Speaker: Sophie Rutenbar, Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow
Topic: Violence and Conflict in the Post-Post-Cold War Era: The Changing Role of United Nations Peace Operations
Bio: Sophie Rutenbar is a Visiting Fellow in the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology in the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, which she joins as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. She also currently works as a Visiting Scholar with the Prevention and Peacebuilding Program of the New York University Center for International Cooperation. Prior to her fellowship, Rutenbar was the Mission Planning Officer for the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti for 3.5 years. Before that, she worked at U.N. Headquarters in New York for several years, including with the Policy Planning Team of the U.N. Department of Peace Operations. In that role, she worked extensively on U.N. peacekeeping and peace and security reform processes, including supporting the Action for Peacekeeping Initiative, Secretary-General’s Peace and Security Restructuring, and High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations.
Before joining the U.N., Rutenbar worked for organizations in Sudan and South Sudan, including observing the 2011 referendum process on independence for southern Sudan with the Carter Center and working for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)’s Sudan and South Sudan Transition and Conflict Mitigation Program. She also has experience in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia, and Thailand.
She was a 2005 Truman Scholar. Through the Marshall Scholarship, she received master’s degrees in Conflict, Security, and Development from the War Studies Department at King’s College London and in Human Rights from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
