Janine di Giovanni

Janine di Giovanni is a globally recognized civil-society leader, geopolitical analyst, and one of the world’s foremost authorities on war crimes, mass atrocities, and accountability. An award-winning war correspondent with more than 35 years of frontline experience, she has reported from 18 conflict zones and three genocides, bearing witness at the sharp edge of history. Her work sits at the intersection of journalism, international law, and human rights enforcement, with deep expertise spanning the Middle East, the Balkans, Ukraine/Russia, and Africa.

She is the Founder and CEO of The Reckoning Project, an EU-funded war-crimes documentation unit that works directly with prosecutors to build cases against perpetrators of international crimes. Her organization’s investigations have contributed to active accountability efforts at the national and international level. Di Giovanni is also a Senior Fellow at Yale University’s Jackson School of Global Affairs, where she teaches Human Rights and regularly convenes leading policymakers, jurists, and practitioners shaping the future of justice in conflict.

A former Guggenheim Fellow, di Giovanni is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ highest prize for nonfiction, as well as more than a dozen major international awards for journalism and human rights reporting. She has been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world working to reduce armed violence, and is a recipient of the International Women’s Media Foundation Courage in Journalism Award and two Amnesty International Media Awards.

She has held senior fellowships at the Council on Foreign Relations (Edward R. Murrow Fellow), Yale Law School’s Schell Center for International Human Rights, Johns Hopkins’ Agora Institute, and Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and currently serves as a non-resident International Security Fellow at New America and the Geneva Centre for Policy Studies.

Di Giovanni is the author of nine books, including "The Vanishing" and "The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria," translated into 28 languages and praised by The New York Times as “necessary and devastating.” A longtime contributor to Vanity Fair, Foreign Affairs, Harper’s, and The New York Times, she is also a Global Affairs columnist for The National, where her work reaches senior political and business leaders across the Middle East and Europe.

A sought-after global speaker, she has taught at Yale, Columbia SIPA, and Sciences Po, and regularly moderates and speaks at the World Economic Forum, Munich Security Conference, United Nations, World Bank, and other high-level international forums. Her TED Talk, "What I Saw in the War," has been viewed over one million times.

Beyond journalism and academia, di Giovanni has advised UNHCR, the European Union, NATO, and senior government officials on Syria, accountability, and conflict-related human rights, bringing rare credibility from both the field and the policy arena. She is a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the advisory board of the Atlas of Impunity.

She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, an MA from The Fletcher School, and an MA from the University of London. Her debut novel, "Evidence," will be published in 2027.