James Ron

published widely in scholarly and popular venues. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, the Washington Post, the Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, and many more.

James has had a long career in social science research, policy advisory, and human rights advocacy. He was born in the US, lived in France, and moved to Jerusalem when he was nine.

James began his studies at Hebrew University but then transferred to Stanford, where he completed a BA in political science. Between semesters, he returned home to work with the Jerusalem bureau of the Associated Press, reporting on events in Israel and Palestine. As the first Palestinian uprising against Israeli military rule continued (19988-1993), he grew increasingly concerned by Israel's treatment of Palestinians. He volunteered with B'Tselem – The Israeli Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories –as an English-language editor for the group's pathbreaking investigation into Israeli ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian suspects.

James' work at the Associated Press and B'Tselem affected him profoundly and encouraged him to begin working with Human Rights Watch, a non-governmental organization based in the US. He investigated a variety of Israeli military policies in the Palestinian territories, writing two book-length reports on violations of international human rights and humanitarian law.

Inspired by this work, James Ron began a PhD in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he focused on the causes and consequences of nationalism and political violence. Although he studied conflicts in other countries, he remained focused on the Israeli-Palestinian situation, completing his doctorate with a dissertation comparing Israeli and Serbian nationalism. This work later appeared as a book with California University Press.

During his doctoral studies, James consulted for the International Committee of the Red Cross, a Swiss-based agency that promotes the Fourth Geneva Convention, often called the "laws of war." He evaluated their collaboration with other civilian and prisoner-protection agencies during the Bosnian and Croatian civil wars. Then he consulted for CARE-USA, a humanitarian agency, to assess the human rights implications of their aid to people living in the post-Rwandan genocide refugee camps in the Congo.

After earning his doctorate, James held several tenure track and tenured positions in teaching and research institutions, including Johns Hopkins University, McGill University, Carleton University, and the University of Minnesota. He continued to study political violence, traveling for Human Rights Watch and his academic research to Albania, India, Israel, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Palestine, the Republic of Congo, Serbia, Russia, and many more.

In 2005, James began using statistical methods to study the determinants of international NGOs and newspaper reporting about human rights problems. In 2012, he started a series of face-to-face opinion surveys in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, tracking and analyzing public attitudes towards human rights. Soon after, he began investigating the potential for citizen donations to human rights groups in Mexico and Colombia, using cash experiments and other innovative methods to determine whether local non-profits could raise funds from their fellow citizens, as opposed to money from Western governments, the UN, or international philanthropies.

Since 2010, he has volunteered for Life for a Child. This Australia-based charity provides insulin, syringes, and other life-saving medical supplies to over 18,000 children with Type 1 diabetes in low and middle-income countries. James has conducted evaluations and field visits for the group in India, Mexico, Morocco, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. James was inspired by this work by his son, who was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, an autoimmune disease, when he was only two years old.

In 2013, James co-founded Open Global Rights, an online thought-leadership platform encouraging a multilingual conversation about human rights strategies, research, funding, and impacts. The website raised over a million dollars from the Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundations, and others. He worked as the website's lead editor for four years.

James continued to work on and off with Human Rights Watch from 1992 to 2020, conducting rights-related research in multiple countries and producing reports on innovative research methods. In 2018, he worked with colleagues and Human Rights Watch to survey the US public's attitudes towards human and civil rights at home and abroad.

Since 2020, James has been a consultant to private clients, including a major European bilateral donor in the Middle East, an international humanitarian agency in Latin America, a private philanthropy in the US, and a women's human rights organization in southern Israel.

Beginning in fall 2025, James hopes to spend more time traveling, especially to warmer climates during Minneapolis' frigid winter.