March 19, 2024

About

Rebecca Hamilton Headshot

Rebecca Hamilton is a Professor of Law at American University, Washington College of Law (WCL), where her research and teaching focus on national security law, international law, and criminal law. She is an Executive Editor at Just Security and was a 2019-2020 Council on Foreign Relations, International Affairs Fellow. Her scholarship draws on her experience in the prosecution of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, as well as her work in conflict zones as a foreign correspondent. She is the author of Fighting for Darfur: Public Action and the Struggle to Stop Genocide (Palgrave Macmillan) which analyzes citizen activism and the effort to stop mass atrocities.

Bec previously served as a lawyer in the prosecutorial division of the International Criminal Court, working on cases in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, Uganda and Sudan. She has also worked in the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and has been the Deputy Director of the Bernstein Institute for Human Rights at NYU School of Law.

Prior to entering academia Bec worked as a journalist for the Washington Post, and Reuters. A Pulitzer Center grantee, and former fellow at New America and at Open Society Foundations, she has also written for Foreign AffairsThe New YorkerForeign PolicyThe AtlanticInternational Herald Tribune, and The New Republic. She has appeared on PBS Newshour, NPR, BBC, Al-Jazeera, and other media outlets.

Professor Hamilton is a member of the New York Bar, the American Society of International Law, and a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She is a proud first generation high school and college graduate. She received her J.D from Harvard Law School and M.P.P from Harvard Kennedy School. A graduate of the University of Sydney, she was born in Aotearoa, NZ. She lives in Washington D.C. with her husband and four young children.