Nimmi Gowrinathan, PhD

Dr. Gowrinathan is the Founder and Director of the Politics of Sexual Violence Initiative, a global initiative examining the impact of rape on women’s political identities, infusing movement building with the insights of engaged scholarship.

She is a senior affiliated scholar at Berkeley University’s Political Conflict, Gender, & People’s Rights Project and a Visiting Professor at Columbia University. She is the founder and publisher of Adi Magazine, and the Female Fighter Series at Guernica Magazine.

She has been the Senior Expert on Gender, Political Voice, and Rights for United Nations Women and the Asian Development Bank, Gender Expert for the United Nations Human Development Report on Afghanistan, a contributing scholar to both the Countering Violent Extremism and Sexual Violence policy projects at the United States Institute of Peace, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Conflict, Negotiation, and Recovery . She has been a senior analyst for the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue and the International Crisis Group, researching and analyzing gender inclusion in peacebuilding and women’s insecurities in conflict zones. She was formerly the Director of South Asia Programs and UN Representative for Operation USA.

Dr. Gowrinathan received her PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles,on “Why Women Rebel: Tamil Women in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam”, which received the Jean and Irving Stone Award for Innovation in Gender Studies. She provides expert analysis for CNN, MSNBC, Al Jazeera, and the BBC, and has published both academic articles and journalistic pieces on humanitarian intervention, militarization, gender, and political violence.