Alexa Koenig

Alexa Koenig, Ph.D., J.D., is the Executive Director of the Human Rights Center (winner of the 2015 MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions) and a lecturer at UC Berkeley School of Law, where she teaches classes on human rights and international criminal law with a particular focus on the impact of emerging technologies on human rights practice. She co-founded the Human Rights Investigations Lab, which trains students to use cutting-edge methods to support human rights advocacy and accountability. Alexa is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Human Rights and Technology, a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility, co-chair of the Technology Advisory Board of the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, and a member of the board of advisors for the Syrian Archive. Alexa has been honored with several awards for her work, including the United Nations Association-SF’s Global Human Rights Award, Mark Bingham Award for Excellence, the Eleanor Swift Award for Public Service, the Phi Beta Kappa Northern California Teaching Excellence Award, and diverse grants, including support from the National Science Foundation and numerous private foundations. Her research and commentary have appeared in the Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, US News and World Report, and elsewhere. Follow her @KAlexaKoenig

Alexa was profiled for ATLAS by Lindsay Freeman, a Senior Legal Researcher at the Human Rights Center, UC Berkeley School of Law and a consultant for the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, where she worked previously. Read more about Lindsay's work at the end of this profile. 

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What drew you to working in international law/ domestic human rights law? And what were your first steps? 

My parents moved from Washington DC to San Francisco and the freedom, idealism and experimentation of the west coast during the summer of love. My mom was an Army brat who spent her formative years in Bangkok, Thailand, and my dad’s family mostly worked for the US government. Much of our identity, as a result, was a mix of international with a strong sense of service. Growing up in San Francisco during the Vietnam War exposed me to a strong anti-war sentiment and a need to fight for rights, especially around issues of gender, class and ethnicity. 

My parents split right as I was going to college. That was a gendered wake up call, as I saw my mom struggle to get credit and keep a roof over our heads. I had gotten into UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television and was determined to go, despite the fact that I had no idea how we’d make that happen. Thankfully I was given both financial aid and a series of merit scholarships. 

After college, I was working for a children’s environmental education program and a colleague asked if I knew of anyone who might be interested in a public relations job. I said I was interested. The job was on public relations specifically for tribal governments. That threw me into working with approximately 60 tribal governments in the state of California. Right after I took that job, law enforcement begun raiding reservations, shutting down bingo parlors; as one of the few public relations consultants in Indian country, I was appointed to serve as a media coordinator for Propositions 5 and 1A in the state of California (the Indian Self-Reliance Initiatives), right as the fight between tribes and the state sparked into a wildfire.  My years working in Indian country were incredibly formative, powerful, and eye opening. It also sensitized me to the extraordinary human rights crises that exist in the United States, but that get so little attention. 

It was on this job that someone who was not particularly friendly and usually ignored me, turned to me and said, ‘Alexa, you’re small, you’re blonde, you’re female, you’re young – if you’re ever going to get the California legislature to listen to you, you need to go get every big fat degree you can get and make them listen.” It’s what inspired me to enrol in law school. I went to night school so I could keep advocating for tribal-related issues during the day and took all the human rights and international courses available. I also earned a certification in IP and Cyberlaw – little did I know that a decade later these two seemingly disparate fields of practice would come crashing into each other in the tech and human rights field. 

In my second year of law school, 9/11 happened and the US government’s response to that event became a focus of my human rights work. I was increasingly horrified by the US treatment of Muslim populations, which seemed so much like what I’d seen from the US government with regards to native populations in the United States. 

After I graduated, I was invited to teach legal research, writing and analysis at USF Law School, which introduced me to my love of teaching. At the same time, I gave birth to my son and later my daughter in an atmosphere unaccommodating to women. In a contract position without benefits, I was given a week of maternity leave. With such short leave, it was really difficult to juggle my job and home responsibilities, especially when each of my kids was born with serious medical issues. When I started to grow frustrated with the limits of that position and the law more generally to impact social change, I entered a Ph.D. program at Berkeley that focused on finding strategies for closing that gap. I was balancing both a Ph.D. and work with motherhood, and felt a lot of pressure, both internal and external, to prove myself. 

I focused on gender issues during this time, but also began working with Laurel Fletcher and with Eric Stover on a major study they were conducting into the experiences of former Guantanamo detainees. My Ph.D. dissertation focused on the definition of torture as cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, mapping the gap between how courts look at these issues and how that view differs (sometimes radically) from what people actually suffer in detention. 

Eric hired me as his research assistant initially, and later, in May 2012 as the Human Rights Center’s executive director. I’ve been with HRC ever since. In this role I’ve worked on a range of projects including designing and co-teaching a class on Human Rights and War Crimes Investigations; conducting studies into the experiences of civil party participants at the Cambodia Tribunal; and looking into the ways that new and emerging digital technologies could be used to strengthen investigations and prosecutions at the International  Criminal Court and in national courts. While my focus now is global, I will always have an acute sensitivity to—and interest in working on—human rights issues here in the U.S.

What have been the high points of your career thus far? 

There have been several, but three in particular come to mind. 

While getting my Ph.D., I worked with Eric Stover and Victor Peskin on interviewing the pioneers who had dedicated themselves to getting arrests of human rights and war crimes perpetrators over the past 70 years. That ended up being a six year study that would result in our book, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Pursuit of War Criminals from Nuremberg to the War on Terror. Interviewing the pioneers who played such a central role in creating our system of international criminal justice was an extraordinary learning process, especially for someone relatively new to the field.

In 2016, I founded the Human Rights Center Investigations Lab with Andrea Lampros, our associate director. It’s honestly been the best (and most humbling) experience of my life. In the beginning, we couldn’t get anyone to take us seriously outside of our first partners (Amnesty International and the Center for Justice and Accountability). Today the team is 67 students who speak 28 languages and come from 33 majors and minors. We have almost ten teams working on sourcing digital information about human rights violations from the internet and verifying that content for our three sets of partners: human rights advocacy organizations, investigative reporters, and human rights lawyers. 

I’ve been proud of a lot of our substantive wins in that space, including a story the students worked on with Steve Stecklow of Reuters that focused on Facebook’s role in spreading hate speech related to the genocide in Myanmar, which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize, and our recent piece on torture in Western Sahara with the Washington Post. We’ve struggled, at times, with the model and the outputs as this has been a highly creative learning space. At the same time, what I’m most proud of is the world that we’ve created, which is one that I’ve always wanted to see in the wild: a team that’s incredibly international in terms of its origins, majority students of color, 70% female, working at the intersection of technology and human rights, bringing much needed diversity to the war crimes and technology spaces, and working in a way that’s deeply collaborative and mutually supportive—one that cares about psychosocial resiliency and how we do this work, as much as what we do. 

This February, Sam Dubberley of Amnesty International, Daragh Murray of the University of Essex and I launched our book Digital Witness: Using Open Source Information for Human Rights Investigation, Documentation, and Accountability. It’s our attempt to bring some of what we’ve learned with faculty and students across Amnesty’s Digital Verification Corps and from using digital information to investigate alleged war crimes to a broader community. I see this as an important complement to the international protocol on open source investigations that you, Eric and I have been working on for the last several years.

What are some of the challenges that you faced coming up in your career? 

The biggest challenges I’ve faced are related to class and gender, as well as a lack of work security and funding.I’ve noticed a pattern over the years of the man I report to and men who report to me being invited to events that are squarely in my wheelhouse (especially emerging technologies and human rights related issues), while I’m excluded. It’s always fascinating to me to see how it’s justified. It’s usually something along the lines of, “the guy she reports to is higher up and is actually the expert” and “the guy below her is closer to the work, and actuallydoes the work.” The same thing happens with my degrees: I’m not qualified for the academic stuff because I’m “just a practitioner.” Among practitioners, I’m “just an academic.” I can’t tell you how many times my degrees have been used against me as evidence that I don’t know the field. And how the field has been used against me to assert that I’m not really an academic. 

The tricky thing on top of that is that both war crimes investigations and tech development are male-dominated fields; it’s amazing how hard that is to change. I had a conversation with some colleagues recently who work on issues of SGBV and health, and their experiences have been very different, in part, we were hypothesizing, because they’re working in fields with strong female presences and different norms. 

To this day, I don’t have job security. We’re all on one year contracts and have to bring in our funding (including all center-related salaries) from external sources. All staff at Berkeley law were recently taken off those except for people who work for centers. We’re the last hold out. It adds a huge degree of stress. But of course that’s the experience of the vast majority of us working in the non-profit sector. 

Do you have any advice for people, particularly women, hoping to work in international law/ domestic human rights law in the future?  

One piece of advice I have is for lawyers in the United States to study federal Indian law. It’s such a powerful illustration of how law can be used not only as a tool, but a weapon. I truly believe it’s impossible to understand our legal system here in the United States if you don’t understand that final third of the federalist system. It’s also impossible to really know our legal history without understanding how law was manipulated for political, economic and social ends. Understanding that jurisprudence helped prepare me for the tug of war that resulted in the United States between our legislative, executive and judicial branches during the War on Terror, and the further perversion of our system of justice--a system whose negative ripples can be felt in incredibly diverse corners of the globe. 

The biggest piece of advice I have, however, is to take care of each other – and be sensitive to what women are experiencing at all rungs along the career ladder. There’s a myth that younger women need the help the most. On one hand, that’s true - but on the other, it’s not. Some of the research suggests discrimination becomes most acute at later stages of one’s professional life. What’s surprised me the most at reaching this point in my career is that I still feel (at times) exposed and under attack. This is purely anecdotal and of course there are incredibly important exceptions, but it seems like many men who are at my level are far more willing to work with young women than women my age. The young women are grateful for the opportunities the men can provide, do a lot of lower level work, and make the men look (and feel) good At its worst, this arrangement can be highly exploitative. One tip would be to look for men who are willing to make you co-author of any report or other piece of writing, or even make you lead author, or sole author – the amount of credit they give you publicly says a lot about who they are and how they see you in relation to themselves. By contrast with younger women, some men seem to see women at my age as competition and as a threat, especially when working in highly masculine environments; when they do, it’s amazing how sidelined you can be, and it can be painful. With senior women there can be a false competition that comes from a perception of scarcity; that there’s only one spot for a woman on that panel--which is a false and manufactured scarcity. And then younger women sometimes send out the implicit message that “it’s my turn--you need to step aside.” Ultimately, senior women need to be helping pull younger women up the ladder, and younger women need to be pushing and promoting from behind, and mid-career women need to be doing and receiving both. We need each other. 

Push yourself out of your comfort zone and taking risks to advance in your career, but also being careful about assuming manager level positions too soon. Management level positions can put you in a box, where you’re stuck with administration and helping advance others’ careers instead of your own. Managing teams can be incredibly rewarding, but it helps to have first built up a body of work, to have soaked up a huge amount of on the ground experience, developed diverse skill sets and established your reputation beforehand. 

The last bit of advice I have is to remember to celebrate the joy that can come from this work. It’s so easy to be consumed by the frustrations, the letdowns. And yet there are abundant rewards: the deep connections with colleagues, the humor you share as part of a team, the humility and perspective that come with listening to people’s stories, the privilege of bearing witness to others’ strength and vulnerability, the chance to learn from everyone you meet, seeing parts of the world you would never otherwise see, experiencing a broader range of life experiences than most will ever be so fortunate to have. Even if, at times, it swamps other parts of our lives, we’re so lucky to be part of a profession that is more of a calling than a job. 

Alexa was profiled for ATLAS by Lindsay Freeman, a Senior Legal Researcher at the Human Rights Center, UC Berkeley School of Law and a consultant for the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, where she worked previously. For the past 2.5 years, Lindsay led the develop of international standards and guidelines for open source investigations, a project spearheaded by the Human Rights Center in partnership with the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. The Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open Source Investigations will be published later this year. Lindsay has also worked as a trial lawyer at the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office and a law clerk at the U.S. Attorney’s Office Criminal Division and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia. She has an Adv. LL.M. in public international law from Leiden University