Manisha Desai is the Head of Sociology and Professor of Sociology and Asian and Asian American Studies at the University of Connecticut and a Senior Research Fellow at the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development in Geneva, Switzerland. Her areas of research and teaching include gender and globalization, transnational feminisms and women’s human rights, and social movements in India. Her most recent book is Subaltern Movements in India: The Gendered Geography of Struggles Against Neoliberal Development (Routledge 2016). In addition, she has 4 other single-authored or edited and co-edited books and numerous articles and book chapters.  Currently she is working on several projects related to decolonizing transnational feminism and social theory as well as contemporary feminist campaigns against Hindu fundamentalism in India.

In recognition of her contribution to feminist scholarship she was awarded the Sociologist for Women in Society’s 2015 Distinguished Feminist Award. She is also the recipient of the 2016 Faculty Mentor Award from the Compact for Faculty Diversity in the United States. She has served in many leadership capacities including as President of Sociologist for Women in Society and as part of the Expert Committee of Every Woman Everywhere’s Global Treaty to End Violence Against Women. 

David Richards is an Associate Professor at the University of Connecticut, with appointments in both the Department of Political Science and the Human Rights Institute, where he is Director of Graduate Studies.

David’s body of work on human rights includes more than two-dozen studies of: gender-violence law, the measurement of government respect for human rights including torture, US public support for torture, and the effects of globalization on human rights respect, among others. He has also authored reports for governments and international organizations.

Some current projects include studies of: torture in the time of COVID; sexual violence as torture; school infrastructure as a children’s right; the language of torture in narratives; and best-practices in teaching college students about torture.

David Richards is likely best known as the co-founder/director of the now-archived Cingranelli-Richards (CIRI) Human Rights Data Project. Funded multiple times by the National Science Foundation and World Bank, among others, this project provided information on the level of government respect for 16 human rights in 196 countries from 1981 to 2012. The CIRI Project’s data have been used by international organizations such as the United Nations and World Bank, and in 170 countries by governments, media, activists, businesses, scholars, and students.

David’s book (with Jill Haglund, Univ. of Kentucky) Violence Against Women and the Law (Routledge 2015), examines the strength of laws addressing four types of violence against women–rape, marital rape, domestic violence, and sexual harassment–in 196 countries from 2007 to 2010. Of central importance is the question of why these laws exist in some places and not others, and why they are stronger or weaker in places where they do exist. The book’s original data allow the testing of various hypotheses related to whether international law drives the enactment of domestic legal protections. Also examined are the ways in which these legal protections are related to economic, political, and social institutions, and how transnational society affects the presence and strength of these laws.

Jeremy Pressman is a Professor of Political Science and Director of Middle East Studies at UConn. He is the Co-director of the Crowd Counting Consortium and a fellow of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy.

Jeremy studies international relations, protests, the Arab-Israeli conflict, Middle East politics, and U.S. foreign policy. He co-founded and co-directs the Crowd Counting Consortium, an event counting project that has tallied and made publicly available data on all manner of protests in the United States since 2017. Pressman received his PhD in political science from MIT and previously worked at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He has held fellowships at Harvard University, Brandeis University, the University of Sydney, the Humanities Institute at the University of Connecticut, and the Norwegian Nobel Institute where he was a Fulbright fellow.

His most recent book is The sword is not enough: Arabs, Israelis, and the limits of military force (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2020). Pressman questions the over-reliance on military force and highlights the negative military and political consequences such as greater insecurity. Pressman has spoken at length about the book in settings ranging from an academic talk at UCLA (video) to podcasts such as “In the Moment” (Town Hall Seattle) and “Power Problems” (CATO Institute).

Pressman has written two other books:  Warring Friends: Alliance Restraint in International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), a part of the Cornell Studies in Security Affairs; and, with Geoffrey Kemp, Point of No Return: The Deadly Struggle for Middle East Peace (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997). He has published journal articles in Cooperation & Conflict, Diplomatic History, International Security, Perspectives on Politics, Science Advances, Social Movement Studies, and elsewhere (journal articles). He has also published many articles and letters in the wider press such as the New York Times, Washington Post, the Boston Review, the Washington Quarterly and ForeignAffairs.com (articles and interviews). Pressman has enjoyed speaking to community groups – often about Israel-Palestine – including at public libraries, eldercare facilities, faith communities, schools, a debate camp, and (virtually) to the Tucson (AZ) Great Decisions Association. See E-IR for a 2020 interview with Pressman on his career and publications.