The Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights at Harvard Kennedy School has launched a groundbreaking fellowship program for the academic year 2025–2026 that focuses specifically on the nexus between human rights and U.S. foreign policy. This ambitious initiative emerges amid a global environment marked by deep geopolitical uncertainties, rising authoritarianism, and challenges to the liberal democratic order both abroad and at home in the United States. The fellowship aims to cultivate and empower a new generation of leaders—scholars, practitioners, and policy influencers—who recognize that human rights are fundamental to U.S. national security, global stability, and democratic identity.
The Importance and Purpose of the Fellowship
The fellowship, termed the Human Rights & U.S. Foreign Policy Fellowship, represents a concerted effort by the Carr-Ryan Center to preserve human rights as a core pillar of American diplomacy. The center seeks to reinvigorate the role of human rights in shaping U.S. foreign policy at a moment when these commitments are increasingly viewed through partisan lenses rather than shared national values. Faculty Director Mathias Risse emphasized this urgency, stating,
“Our goal is simple but urgent: to ensure that future U.S. policymakers understand that human rights are not optional—they are essential to national security, global stability and democratic identity.”
This framing underscores the Center’s recognition that human rights advocacy is intertwined with the broader geopolitical concerns and soft power strategies of the United States.
In this context, the fellowship program serves as a vital pipeline for career human rights practitioners—whether diplomats, policy advisors, senior leaders in international organizations, or advocates. The year-long fellowship situates these Fellows at Harvard Kennedy School to engage deeply in real-world projects, interdisciplinary dialogue, and mentorship of students and early-career professionals preparing to enter public service. This aligns with the Center’s broader educational mission to advance scholarship and practical engagement around human rights and policy.
Structure and Features of the Fellowship Program
The Carr-Ryan Center Fellowship is a non-residential, unpaid affiliation lasting one academic year, from September 1, 2025, through June 30, 2026. Fellows are generally responsible for securing their own funding through employers, home institutions, or external grants. Despite being unpaid, the fellowship offers significant intellectual and professional benefits, including opportunities to focus on research and writing, audit classes at Harvard Kennedy School, and participate in an array of lectures, workshops, study groups, and conferences.
Fellows are encouraged to build intellectual partnerships within a diverse cohort that represents multiple disciplines, sectors, and methodological approaches to human rights. This diversity fosters a collaborative environment conducive to innovative research and policy approaches. The Center also hosts thematic fellowships in related areas, such as racial justice and technology’s impact on human rights, emphasizing its inclusive and intersectional approach to understanding human rights challenges in the contemporary world.
The Role of Senior Fellows and Leadership
The 2025–2026 inaugural cohort of Senior Fellows reflects notable expertise and experience spanning presidential administrations, multilateral diplomacy, racial justice, and LGBTQI+ rights. For example, Maggie Dougherty, a former Senior Director for International Organizations at the U.S. National Security Council and advisor to several prominent U.S. diplomats, participates in the fellowship focusing on the erosion of the global human rights architecture under geopolitical pressure. Such leadership offers the cohort and students direct engagement with seasoned policymakers who have shaped—and continue to influence—U.S. global engagement on human rights.
Carr-Ryan Center leadership further reinforces the program’s strategic vision. Mathias Risse, as faculty director, and executive director Maggie Gates, continue the Center’s legacy of human rights leadership established by predecessors including Samantha Power. Their guidance signals strong institutional backing for blending academic rigor with actionable public policy and advocacy.
Fellowship as a Response to Current Challenges
The fellowship’s launch takes place amid a fraught global landscape where human rights face existential threats from authoritarian regimes, geopolitical rivalries, and domestic backslides in democratic norms. This program is explicitly reactive to what it terms
“a growing effort to dismantle human rights, development, and humanitarian programs and to use the human rights movement to exacerbate our partisan divides.”
To counteract these pressures, the program offers
“a space to build coalitions, resist the rollback, reimagine our commitments, and train leaders who can carry this work forward,”
as Mathias Risse explains.
This positioning of human rights not merely as moral or ethical imperatives, but as foundational to U.S. strategic interests, aligns with renewed efforts in U.S. foreign policy circles to integrate rights and democracy promotion into comprehensive geopolitical strategies. Such integration is vital in competition with authoritarian powers that reject these norms.
Opportunities and Expectations for Fellows
During their fellowship year, participants concentrate on advancing their research agendas and policy projects while interacting with a broad spectrum of faculty and experts in human rights and international relations. Fellows also assume roles mentoring students and leading discussions that prepare the next generation of policymakers and advocates. These activities enhance the fellows’ capacity to influence both scholarship and practical policies.
The Carr-Ryan Center fosters a vibrant intellectual community, encouraging fellows to participate in seminars, public lectures, and workshops that tackle pressing issues such as racial justice and the intersection of technology and human rights. This allows for multidimensional inquiry and innovation in addressing rights challenges globally.
Although the fellowship is non-residential, occasional shared office space in the Cambridge/Boston area may be available, facilitating in-person collaboration and networking. While the fellowship does not confer Harvard faculty or staff status or salaries, it provides fellows with prestigious institutional affiliation and credible platforms to disseminate their work and amplify advocacy.
Academic Freedom, Institutional Review, and Controversies
The Center implicitly balances academic freedom with institutional oversight. It fosters open discourse around complex and sometimes controversial issues while maintaining policies ensuring intellectual rigor and institutional values. A recent example highlighting this balance arose from a fellowship offer to a pro-Palestine scholar, demonstrating the intricacies of managing academic freedom and review processes in politically charged environments. This underscores the fellowship’s role not just as an academic platform but as a space navigating tensions between free expression, institutional responsibility, and global human rights realities.
Significance for U.S. Foreign Policy and Human Rights Advocacy
The launch of the Carr-Ryan Center Fellowship recognizes that U.S. foreign policy faces 21st-century challenges that demand a sophisticated and deeply committed human rights orientation. By affirming that human rights advocacy is essential—not optional—the fellowship seeks to counter declining bipartisan support for rights-centered diplomacy in the United States and abroad.
It also creates a critical pipeline for public service leaders who can integrate human rights principles into foreign policy decision-making processes and diplomatic practice, ensuring that human rights concerns remain central to the formulation and implementation of U.S. international strategies and alliances.
In summary, the fellowship is more than an academic opportunity: it is a strategic response to a global and domestic moment demanding renewed leadership, vision, and pragmatic coalition-building. It prepares a new cohort of leaders not only to analyze but to act upon human rights and foreign policy challenges with rigor, courage, and clarity.
