Louis N. Bickford

Director of Operations, Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights

Louis Bickford is Director of Operations at the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights and Director of the New York Office. He also serves as General Secretary for the Robert F Kennedy Center of Europe.

Dr. Bickford previously served as Director of the Policymakers and Civil Society unit at the International Center for Transitional Justice, where he was a founding staff member and a member of the senior management team.  At the ICTJ, he ran the center's global network of NGOs and individuals involved in transitional justice, oversaw fellowship programs in Cape Town, Santiago, Rabat, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Barcelona, and developed training materials and capacity-building programs with a variety of international partners. He also created the ICTJ's Memory, Museums, and Memorials program.

From 1999-2001, Dr. Bickford was Associate Director of the Global Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he ran the center’s operations, oversaw global research projects, including “Legacies of Authoritarianism,” and managed the Macarthur Global Studies Fellowship program for graduate students.

As an independent consultant, Dr. Bickford helped develop strategy for the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission; worked on issues of Stalinist legacies in Russia for the Center for Strategic and International Studies; and advised on confronting past atrocity in Bosnia and Herzegovina for the Expert Working Group. He also undertook a strategic review of human rights programs for the Oak Foundation (Geneva).  Between 1993 and 1996, Dr. Bickford was a consultant to the human rights and democratic governance programs of the Ford Foundation's Santiago office.

Dr. Bickford has taught seminars on human rights at the University of Chile Law School, Columbia University, the New School for Social Research, New York University (where he is an adjunct professor) and the University of Hiroshima. He has given lectures on dealing with past human rights abuse in contexts as diverse as the Comissão de Anistia do Ministério da Justiça (Brazil); the Inter American Commission for Human Rights (Washington, DC); Yale University Law School; the Universidad Liberoamericana (Mexico); Kabul University (Afghanistan); University of Rosario (Colombia); Sabanci University (Turkey); UNESCO (Paris); and University of Liberia. He holds a PhD in political science from McGill University.