Helen Kinsella

Helen Kinsella came to the Consortium with a background in political science, public policy and legal advocacy. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Minnesota and an M.P.P from the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute. Dr. Kinsella was also an affiliated scholar with the Center for Advanced Feminist Studies and the MacArthur Program on Interdisciplinary Change and Cooperation at the University of Minnesota. Prior to pursuing her graduate studies, Dr. Kinsella served as a legal advocate for survivors of felony domestic violence assaults. She also worked with a Guatemalan women’s organization, where she assisted in developing resources for working with survivors of domestic violence and the violence of the civil war. Dr. Kinsella also worked with the Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights to write a policy brief on the subject of internal displacement in 1998, and with the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women to draft the Special Rapporteur’s fourth report in 1997. Her Consortium fellowship was based at the Women in Public Policy Program at the John. F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Dr. Kinsella’s research at the Consortium began with the simple premise that compliance with international humanitarian law, specifically with the injunction to distinguish between combatants and civilians at all times during armed conflicts, is an integral step toward improving the protections of civilians in war. The result of her fellowship was the Consortium Working Paper, "Securing the Civilian: Sex and Gender in the Laws of War." A later draft of the paper was published in Power and Global Governance, edited by M. Barnett and R. Duvall.