PROFILE

Douglas Irvin-Erickson is a political theorist and legal historian, specializing in the 20th and 21st century history of international criminal law and human rights. He is the author of numerous book and articles on genocide, peacemaking and peacebuilding, and the ethics of practice in social movements for conflict transformation (which is a fancy way of saying “the ethics of doing real work in the real word to change society for the better”). He is currently finishing two books. The first is titled, Critical Theory and its Justice Theorists. The second is titled, Dying in the Age of Thoughtlessness: Or, the Genocide Prevention and Peacebuilding Industrial Complexes, which is based on his more than two decades of work in Burundi and Cambodia. 

Doug teaches classes on peace, conflict resolution, genocide prevention and human rights at George Mason University, where he works as an assistant professor at the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution and directs the Carter School's Genocide Prevention Program. He has held teaching positions in at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey and York College at the City University of New York, in Jamaica, Queens. He also serves as co-editor of the flagship journal of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Genocide Studies and Prevention. 

 

Doug earned his PhD in Global Affairs, and an MA in English Literature, from Rutgers University in Newark, NJ, and undertook graduate coursework in Sociology and Law at the University of Buenos Aires. He holds undergraduate degrees from Rutgers in English Literature and Ancient & Mediterranean Civilizations.

 

Recent Books:

 

Raphaël Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). 

• Featured in Raul Peck’s HBO documentary series Exterminate all the Brutes (2021).

• Featured in book symposium, Genocide Studies and Prevention (2022). 

• Reviewed in Human Rights Review (2017), Patterns of Prejudice (2017), Journal of Interdisciplinary History (2017), Holocaust and Genocide Studies (2018), Slavic Review (2018), and The Polish Review (2020). 

 

Wicked Problems: The Ethics of Action for Peace, Rights, and Justice (Oxford University Press, 2022) (with Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick and Ernesto Verdeja). 

 

Building Peace in America (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020) (with Emily Sample). 

 

For a full list of publications, please see Doug’s personal website: douglasirvinerickson.org

​