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Vanity Fair sent me to UKRAINE to chronicle my project’s campaign to collect evidence of Russian atrocities that might stand up in court against Putin, his commanders, and their troops.
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about janine

Janine di Giovanni is a multi-award winning journalist and author, and CEO/Executive Director of The Reckoning Project. Janine was a war reporter for nearly three decades, from the first Palestinian intifada in the early 1990s to the siege of Sarajevo; the Rwandan genocide; the brutal wars in Sierra Leone, Somalia, Ivory Coast and Liberia to Chechnya, Afghanistan, Pakistan. She reported extensively in Iraq pre and post invasion, the Arab Spring, and finally Syria. Her field work for her most recent book took her to Gaza, Iraq, Egypt and Syria. In 2020, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded her their highest non fiction prize, the Blake Dodd. Janine served as a Senior Fellow and Professor at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs from 2018-2022 where she taught two human rights courses which looked at eight different conflicts in depth: Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. She also taught a course at Yale in Reporting War for Humanitarians. In 2016, CNN made a short video about her life and work when the International Women’s’ Media Foundation gave her their prestigious Courage in Journalism Prize, which you can watch HERE. You can also read a compelling article in the New Yorker written about her in 2011 HERE.

For her most recent project, Janine founded and directs The Reckoning Project, a transitional justice organization that trains researchers in Ukraine to collect testimonies that can be used in court. Through her work as a conflict journalist, Janine has experienced firsthand the frustration when testimonies collected directly from victims are inadmissible in courts. So, in partnership with Peter Pomerantsev, she’s created a team of legal experts and journalists to bridge the gap between journalism and justice.

Janine’s latest book, The Vanishing: The Twilight of Christianity in the Middle East, was published in 2022 and shortlisted for the Moore Prize for Human Rights, as well as being presented to His Holiness, Pope Francis, in Rome in March 2022. Her previous book, The Morning they Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria was translated into 28 languages and was a finalist for the Helen Bernstein New York Public Library Award for Excellence in Journalism. Click here to read more about it. She has published eight other books. You can read more about them and support her work by buying them HERE.

Di Giovanni was a war reporter for nearly three decades, from the first Palestinian intifada in the early 1990s to the siege of Sarajevo; the Rwandan genocide; the brutal wars in Sierra Leone, Somalia, Ivory Coast and Liberia to Chechnya, Afghanistan, Pakistan. She reported extensively in Iraq pre and post invasion, and the Arab Spring and finally Syria. Her field work for her current book takes her to Gaza, Iraq, Egypt and Syria.

Her focus is on war crimes; global terrorism; refugee issues and sexual violence during war time. Her goal is to document evidence on the ground that can later be cited in war crimes tribunals. She works alone; often undercover and in closed and difficult countries.

She is the former Edward R. Murrow Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and has won more than a dozen awards, including the National Magazine Award, two Amnesty International Prizes and the prestigious Courage in Journalism, and many others. You can see the full list HERE.

As an analyst, Janine has written governmental white papers and been a Senior Consultant for projects for the UN Refugee Agency; the UN Democracy Fund; the The Shattuck Center on Conflict, Negotiation and Recover; the International Refugee Commission. She is an International Board Member of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, and she is also an advisor on strategic communications.

Di Giovanni was a long-time Senior Foreign Correspondent for The Times of London and a Contributing Editor for Vanity Fair. She now writes for the New York Times; the Washington Posts; The Guardian; The New York Review of Books; Harpers; The Atlantic; Foreign Affairs and many other publications. She currently has a twice monthly column ion Global Affairs in The Nation Newspaper, in Abu Dhabi which you can follow HERE.

As a speaker, her TED Talk “What I saw in the War” has over 1 million views. She has been a Delegate to the World Economic Forum, Davos; The UK Governments’ Conference on Sexual Violence during War Time; a lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School; Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Government; the London School of Economics, She has moderated events at The World Bank, The United Nations, the US State Department; and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy where she was a Pakis Fellow in 2016.

She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the British Governments Stabilization Unit for Fragile States. She is a non-resident Fellow at New America Foundation and the Geneva Center for Security Policy.

A multi-national, Janine lives in Manhattan with her son, Luca, but she also considers London and Paris home.

Janine has written thousands of essays, reportage and Op Eds over her thirty year career, and you can see all of them HERE.

But to make life simpler, here are her favorite…