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An Evening with Janine di Giovanni and Peter Pomerantsev
October 16, 2023 @ 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm
Join us for a very special evening on Monday, October 16 at 6:30pm with Janine di Giovanni and Peter Pomerantsev, award-winning journalists, authors, scholars, and human rights activists as they discuss their current and urgent work in Ukraine documenting war crimes and atrocities perpetrated by Russia against the Ukrainian nation, its citizenry and heritage.
Ms. Di Giovanni and Mr. Pomerantsev are co-founders of The Reckoning Project: Ukraine Testifies (@TRPUkraine), a transitional justice organization established after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The Reckoning Project is comprised of journalists, storytellers, international lawyers, human rights activists, and database scientists, among other professionals and advocates dedicated to truth-telling. The project trains researchers in Ukraine to collect testimonies of war crimes and crimes against humanity according to legal evidentiary standards that can be used in court. They set up the project to bridge the gap between journalism and justice in partnership with Ukrainian journalist Nataliya Gumenyuk. Their unit was the first to report on the abduction of Ukrainian children and their illegal displacement to Russian territories.
The Reckoning Project website
https://www.thereckoningproject.com/
The Reckoning Project promotional video
https://vimeo.com/846751873/afa04ea376
Janine di Giovanni is an award-winning war reporter, published book author and an academic specializing in human rights. She is currently a Tom and Andi Bernstein Visiting Human Rights Fellow at the Schell Center for Human Rights, Yale Law School. In 2021-2022 she was Visiting Fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s Stavros Niarchos SNF Agora Institute, leading initiatives on transitional justice. From 2018 to 2022, she was a Senior Fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, teaching human rights.
Ms. Di Giovanni has reported some of the world’s most violent conflicts and wars for three decades, investigating and documenting human rights abuse in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. In 2019, she won a Guggenheim Fellowship for her lifetime research in the Middle East, and in 2020, she received the American Academy of Arts and Letters highest prize for non-fiction, the Blake Dodd, for her body of work spanning 30 years. For two decades she was a contributing editor at Vanity Fair where she won the National Magazine Award for Reporting. She writes for Foreign Policy magazine and National, in Abu Dhabi, and is a contributor to Washington Post, New York Times and other publications.
Her ninth book, The Vanishing: Faith, Loss and the Twilight of Christianity in the Middle East was published by Public Affairs in October 2021. The writer Salman Rushdie has described it as “A tragic portrait of a disappearing world, created with all of the great Di Giovanni’s passion and literary grace.” She is also the author of the award-winning book, The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria, which was translated into 25 languages and deemed “searing and necessary” by New York Times.
She has investigated human rights abuse and analyzed conflict on four continents, and has consulted for UNICEF, UNHCR, OHRHR, the World Bank, and others international organizations. She is the subject of two long-format documentaries, including the widely acclaimed 7 Days in Syria and Bearing Witness. Her TED talk “What I Saw in the War” has received over 1 million views on YouTube. In 2016, she was awarded the International Women Media Foundation’s prestigious COURAGE Award.
Di Giovanni has won more than 15 major awards for her extensive work in conflict zones and during humanitarian crisis in Palestine/Israel, Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Albania, East Timor, Zimbabwe, Somalia, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Rwanda, South Africa, Egypt, Syria, Libya, Tunisia, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bahrain, UAE, Algeria, Turkey, Greece, Vietnam, and other countries.
A life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Janine di Giovanni carries British, French and American nationalities. She currently lives in Paris.
Peter Pomerantsev is co-founder of the Reckoning Project, and is a Senior Fellow at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University where he co-directs the Arena Initiative.
Between 2017–2020, he was a Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science where he was the director of the Arena Initiative, a research project dedicated to overcoming the challenges of digital era disinformation and polarisation. His book on Russian propaganda, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, won the 2016 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. His book, This is Not Propaganda, was released in August 2019 and has been shortlisted for the Gordon Burns Prize and was a Times Book of the Year.
Peter has testified on the challenges of information war and media development to the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee, U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the UK Parliament Defense Select Committee. He was a specialist advisor on the ‘UK Parliamentary Committee on Fake News’, and was a member of USC Annenberg’s ‘Transatlantic Working Group on Internet Content Moderation and Freedom of Expression.’ He is a columnist at the American Interest, and writes for publications including New York Times, Granta and Atlantic. Between 2002 and 2014 he was a television producer on documentaries and factual entertainment programs for major networks including the Discovery Channel and the BBC. He continues to present and write radio documentaries for the BBC Radio 4, most recently on disinformation about climate change.
Peter is frequently asked to host policy seminars at NATO, the EU, the UK FCO, German Foreign Office, U.S. State Department, as well as numerous public events. He has helped write in-depth policy recommendations on counter-propaganda and media diversity for both national governments and NGOs, including the UK Foreign Office’s Strategic Communication policies for Russia and the Western Balkans.
An Evening with Janine di Giovanni and Peter Pomerantsev
“The Reckoning Project: Ukraine Testifies”
Monday, October 16 at 6:30pm
Ukrainian Institute of America
2 East 79th Street
New York, NY 10075
This event is free and open to the public. RSVP here.
For further information about this event, call the Ukrainian Institute of America at (212) 288-8660 or email at mail@ukrainianianinstitute.org.