Balakrishan Rajagopal

Balakrishnan Rajagopal is Associate Professor of Law and Development in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the Founding Director of the Program on Human Rights and Justice at MIT and the founder of the Displacement Research and Action Network. He is a founder and leading participant in the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) network of scholars, and is recognized as a leading global commentator on issues concerning the Global South. He has been a member of the Executive Council and Executive Committee of the American Society of International Law, and is currently on the Asia Advisory Board of Human Rights Watch and the International Advisory Committee of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights. He is a Faculty Associate at Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation and has been a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, the Madras Institute of Development Studies, the Jawaharlal Nehru University in India, and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Hebrew University. Rajagopal has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Melbourne Law School and American University. He served for many years with the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Cambodia. He has published numerous scholarly articles in leading law journals and is the author of International Law from Below: Development, Social Movements and Third World Resistance (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and co-editor of Reshaping Justice: International Law and the Third World (Routledge, 2008). He holds a law degree from India and an SJD from Harvard Law School.