Debora Rogo

Debora Rogo (joint program in Peace Studies and History and a Kellogg Institute Doctoral Fellow) studies the East African Airlift as a lens to understand democracy, ethnicity and conflict in Kenya.  She also plans to study the impact of the 1969 assassination of the Airlift's architect and Kenyan politician, Tom Mboya, and how that single act of violence helped inject ethnic tensions into the current political, cultural, and socio-economic landscape in Kenya.  Debora is a Kenyan attorney and human rights advocate.  She received her JD from Washington University and the St. Louis School of Law and her BA in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Before joining Notre Dame, she was the General Manager at the rural Sagam Community Hospital and its research hub, the African Institute for Health Transformation in Western Kenya.  Prior to that, she served as a legal consultant in East Africa where she worked with various NGOs and IGOs including the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania.  Her past experience includes serving as an Associate Attorney at the International Law Institute in Kampala, Uganda, where she provided support for the Institute’s implementation of technical and advisory projects concerning strengthening legal infrastructure in Sub-Saharan Africa.  Her work has focused on project implementation and management (especially in post-conflict and rural regions), human rights, international criminal and human rights law, good governance, access to justice, and the human rights-based approach (HRBA) to development.  Apart from her work, she also is a freelance photographer.