Critical Global Conversations | Radhika Coomaraswamy: Diaries from the Field

Radhika Coomaraswamy was the Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations, Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict and the first UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women. In 2014, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon appointed Coomaraswamy as Lead Author on a global study on the implementation of UNSC Resolution 1325, on women, peace, and security. In 2017, after atrocities against the Rohingya people, she was appointed a Member of the three-member United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar. While Special Representative of the Secretary-Genral for Children and Armed Conflict, Radhika Coomaraswamy traveled to the Central African Republic to assess the situation of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) and to sign an agreement or "action plan" for the release of child soldiers.

She earned her B.A. from Yale University, her J.D. from Columbia University, an LLM from Harvard Law School and honorary Ph.D.s from Amherst College, the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Essex, and the CUNY School of Law.

Coomaraswamy will be in conversation with Pam Grossman, Dean of the Graduate School of Education and the George and Diane Weiss Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. A distinguished scholar, she came to Penn from Stanford University's School of Education, where she was the Nomellini-Olivier Professor of Education. At Stanford she founded and led the Center to Support Excellence in Teaching and established the Hollyhock Fellowship for early career teachers in underserved schools. Before joining Stanford, she was the Boeing Professor of Teacher Education at the University of Washington. 

Introduction by Rangita de Silva de Alwis, Associated Dean of International Programs, University of Pennsylvania Law School. 

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