I’m an international relations specialist best known for my work on human rights, international norms, transnational advocacy networks and social movements, and transitional justice. I teach at the Harvard Kennedy School, where I’m the Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights Policy. I’m trying to write both for scholars and for members of the public interested in human rights and justice, especially my new book, The Hidden Face of Rights: Toward a Politics of Responsibility, and the books The Justice Cascade, Evidence for Hope, and Activists beyond Borders. My books have been awarded prizes, including the Grawemeyer Award (for Ideas for Improving World Order), the Robert F. Kennedy Center Book Award, and the WOLA/Duke University Award. In my most recent book The Hidden Face of Rights (Yale University Press, 2020) I argue that we cannot truly implement human rights unless we also recognize human responsibilities, giving examples from diverse issues like climate change, voting, digital privacy, and campus sexual assault. I’ve been a Fulbright Scholar in Argentina and a Guggenheim fellow.

Stephen C. Ropp (who also writes as Steve C. Ropp) is Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of Wyoming. Born in 1941 in Durham, North Carolina, he attended Allegheny College (B.A.) and the University of Washington (M.A.). He developed an interest in Central American and Panamanian politics while serving in the Army in the Panama Canal Zone during the 1960s. This led him to obtain a Ph.D in Latin American Studies from the University of California, Riverside in 1971.

Having published on regional issues during the 1970s, he frequently provided expert advice and testimony during the Central American conflicts of the 1980s. Those seeking it included the Department of State's Kissinger Commission on Central America as well as the Senate and House Foreign Relations Committee. These Committees were particularly concerned with the growing involvement of Panama's General Manuel Antonio Noriega in the international drug trade and the military regime's human rights record.

General Noriega was indicted by a U.S. Federal Grand Jury in 1988 and captured in Panama in 1990 during Operation Just Cause. One year later, Ropp testified as first witness for the prosecution in his Miami-based trial for drug trafficking and money laundering. While this trial was considered problematical at the time for a number of reasons, it set a powerful precedent for the dismissal of claims of sovereign immunity by former heads of state. It also served as one more reason for the eventual creation of more independent international tribunals such as the International Criminal Court.

With human rights becoming an even more important topic in the 1990s following the end of the Cold War, Steve shifted his publishing focus from the regional to the global level. In this regard, he was fortunate to make the acquaintance of Thomas Risse (Free University of Berlin) and Kathryn Sikkink (Harvard). who were independently developing new theories about human rights change. With the collaboration of a talented team of younger scholars, Risse, Sikkink, and Ropp subsequently co-edited several influential books on the subject.