Janine di Giovanni is the Middle East editor of Newsweek and a Pakis Scholar at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, where focuses concentrating on track-two diplomacy, international law and international security. In 2016, she was awarded the Courage in Journalism Award for her work in war zones over the past 25 years, most recently, in Syria. Di Giovanni is also a policy analyst and a political adviser, focusing on war crimes, countering violent extremism, post-conflict transitional justice, and political representation, with an expertise in minority and gender issues in the Middle East and Africa.

Di Giovanni is a non-resident International Security Fellow at the New America Foundation and an associate fellow at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, where she moderates their geopolitical debate series. Her TED talk on conflict resolution has reached more than 850,000 viewers. A former adviser on the Syria conflict to the UNHCR, she has advised senior officials on policy for the EU and NATO, among others. Di Giovanni was also a delegate to William Hague’s conference on addressing sexual violence during conflict and has published extensively on the subject.

As a journalist, di Giovanni has reported on war, conflict, and its aftermath for more than 25 years in the Middle East, the Balkans, and Africa. She has won nine awards and published seven books, the most recent of which, The Morning They Came For Us: Dispatches from Syria, was published in March 2016. The organization Action on Armed Violence (AOAV) named her one of the 100 most influential people reducing armed conflict.

Currently working in Syria and Iraq, Di Giovanni is focusing on ISIS and other insurgency groups in the Middle East, with an overarching interest in talking to non-state actors about reducing conflict and providing political representation to minorities in post-conflict regions.

A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, she lives in Paris and holds American, British, and French nationalities.