Connecting Research, Policy, and Practice: A Conversation with Dr. Samantha Lakin
Dr. Samantha Lakin, Curriculum Specialist for the Organizational Learning Unit in the Office of Planning, Policy, and Resources within the Department of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs at the U.S. State Department, sat down with Sophie Hayes from the Signal Program to discuss her background, her work at the U.S. State Department, and her goals for collaboration with the Signal Program’s current project: the Atrocity Prevention Lab (APL). Dr. Lakin is a newly added member to the APL’s Steering Committee, a group of experts convened to guide the APL’s community of practice as it serves as a dynamic platform for knowledge exchange, research, and practical interventions.
Could you share a little about yourself, your background, where you are currently, and what led you into this space?
I have focused on atrocity prevention and early warning for more than 15 years in several capacities. First, I hold a PhD in History from the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. My doctoral research explored questions of memory and justice in the aftermath of genocide in Rwanda, specifically documenting ordinary citizens’ diverse experiences with genocide remembrance processes. I have spent more than 10 years in Rwanda as Fulbright Scholar and doctoral researcher. I worked at the Genocide Archive of Rwanda and as a Policy Officer for Aegis Trust and the Kigali Genocide Memorial. I was also a Community Consultant for the preservation of the Nyamata Genocide Memorial through the U.S. Ambassador’s Fund for Cultural Preservation. We were the first team to preserve a genocide memorial site as cultural heritage. In 2024, Nyamata was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
I consider myself a comparativist, with a deep specialization in the Great Lakes Region of Africa. I speak French bilingually and have a working knowledge of Kinyarwanda, Rwanda’s national language, which I was fortunate to study at Harvard and Clark.
I also have a Master of Arts in International Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School at Tufts University. The reason why I mention both is because when I started my PhD at Clark, I already had work experience and a skill set that allowed me to take consulting positions in post-conflict peacebuilding and human security.
My entrance to this space was, like many of my colleagues, not straightforward. After college I worked for 4 years before going back for my Master’s. I did Teach for America in Greater New Orleans, which was amazing, but very challenging. It made me realize I did not want to be an elementary school classroom teacher.
I then went on to do a Fulbright in Switzerland, where I looked at the case of Jewish children who were clandestinely rescued from France to Switzerland to escape Nazi persecution. This research explored a historical case of international rescue, which connects to my current work, interestingly enough. This work made me realize that I really like research. I liked knowing and understanding people’s stories and trying to figure out the human aspect of problems that are usually looked at with different types of data.
At Fletcher, it was harder to connect the case of rescue during the Holocaust to more contemporary issues. I owe my introduction to the field of transitional justice to Dr. Eileen Babbitt, a well-known conflict resolution professor at Fletcher School. She opened my eyes to a field that encompassed and embraced the kinds of questions I had been asking. While at Clark for my doctoral research, I applied my background from my Master’s to take direct consulting work in human security and international justice across the peace building and atrocity prevention world. I really enjoyed the duality that allowed me to develop different skills and remain relevant outside of a traditional academic path. I met a lot of wonderful people along the way that have really enhanced my work and perspective.
I learned about the APL when I was a Lecturer at UMass Boston in their conflict resolution program, which is how I met Mads [Madhawa Palihapitiya, Early Warning Consultant for the APL].
Currently, I work in the Department of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs at the US State Department, in the Office of Planning, Policy, and Resources (R/PPR). More specifically, I work in the Organizational Learning unit of R/PPR. Our team provides support and policy guidance to approximately 5,000 people working in U.S. embassies abroad in public diplomacy roles.
I also live in Boston with my husband and our two wonderful children.
Can you speak more to your work in the federal government?
In the Organizational Learning Unit, my portfolio focuses on developing the Public Diplomacy (PD) Framework Competencies project, in addition to leading workshops on design thinking for U.S. Missions around the world. The PD Competencies project delves deep into longer-term goals of skills development, critical thinking, and assessing core competency retention across an entire PD post. For example, if an American public affairs officer rotates every three to four years, we must examine how U.S. Missions sustain high-level competencies and strengthen areas for growth among incoming officers and locally employed staff who remain in their positions.
Our unit’s work helps public diplomacy practitioners think and act more strategically, aligning programs and initiatives with US foreign policy goals. Public diplomats have a huge impact on security, and understanding national interests is essential to their work.
The goal is to really introduce a shift in mindset within the field of public diplomacy. We want to encourage the idea that public diplomats are not just event photographers, but play a hugely strategic role in carrying out US foreign policy and dealing with all the challenges in the world today. There’s a lot of different ways that looks, but it can be summed up by examining best practices as well as competencies.
You also have a long-standing connection to Harvard University, in many different areas. Can you speak a little to that?
Yes! I have been contracting and working on different initiatives at Harvard for a while. I had a fellowship in the Program on Negotiation (PON) at Harvard Law School (HLS) during the fifth year of my PhD. This was specifically a dissertation completion fellowship, but I was able to be involved in the HLS and PON community. More recently I was asked to serve as a research consultant for the Institutional Antiracism and Accountability (IARA) project on their “Global Justice, Truth-telling and Healing” research. I worked closely with Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad there.
So, I’ve always had these connections to Harvard.
Yes, I was going to ask about your time in the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law. While transitional justice and negotiation studies look at post-conflict relationships, the APL is more focused on atrocity prevention and intervention-based early warning mechanisms. I’m interested in the connections you see between these two practices, and the potential applications of similar or different strategies within these spheres, having worked in both.
Post-conflict negotiation is generally cast as a relatively formal process. Best practices in international mediation focus on questions such as, “Who is the best mediator?”; “Is the process impartial?”; “How do we get people to come together and compromise?”; “How do we frame compromise?”; and “How do we deal with sensitive topics in the presence of former perpetrators?” These are all important questions necessary to create the best outcome for a negotiated settlement. However, within this framework, I believe that many of the ways transitional justice maps onto stakeholder negotiations haven’t been appropriately examined or applied. If you reframe or recast core transitional justice processes alongside negotiation practices, it can create more opportunities regarding the form and function of what justice, compromise, and post-conflict rebuilding might look like. I think it would be very beneficial for more literature to emerge that examines how these fields inform each other.
With regards to atrocity prevention, the cycle of extreme violence always stems from something. We often see a relapse or recurrence of violence when there was a history of violence that was never addressed. Prevention will always be intertwined with the past. If you don’t find ways for societies to come to terms with historical injustices, new marginalizations and social divisions will often be created based on grievances that were never addressed. People may feel like they are not in a place to create a good life, or that they haven’t been included in negotiations or guaranteed non-repetition. In these cases, there emerges a risk of more conflict. I see dealing with past crimes as a central component of prevention work.
Prevention will always be intertwined with the past.
Atrocity prevention and early warning are, to me, two of the most challenging and elusive topics for several reasons.
First, one main and popular approach to atrocity prevention often focuses on measuring different early warning factors with the goal of making an evaluation that says, “This is a situation ripe for conflict.” The question for me is, and remains, what is the right ‘cocktail’ of early warning indicators? What is the tipping point? What is the thing that essentially blows the keg? In Rwanda, for example, the catalyst for the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi was the plane that was shot down [carrying Rwanda’s then-president, Juvénal Habyarimana]. Relying on quantitative indicators is very challenging because we can’t hold every variable constant in order to isolate and determine the impact of one variable indicator We also can’t necessarily standardize them across countries or cases. This makes any kind of atrocity prevention or early warning indicator-based system a challenge. To be sure, many quantitative researchers use these methods and do them quite well. Yet, I find that they will always be imperfect.
The second issue is that there are simply things that are just not measurable, or, at least, accurately measurable. As social or political scientists, we can try to measure social concepts like “social cohesion” or the “perceived impacts of public apologies” but we cannot always measure them in a way that translates meaningfully. There will always be endogenous variables. But people like data. People like numbers and models. The truth is that there are always going to be things that we can’t see and that we can’t measure. Trying to measure can sometimes be an inappropriate way to answer a question. Sometimes it’s necessary for scalability, but if you are doing a household survey versus talking to people on the ground about what is going on, you are more likely to have disconnect and get it wrong.
The truth is that there are always going to be things that we can’t see and that we can’t measure.
The third issue, for me, is that we don’t know what we’re preventing until it happens. We need to learn more about the null or “non-cases,” where genocide could have happened, but it didn’t. How do we work these types of cases into prevention models?
There is a lot of great development of models and measures currently in the field. In my experience, I am concerned that none of them, or at least, none of them on their own, can handle the task of comprehensive prevention. This is a hard thing to sit with. And yet, we still do this work.
Speaking specifically about the Atrocity Prevention Lab and the spatial aspect of atrocity prevention and early warning, from what I’ve seen on the ground, people are very concerned about being protected in chaotic conflict situations. This fear ends up fueling a significant amount of citizen and participatory data collection. In 2015, when I worked with Burundian activists in North America after the the third election [of Pierre Nkurunziza, who was elected to his third presidential term in 2015], people were documenting crimes with their phones and on Twitter, but without a repository or a safe mechanism to transfer and store this data for analysis. We kept telling people to document everything as evidence for the possibility that there would be a trial or case against Nkurunziza. It feels insufficient to tell people to ask people to document crimes for future, not immediate, justice. Unfortunately, it’s often the truth.
In Syria, people have been documenting crimes for years. Beginning in 2011, the Impartial and Independent Mechanism (IIIM) has collected, documented, preserved, and analyzed evidence of human rights violations in Syria under the Assad regime. The IIIM has received robust sponsorship from the international community. But the goal is the same, document now to use as evidence later.
I think the data collection aspect is an area where emerging technology and spatial analysis can really contribute. We now have an added issue of misinformation and disinformation, which include deepfakes, doctored images, and even presidential speeches fabricated by AI. It’s important to have forensically information in such a time as this, when there is pushback on real information. Forensic truth can say that such a thing happened at this time, in this location, and between these people. My work often deals with multiple truths: forensic truth and narrative truth can, at the same time, be different and valid. But when practitioners fail to differentiate between forensic truth and accurate information, we risk exacerbating disinformation.
I am excited to be a part of the APL to contribute my foundational and nuanced knowledge of the history, theory, practice, and initiatives about atrocity prevention to a new community of practitioners who have technical knowledge and expertise in geospatial technologies and spatial mapping. I know the capacity for this work and what is possible. I’m looking forward to bringing my research and practical perspectives and deep experience in the atrocity prevention world to think collaboratively and deeply about spatial aspects of atrocity prevention a little differently. There’s real room to innovate.
Further, I see a natural connection between the geospatial world and more traditional prevention efforts. Using GIS and mapping to accurately establish how, where, and when crimes took place plays an essential role in our ability to analyze trends and create established factual information to prevent bad actors from wielding information for negative reasons. After spending significant time in the research and policy realm, as well as in the field with many different communities, particularly victims, I believe there is incredible power in emerging spatial technologies. There are people already doing it, but I think the APL can do it well.
I think it’s important to have you on our team as someone who is super foundational in atrocity prevention methods and transitional justice. There is a more traditional qualitative aspect of research on atrocity prevention, and integrating these methods into the geospatial space has so much potential. It can certainly be done, but it needs to be done ethically, and that’s where your expertise comes in. How do you approach ethics in your work, and how do you feel these considerations can be integrated into your future work with APL?
Everything to me is research. Even program implementation requires elements of research. Figuring out the goals of a program, what we want to achieve, and the ways in which we can mitigate harm require [ethical] awareness. I take these practices very seriously, because, like many others, I have seen the impacts of unintended consequences for communities when people do not do their work ethically. There have certainly been times in my career where I have said, ‘This is not something I’m going to publish,’ or ‘This is an interview I’m not going to do.’ Specifically with regards to data and data collection, I question, ‘Who is this information for?’ and most especially, ‘Is this information going to help anybody?’
These questions are paramount to me when dealing with both qualitative and quantitative data. Everything comes from people. Social media, tweets, it all comes from people. People are literally putting their lives in danger to potentially get information to the outside world. It is important to evaluate the risks and benefits of this sort of data collection, and to explore how spatial technology and methods might increase safety and reduce risk.
First, thinking through how we can make this process feel like a safer and more valuable practice for people is important. The ways in which we communicate the goals of this data collection can help people to feel like their efforts are truly important, even if they don’t see an immediate result.
Secondly, this engagement can support the development of questions around what we consider as data. What do we need? What is worth it to collect? I think it was Cindy Caron [Associate Professor in Sustainability and Social Justice, Clark University] that said she never wanted to hear the term ‘data mining’ again.
I hate that phrase too!
I remember this comment so strongly, because people will use it, and it does not sit well with me. It’s frustrating to hear because that is exactly the opposite of what I want to embody. Power cuts through everything, and people’s lives are more important than anything else. When doing sensitive work, there’s always an exciting part where we, sitting in Boston or Washington, D.C., can foresee the positive impact and implications of our research or policies. But that does not mean we are ready or able to carry out prevention work without understanding the situation of our partners on the ground.
There’s always a push and pull between the policy world and the research world. People say the research world is too slow and the policy world is too fast. It’s important to find a niche where thoughtful engagement contributes to the world moving forward at any sort of pace. The APL is a unique initiative that brings together researchers, practitioners, and policy experts from diverse backgrounds, to look at the problems and potentials of spatial analysis and atrocity prevention from a multi-disciplinary and multi-directional perspective. I have high hopes for the APL and am proud to be among esteemed colleagues on the Steering Committee.
Samantha Lakin, PhD, is Curriculum Specialist for the Organizational Learning Unit in the Office of Planning, Policy, and Resources within the Department of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs at the U.S. State Department. She is also Senior Fellow at the Center for Peace, Democracy, and Development at University of Massachusetts-Boston. Dr. Lakin’s views expressed in this article are her own as an independent academic and do not represent the views of her current employer.
Sophie Hayes is a current MS GIS student in the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University and a graduate trainee at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative’s Signal Program.