About
Lara J. Nettelfield is a Clinical Professor and Director of the Program in International Relations at New York University. Currently, she is working on an oral history project, The New Humanitarians, about the refugee crisis in Europe and the Middle East. Her research interests include human rights, forced migration, transitional justice, technology and society, and social movements.
She is co-author (with Sarah E. Wagner) of Srebrenica in the Aftermath of Genocide (Cambridge University Press, 2015). This book reveals how interactions between local, national and international interventions— from refugee return and resettlement to commemoration, war crime trials, immigration proceedings and election reform— have led to subtle, positive effects of social repair, despite persistent attempts at denial. Srebrenica in the Aftermath of Genocide received Honorable Mention for the International Studies Association's Ethnicity, Migration and Nationalism (ENMISA) Distinguished Book Award (2015) and was shortlisted for the 2015 Rothschild Prize for the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN). In 2015, Senado Kreso translated it into Bosnian for the Insititute for History (Sarajevo).
Nettelfield is also the author of Courting Democracy in Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Hague Tribunal's Impact in a Postwar State (Cambridge University Press, 2010), which former Hague prosecutor Richard Goldstone has called "essential reading, well-balanced, and realistic." This volume argues that International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has in fact contributed to Bosnia and Herzegovina's transition to democracy. Courting Democracy won the 2011 Marshall Shulman prize of the Association of for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES).
A political scientist by training, Nettelfield received Ph.D., M.Phil. and M.A. degress from Columbia University and a B.A. degree from the University of California, Berkeley. She also completed a certificate at Columbia's Harriman Institute. She has worked for international organizations such as the International Commission of Missing Persons (ICMP), the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, in addition to serving as an advisor for non-governmental organizations. She has served on the editorial boards of East European Politics, the Sarajevski žurnal za društvena pitanja (Sarajevo Social Science Review) and the British International Studies Association's (BISA) flagship journal Review of International Studies (RIS). She frequently contributes to the press, includnig the New York Times, the Guardian, Buzzfeed, Foreign Policy, the BBC, OpenDemocracy, Public Seminar, NBC, the Detroit Free Press, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She is a fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA) (UK). She tweets at @LJNettelfield. See her Goodreads page.