Barnett Rubin

Barnett Rubin  link (Political scientist)
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Born	January 10, 1950 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Nationality	US
Ethnicity	Jewish
Alma mater	University of Chicago, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Yale University
Interests	Afghanistan, South Asia
Double Bilderberger, CFR, US political scientist with interest in Afghanistan

Barnett Richard Rubin is an American political scientist and a leading expert on Afghanistan and South Asia. He was senior fellow and director at the Center on International Cooperation at New York University. He was previously senior advisor to the US special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. He has advised the United Nations, NATO, the United States, and the Afghan government on numerous policy matters, including aid policy, security policy, and diplomatic strategy. He attended the 2008 and 2009 Bilderberg meetings.

Education

Raised in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, area, he received his BA in history from Yale University and his MA and PhD in political science from the University of Chicago in 1982. He also received a Fulbright Fellowship to study at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris in 1977–1978.

He is fluent in English, French, and Hebrew, and intermediate in Arabic, Persian, and German.

Professional work

He was a Jennings Randolph Peace Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace and assistant professor of political science at Yale University.

He started working to research human rights violations in Afghanistan during the covert war with the Soviet Union, gathering from various sources. He was asked by Jeri Laber, director of what was then Helsinki Watch, which was something that became part of Human Rights Watch, to write the first human rights report on Afghanistan. That was in the fall of 1984: Tears, Blood, and Cries. He wrote another one in 1985.

He was associate professor of political science and director of the Center for the Study of Central Asia at Columbia University from 1990 to 1996.

He was a founding member of the Executive Board of Asia Watch, now Human Rights Watch/Asia. Between 1996 and 1998, he sat on the US secretary of state's Advisory Committee on Religious Freedom Abroad.

Between 1994 and 2000, he was director of the Center for Preventive Action and Director, Peace, and Conflict Studies at New York City's Council on Foreign Relations.

Rubin was director of studies and senior fellow at the Center on International Cooperation (CIC) of New York University, where worked from 2000 until 2020. From April 2009 until October 2013, he was the senior adviser to the special representative of for Afghanistan and Pakistan at the US Department of State.

In November–December 2001 Rubin was special advisor to the UN special representative of the secretary general for Afghanistan during the negotiations that led to the Bonn Agreement. He advised the United Nations on the drafting of the constitution of Afghanistan, the Afghanistan Compact, and the Afghanistan National Development Strategy.