Deborah Avant
Sié Chéou-Kang Chair and Distinguished University Professor
Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs, University of Denver
Deborah Avant is the Sié Chéou-Kang Chair and Distinguished University Professor at the Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs, University of Denver. Her research has focused on civil-military relations, the roles of non-state actors in controlling violence and generating governance, and pragmatic approaches to research and ethics.
She is author/editor of Civil Action and the Dynamics of Violence in Conflicts (with Marie Berry, Erica Chenoweth, Rachel Epstein, Cullen Hendrix, Oliver Kaplan, and Timothy Sisk), The New Power Politics: Networks and Transnational Security Governance (with Oliver Westerwinter); Who Governs the Globe? (with Martha Finnemore and Susan Sell); The Market for Force: the Consequences of Privatizing Security; and Political Institutions and Military Change: Lessons From Peripheral Wars, along with articles in such journals as International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, International Studies Review, Security Studies, Perspectives on Politics, World Development, and International Affairs. She is an observer member of the International Code of Conduct Association (ICoCA) and was the inaugural Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Global Security Studies as well as President of the International Studies Association (2022-23).
Linda Méndez-Barrientos
Assistant Professor, Lead of the Environmental Justice & Policy Research Lab
Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs
Linda Mendez-Barrientos is an Assistant Professor at the Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs at the University of Denver. In this role, she leads the Environmental Justice & Policy Research lab (ejpr), which is dedicated to understanding how inequality and power asymmetries shape institutional change processes and environmental justice. She is also the co-founder of s2e-Science to Empower, an environmental justice initiative that leverages data and innovative research to facilitate environmental accountability and human rights protection, and increase the participation of diverse and historically excluded voices in the decisions that define new sustainable trajectories.
Dr. Mendez-Barrientos research lies at the intersection of institutional change, public policy implementation, environmental justice, and natural resource governance, with a focus on water policy and management. Her work has been published in top interdisciplinary journals including Scientific Reports, Society & Natural Resources, Ecology & Society, Environmental Policy & Planning, Environmental Policy & Governance, and Environment and Planning E: Nature & Space, as well as leading water journals, including Nature Water, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water, Water Security, Water Policy, and the International Journal of Water Resources Development. She is also the recipient of a number of prestigious and competitive awards, including the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship (2016-2021), NSF Integrative Graduate Education & Research Traineeship (2015-2017), and European Commission Agris Mundus Scholarship (2008-2010).
Dr. Mendez-Barrientos earned her Ph.D. in Ecology from the University of California Davis, and holds a MSc. in Water Management from Wageningen University in the Netherlands, and a MSc. on Tropical Agrarian Systems from Montpellier SupAgro in France. Before academia, Dr. Mendez-Barrientos served as an environmental policy analyst for several years with the Environmental Defense Fund.
Devin Finn
Visiting Assistant Professor, International Relations at Lehigh University
As a UN Faculty Fellow, Professor Devin Finn Vega is studying how indigenous peoples and local communities in the Andes-Amazon region of Peru practice care of ecosystems and mobilize to defend nature in the context of climate change and threats to local livelihoods. As international negotiators at United Nations fora increasingly recognize and finance indigenous groups as central protagonists of climate resilience and adaptation, we must understand how communities practice stewardship of forests, rivers, and ecosystems – and how power and political mobilization shape the diffusion of this knowledge. Professor Finn is observing meetings and interviewing civil society leaders at ECOSOC Meetings like the UN Forum on Forests and the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Through this work and her teaching, Professor Finn will work to support Lehigh students as they participate in UN meetings and internships.
Tricia Olsen
Professor and Stassen Chair of World Peace, University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs and Department of Political Science
Tricia D. Olsen, PhD, is professor and the Stassen Chair of World Peace at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs and Department of Political Science.
Olsen studies and teaches about human rights, business ethics, and the political economy of development, with a focus on Latin America. Dr. Olsen’s book, Seeking Justice: Access to Remedy for Corporate Human Rights Abuse(Cambridge University Press, 2023), provides an in-depth exploration of victims’ access to remedy mechanisms for corporate human rights abuses. Many of the findings in her book are drawn from her original, large-N database of historical trends of businesses’ human rights practices, the Corporations & Human Rights (CHRD) database.
Olsen has received support from various organizations for her research, including the National Science Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, USAID, and Fulbright-Hays. Her published work can be found in World Development, Organization Studies, Journal of Business Ethics, Business Ethics Quarterly, Comparative Political Studies, among others.
