MHR Alum Works to Strengthen Arms Controls

Jackie Kantack elaborates on her current work within the arms division of Human Rights Watch
Jackie Kantack poses for a picture on the UN Plaza in New York

Jackie Kantack is a Masters of Human Rights Alumna, she graduated in 2018. She has been working with Human Rights Watch and has been focusing on four main issues within the Arms Division. In this interview, we asked Jackie about her current experience within the organization, and how her academic background has played out with the work she does today.

HRP: Where are you currently working and how long have you been working there? What type of projects/tasks do you work on? 

Jackie: I've been at Human Rights Watch (HRW) for about nine months, and I previously interned at HRW back in 2017 for my MHR internship requirement. I work in the arms division, meaning that I mainly focus on certain types of weapons systems that are inherently indiscriminate, cause unnecessary suffering, or cross a moral line in some other way. Much of the arms division’s work focuses on compliance with and strengthening of existing weapons treaties or working to create new treaties to respond to emerging threats to civilian security. 

I work on four main issues: antipersonnel landmines, cluster munitions, incendiary weapons, and fully autonomous weapons (otherwise known as “killer robots”). My day to day job really varies, but some of the larger projects I work on include researching/writing for the annual Landmine Monitor and Cluster Munition Monitor publications, tracking use of the aforementioned weapons in Syria using open-source methods, and a myriad of projects related to killer robots. HRW is one of the founding organizations of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, so I actually get to work with people from many different organizations in different parts of the world. Some of the more interesting things I’ve done with the Campaign include spending a week in West Virginia at the World Scout Jamboree teaching youth about the issue of killer robots, and more recently my time at the UN in New York at the First Committee on Disarmament and International Security, where we brought our robot campaigner into the UN and also took it around NYC to Times Square and to tech companies (Microsoft and Amazon to name a few) that have not participated in the pledge to not develop technology that would be used in fully autonomous weapons. 

HRP: How do you see your academic experiences playing out in your life today? What have been some of the biggest learning moments for you in your academics and your work?

Jackie: While many of my classes were applicable to the work that I do now, my capstone project with Mary Curtin was particularly useful to my present work on international monitoring mechanisms. Our project was a case study of four UN self-reporting regimes, where we analyzed the quality of state reports, frequency of reporting, and discrepancies in reporting between mechanisms to better understand how to improve the quality and frequency of reporting to UN monitoring mechanisms. 

I think my biggest learning moment so far has come in the past week at the UN. I had, of course, seen videos and such of UN sessions and heard about it from my colleagues, but it was fascinating to watch the process in real life. I was able to watch our campaigners from all over the world engage with diplomats, and take part in some lobby meetings myself. It was also interesting to see how the campaign works with states that are pro-treaty, as the move to negotiate a new treaty and the content of the treaty itself must come from States. Though most of our work at the UN was focused on fully autonomous weapons, I also delivered the NGO statement on incendiary weapons on behalf of HRW and engage with diplomats afterward. 

More broadly, working at a large human rights organization that has people working on so many different issues makes me feel like I’m continuing my human rights education on a daily basis. Though I only work on a very small fraction of the topics that HRW covers, I’m constantly reading about and hearing about the work that colleagues are doing. I feel particularly fortunate to work in HRW’s DC office where most of our programmatic divisions have at least one or two people based, so I am able to attend events on a wide variety of human rights issues where HRW is represented, as well as hear about the issues we are working on in both office meetings and also in casual conversations in the office kitchen. 

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