Carol R. Saivetz is a research associate at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and a research affiliate at the Security Studies Program at MIT. Saivetz has consulted for the US Government on topics ranging from energy politics in the Caspian Sea region to Russian policy toward Iran. From 1995-2005, she was the Executive Director of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. She is the author of In Search of Pluralism: Soviet and post-Soviet Politics.

2013-2014

Mowaffak al-Rubaie
Dr. Mowaffak al-Rubaie is an Iraqi statesman and civil rights activist. Following the removal of Saddam Hussienin 2003, al-Rubaie was appointed member of the Iraqi Governing Council. Since then, he has also served as Iraq’s National Security Advisor and as a member of Iraq’s Parliament. As an Inspire Fellow, al-Rubaei will convene a dialogue on "modern Islamism" between significant players in the MENA region and members of the U.S. government.  He will also be a Visiting Diplomat and Professor of the Practice at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

Beth Holzman
Beth Ginsberg Holzman has over ten years experience integrating social, human rights and environmental impacts and stakeholder relationships into organizational decision-making, strategy development, and program execution.

Eli Levite
Ariel (Eli) Levite is a Nonresident Senior Associate in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment. Prior to this role, Levite was the Principal Deputy Director General for Policy at the Israeli Atomic Energy commission. He has also served as the Deputy National Security Advisor for Defense Policy and was head of the Bureau of International Security and Arms Control in the Israeli Ministry of Defense. An expert on nuclear energy and weapons, he has authored numerous books and scholarly articles.

Mouin Rabbani
A Tufts and EPIIC alum, Mouin Rabbani is an independent journalist and Middle East policy analyst based in Amman, Jordan. His writing, which specializes in the Arab-Israeli conflict and Palestinian affairs, has been featured in The Nation, Foreign Policy, London Review of Books, and the Journal of Palestine Studies. His analysis has been cited by international news corporations such as the New York Times, The Guardian, Rueters, The Washington Post, and Al-Jazeera.

Curt Rhodes
Dr. Curt Rhodes is the founder and international director of Questscope, an international nonprofit that works with marginalized communities and young people across the Middle East. Rhodes began his career in the Middle East in the early eighties serving as Assistant Dean in the School of Public Health at the American University of Beirut. In recognition of his work with Questcope, he was recently awarded Social Entrepreneur of the Year for the Middle East and North Africa by the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship.

Denis Sullivan
Dr. Sullivan is a Professor of Political Science and the Director of the Middle East Center for Peace, Culture, and Development at Northeastern University. He has served as an Affiliate in Research at Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, as consultant to the World Bank and U.S. State Department, and as advisor to the Palestinian Authority in 1998-1999.

2012-2013

Ezra Barzilay, Lead Epidemiologist, Health Systems Reconstruction Office, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Commander, U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps

2011-2012

Daniel Holmberg, Senior Humanitarian Advisor with the USAID Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance in Sudan

Lucas Kello, Post-doctoral Fellow at Belfer Center for Science & International Affairs at Harvard University focusing on cyber security

Col. Benjamin Paganelli, Partner at VIA Unlimited, LLC

2010-2011

Col. James Brown, Deputy Commander for the 95th Civil Affairs Brigade (Airborne)

Pervez Hoodbhoy, Pakistani nuclear physicist, essayist, and defense analyst

Zachary Iscol, Marine Infantry Officer and producer of The Western Front documentary

2008-2009

James Henry, author of The Blood Bankers: Tales from the Global Underground Economy (Basic Books, 2005)

2007-2008

Greg Nakkano, Development Outreach Coordinator: Henry M. Jackson Foundation/Center for Disaster and Humanitarian Assistance Medicine, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences

2006-2007

Sanjoy Hazarika, Director and Saifuddin Kitchlew Chair, Centre for North East Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia in New Delhi

2005-2006

Rick Berry, artist whose work in digital and traditional media explores the matrix of art, technology and cognitive dynamics in popular culture

Jack Blum, Senior Counsel for Special Projects for Finance Sector Compliance Advisers Limited and expert on controlling government corruption, international financial crime, money laundering, international tax havens and drug trafficking

Jim MacMillan, independent multimedia journalist who covered the war in Iraq for the Associated Press

Mort Rosenblum, former chief correspondent for the Associated Press and former chief editor of the International Herald Tribune

2004-2005

Peter Droege, Asia Pacific chair of the World Council for Renewable Energy and author of 100 Percent Renewable - Energy Autonomy in Action (Routledge, 2012), The Renewable City: A Comprehensive Guide to an Urban Revolution (Wiley, 2007), and Urban Energy Transition: From Fossil Fuels to Renewable Power (Elsevier Science, 2008)