James Ron - Home

James Ron is a social scientist, consultant, and writer living in the United States. He was born in the US and has lived and worked all over the world. James has published widely in both scholarly and popular venues and is best known for his work on international human rights, international aid, and civil society.

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Journalism, Education, and Human Rights Documentation

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​​James began his professional career as a journalist for the Associated Press in Jerusalem, covering local and international politics, including the first Palestinian uprising. While working part-time as a reporter, James also attended universities in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Palo Alto, graduating with a BA in political science from Stanford University.

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After completing his bachelor’s degree, James conducted fieldwork for Human Rights Watch in the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza Strip, publishing two book-length reports on violations of international law. He later published a third report for Human Rights Watch on events in Turkey, studying the civilian impact of the military’s war against Kurdish rebels. He continued to work for Human Rights Watch by investigating human rights conditions in Nigeria, Kosovo, and Chechnya.

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In 1999, James graduated with a PhD in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley, where he wrote his dissertation on political violence in the former Yugoslavia and Israel/Palestine/Lebanon. His first book, Frontiers and Ghettos: State Violence in Serbia and Israel, published by the University of California Press, explored the impact of geography, institutional environments, and sovereignty on expressions of nationalist sentiment and patterns of state behavior.​

Academic Career

After completing fellowships at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, and at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, James Ron began a tenure-track teaching appointment with the department of sociology at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Later, he was also appointed to their department of political science. While at Hopkins, James obtained funding from the United States Institute of Peace to work with a co-author on the link between natural resources and civil war in the Republic of Congo.

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After several years in Baltimore, James was awarded a (tier 2) Canada Research Chair in Conflict and Human Rights by the Canadian government. He accepted a regular faculty appointment with the sociology department at McGill University in Montreal, where he taught for five years.

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During this time, James’ focus was the creation of a unique dataset on the correlates of international human rights reporting. In that work, James and colleagues assembled data on country-level human rights coverage from 1980 through 2000 by the Economist, Newsweek, and Amnesty International, as well as a wide range of economic, military, and other data. This unique database allowed them to use sophisticated statistical techniques to uncover the drivers of global human rights reporting and agenda setting. 

James Ron taught for another five years at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada’s premier training program for aspiring diplomats. While in Canada’s capital, James conducted several projects for Canadian government agencies, including studies on violations of human rights principles and their relation to war, peace, and security; the political effects of transitional justice; and the use of public health research methods in conflict analysis.   

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After a year’s sabbatical in Mexico City with el Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE), James took up a new academic position as the Stassen Chair of International Affairs at the University of Minnesota, where he taught for nine years. While in Minneapolis, James and his colleagues developed a set of unique opinion polls on public attitudes towards human and civil rights, which he and his co-authors administered to representative samples of adult populations in Colombia, India, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, and the United States. This work resulted in a second scholarly book, Taking Root: Human Rights and Public Opinion in the Global South, published by Oxford University Press.

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Publishing

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James has published widely in well-known academic journals, including a study on the dynamics of international aid in the Harvard journal, International Security; a study of government crackdowns on foreign aid to local NGOs in World Development; and analyses of violence in Human Rights Quarterly, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, and many more. 

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James Ron is also a prolific commentator in popular publications. In addition to publishing guest editorials in US newspapers such as the Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and Washington Post. In 2013, James co-founded a popular website, Open Global Rights, which publishes commentary, analysis, and data in over 20 languages. While living in Canada, James regularly published guest editorials in the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Ottawa Citizen, and other Canadian papers.

To read more about James Ron's academic work, please visit his ResearchGate and ORCHID profiles, and to learn how other scholars have used and cited his research, visit his Google Scholar page. 

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Evaluation Consultant

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In addition to his publishing, work with Human Rights Watch, and consulting for Canadian government departments, James has evaluated aid programs for a variety of international agencies. 

These clients include the US-based humanitarian aid group CARE, which hired James to evaluate the human rights implications of their aid to refugees in the Democratic Republic of Congo; the International Committee of the Red Cross, which tasked James with evaluating their civilian protection efforts in the former Yugoslavia, and later asked him to join a team evaluating their forensic work in Mexico; and the Swiss government, which hired James and others to evaluate the work of Swiss-supported civil society groups in the Middle East. To learn more about this work, please visit James' LinkedIn profile. 

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Whenever possible, James volunteers his time as a program evaluator for Life for a Child, a Sydney-based charity supplying insulin and other vital supplies to children with Type 1 diabetes in low-income countries. James developed a passion for the cause when his son was diagnosed with the auto-immune disorder at the age of two.

Memoir-Writing

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James is now working on a memoir about his time in the Israeli military and his transition from that experience to working in the field of human rights and war crimes documentation.