Karin Landgren is a Distinguished Fellow at the NYU Center on International Cooperation.
She is currently the Executive Director of Security Council Report. She has previously led three UN peacekeeping and political missions, UNMIL (Liberia), BNUB (Burundi) and UNMIN (Nepal), where, in 2009, she became the eighth woman to head a UN peace operation. In 2014, she led UNMIL’s support to the Ebola response in Liberia.
During nearly twenty years of working with refugees, she was the UNHCR country representative in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the war, in Eritrea in the immediate aftermath of war, and in Singapore, working with Vietnamese boat people rescued at sea. She also served with UNHCR in India and the Philippines. As Chief of Standards and Legal Advice, Landgren helped revive UNHCR’s responsibility for the protection of stateless persons.
Ms Landgren was UNICEF’s first Chief of Child Protection, and developed the protective environment framework, a systemic approach to safeguarding children’s right to protection from violence, exploitation and abuse. She served on the boards of the UN Study on Violence Against Children and the Children and Torture Project.
Ms Landgren is a founding member of the Nordic Women Mediators’ Network. In early 2016, she was the George Soroš Visiting Practitioner Chair, Central European University, and she previously taught at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. She holds a B.Sc. (Econ) and an LL.M. from the London School of Economics, and a Certificate in Public Policy and Governance from the University of Maastricht.
