Dara Kay Cohen

Dara Kay Cohen is an associate professor of public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Her research and teaching interests span the field of international relations, including international security, civil war and the dynamics of violence, and gender and conflict.

Her first book, Rape During Civil War (Cornell University Press, 2016), examines the variation in the use of rape during recent civil conflicts; the research for the book draws on extensive fieldwork in Sierra Leone, Timor-Leste and El Salvador. The book received the 2017 Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award from the American Political Science Association, the 2018 Best Book Awards from the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) and the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies (FTGS) Section of the International Studies Association, and was a finalist for the Woodrow Wilson Book Award of the American Political Science Association. Her current project is focused on the intersection of political violence, public opinion and gender in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Her research has appeared or is forthcoming in the American Political Science Review, World Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, International Security, and Stanford Law Review, and has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the United States Institute of Peace, Folke Bernadotte Academy and the Peace Research Institute Oslo, among others.

In 2011, Cohen was awarded the American Political Science Association's Award for Best Dissertation in Women and Politics, and in 2014, Cohen received the Heinz I. Eulau Award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review in the previous year.

Cohen received her Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University and an A.B. in political science and philosophy from Brown University. Cohen served as a paralegal in the Outstanding Scholars Program in the Counterterrorism Section of the U.S. Department of Justice from 2001-2003. Prior to joining the Kennedy School, she was an assistant professor at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota.

Selected Publications

Academic Journal/Scholarly Articles

• Cohen, Dara Kay and Ragnhild Nordås. "Do States Delegate Shameful Violence to Militias? Patterns of Sexual Violence in Recent Armed Conflicts." Journal of Conflict Resolution 59.5 (August 2015): 877-898.
• Cohen, Dara, and Ragnhild Nordås. "Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict: Introducing the SVAC Dataset, 1989–2009." Journal of Peace Research 51.3 (May 2014): 418-428.
• Cohen, Dara Kay. "Explaining Rape During Civil War: Cross-National Evidence (1980–2009)." American Political Science Review 107.3 (August 2013): 461-477.
• Cohen, Dara Kay. "Female Combatants and the Perpetration of Violence: Wartime Rape in the Sierra Leone Civil War." World Politics 65.3 (July 2013): 383-415.
• Cohen, Dara Kay, and Amelia Hoover Green. "Dueling Incentives: Sexual Violence in Liberia and the Politics of Human Rights Advocacy." Journal of Peace Research 49.3 (May 2012): 445-458.

Books

Cohen, Dara Kay. Rape During Civil War. Cornell University, 2016.

Research Papers/Reports

Cohen, Dara Kay, Amelia Hoover Green, and Elisabeth Jean Wood. "Wartime Sexual Violence: Misconceptions, Implications, and Ways Forward." United States Institute of Peace, February 2013.