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BELINDA COOPER
Expertise Armenian genocide/Turkey, genocide, Germany, Guantanamo, historical memory, human rights, international courts, international law, torture, transitional justice, truth commissions, war crimes, women's rights
Belinda Cooper is a co-founder of the Citizenship and Security Program at the World Policy Institute and an adjunct professor at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs. She is the editor of War Crimes: The Legacy of Nuremberg, which explores the interconnections between the Nuremberg tribunal and today’s international criminal tribunals. Cooper teaches and lectures on human rights and international law, especially as related to the current “war on terror.” She has worked with the lawyers for Murat Kurnaz, a German of Turkish origin imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba until 2006, and visited Guantanamo briefly in 2004.
Cooper lived in Berlin, Germany from 1987-1994. During the demise of the East German regime, in 1988-89, she worked closely with members of the East German opposition. She also traveled extensively in East Germany and Eastern Europe and co-produced a monthly local radio program on developments there. She returned to Berlin again in 2002 as a Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy. A fluent German speaker, Cooper has contributed to German-language print media, radio and TV, appeared as a guest on German radio, and taken part in numerous panel discussions in Germany.
Her family background--Belinda is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor--and experiences in pre- and post-Communist Eastern Europe contributed to Cooper’s interest and expertise in the areas of historical memory and “transitional justice,” which includes tribunals, truth commissions, and other methods of coming to terms with past violence or dictatorship. In this context, she has written on Turkish society’s difficulty coming to terms with the Armenian genocide and on Poland’s complex relationship with its former Jewish minority.
Cooper has taken part in women’s rights fact-finding missions to Armenia, Uzbekistan and Tanzania and coauthored reports on domestic violence in those countries. She has written for a wide variety of publications, including The New York Times, Newsweek, Christian Science Monitor, Forward, and LA Weekly, and has spoken and participated in panels at the Harvard Center for European Studies, Cardozo Law School, the New School, the Jewish Community Center in New York, Israel’s Minerva Center for Human Rights, and other forums. She is also a translator of German scholarly books and articles, including many texts on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust and, most recently, a textbook on international criminal law.
Cooper holds a law degree from Yale Law School and has taught human rights, international law, transitional justice and gender and the law at NYU, the New School, Ohio Northern University Law School, Seton Hall Law School and Humboldt University in Berlin.
Honors & Affiliations Fulbright/DAAD grant; German Academic Exchange Service grant; Phi Beta Kappa; Member, Massachusetts Bar; Ohio Northern University School of Law, Visiting Assistant Professor of Law, (2000-2002); contract attorney, Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights, (2000); Adjunct Professor of Law, Seton Hall Law School, Newark, NJ; Instructor, New School for Social Research (Adult Division), New York; Editorial assistant and writer, newspaper of UNITE labor union (1995-98); Instructor in American law, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany (1992-95); Translator/adaptor and assistant producer of English news program of Deutsche Welle TV, Berlin, Germany, (1992-94); Freelance print, radio and television journalism in German and English, Berlin, Germany (1989-95).
Education
Languages German (fluent) French (basic working knowledge)
Contact cooper(at)worldpolicy.org (212) 481 5005 ext 466
BOOKS & MAJOR TRANSLATIONS (German-English)
Principles of International Criminal Law Asser Press, 2005
Weimar: A Jurisprudence of Crisis, (Translator) by Arthur Jacobson & Bernhard Schlink Univ. of California Press, 2002
Debating Women’s Equality: Toward a Feminist Theory of Law from a European Perspective (Translator with Allison Brown)
Rutgers Univ.
Press, 2001
War Crimes: The Legacy of Nuremberg. TV Books, 1999
“Final Solution:” Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European Jews Translator (with Allison Brown) Hodder Arnold, 1999
Paying for the Past: The Struggle Over Reparations for the Surviving Victims of the Nazi Terror (Translator) by Christian Pross Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998
Anti-Semitism in the Federal Republic of Germany (Translator, with Allison Brown) by Werner Bergmann & Rainer Erb, 1997
Milan Pagon, ed. College of Police and Security Studies, 1996
"The Discovery," in Nice Jewish Girls: Growing Up in America by Marlene Adler Marks, ed, et al. Penguin Books, 1996
"Die 'Arche Berlin-Brandenburg West': Hilfe vom Klassenfeind," in Arche Nova: Opposition in der DDR by Hans Michael Kloth & Carlo Jordan, eds. BasisDruck, 1995
Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene (Translator) Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994
SELECTED ARTICLES & REPORTS
For the Wall Street Journal Europe translated, "Somebody Stop Calmy-Rey," April 4, 2008.
Translated the article, "State of the Union, Republic of Fear," from German for The Wall Street Journal, March 3, 2008.
Contributed (along with Senior Fellow Ian Cuthbertson) to in “The Fog of War Crimes,” an article penned by former WPI Project Leader Frida Berrigan for ZNet, January 8, 2008.
"Postcards from Guantanamo," Internationale Politik, Global edition, December 2007.
Translated Jochen Bittner’s “Among the Believers,” from the German for The Wall Street Journal, Sep. 21, 2007.
"Torture: Now Congress Is Accountable," World Policy Journal, Vol. 23, No. 4, 2006/07.
"Turks, Armenians, and the "G-Word," World Policy Journal, Vol. 22, No. 3, 2005.
"Women’s Rights and Security in Central Asia," with Isabel Traugott, World Policy Journal, Vol. 20, No. 1, 2003.
"We Have no Martin Luther King: Eastern Europe's Roma Minority," World Policy Journal, Vol. 18, No. 4, 2001/02.
"Respecting Women: Domestic Violence in Armenia", Armenian Forum (April 2001).
Domestic Violence in Uzbekistan and Domestic Violence in Armenia (lead author) (Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights, 2000).
"The Changing Face of Berlin", World Policy Journal (Fall 1998)
"Patriarchy With in a Patriarchy: Women and the Stasi., German Politics and Society (Summer 1998).
"Women and the Law in Germany Since Unification" (guest editor), Cardozo Women's Law Journal (1997)
Ms. Cooper has also published articles in Michigan Feminist Studies and Women' s Rights Law Reporter.
MEDIA
Contributed insight “The Fog of War Crimes,” an article penned by former WPI Project Leader Frida Berrigan for In These Times, January 7, 2008. ZNet (January 8, 2008).
Interviewed by “All Things Considered” commentator Melissa Block on the controversial Congressional resolution recognizing the Turkish genocide of the Armenians in the early 20th century. October 16, 2007. Listen to the audiocast here.
LECTURES & APPEARANCES
In early April Cooper spoke to students and faculty at Mercer Law School in Macon, Georgia about US detention and torture policy, particularly at Guantanamo Bay.
Moderated the panel JOSCHKA FISCHER AND THE GENERATION OF '68 with authors Paul Berman and Paul Hockenos at the German Consulate, New York, February 7, 2008.
Chaired the panel, “Truth Commissions, Transitional Justice, Victims and Perpetrators” at the Harvard Center for European Studies in Berlin (panelists included former WPI project leaders Priscilla Hayner and Lars Waldorf), October 1, 2007.
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