Suzanne Nossel

Affiliated Scholar

Suzanne Nossel is Chief of Operations for Human Rights Watch. She served as Deputy to the Ambassador for U.N. Management and Reform at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations from 1999 to 2001 under Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke. There she was the lead representative of the United States in the U.N. General Assembly negotiating a deal to settle the U.S. arrears to the world body. She was awarded the Distinguished Honor Award, the State Department’s highest honor in recognition of the successful conclusion of a consensus agreement on reforms of the U.N. financial system and payment of U.S. dues. After leaving the United Nations, she served as Vice President of U.S. Business Development at Bertelsmann Media Worldwide from 2001 to 2005. She then served as Vice President of Strategy and Operations for the Wall Street Journal from 2005 to 2007. She is the founder of the blog www.democracyarsenal.org and also a contributor to The Huffington Post and The New Republic online.

Prior to her government service, Nossel served as a consultant at McKinsey & Company. During the early 1990s Suzanne worked in Johannesburg, South Africa on the implementation of South Africa’s National Peace Accord, a multi-party agreement aimed at curbing political violence during that country’s transition to democracy. Nossel has done election monitoring and human rights documentation in Bosnia and Kosovo. She is also the author of Presumed Equal: What America’s Top Women Lawyers Really Think About Their Firms (Career Press, 1998). She was awarded the Jane Rainey Opel Prize for the most distinguished alumnae in the Harvard-Radcliffe reunion class. She writes frequently on foreign policy topics, and has published pieces in Foreign Affairs, The National Interest, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Dissent, the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe