Maaike de Langen is a Senior Fellow at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation (CIC).
She has more than two decades of national and international experience leading programs and teams in Governance, Rule of Law, and Justice. She has worked in the Netherlands, Mali, Chad, New York, and Paris.
She is currently the Head of the Justice Cluster in the Public Governance Directorate at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), where she leads programs and initiatives focused on justice, the rule of law, and people-centered justice systems. She is also a Visiting Scholar with the Justice Futures project at Arizona State University.
Previously at CIC, she was Head of Research for the Pathfinders’ Task Force on Justice and oversaw the research for the Justice for All report. She forged the global mobilization of governments and justice partners around people-centered justice.
She subsequently founded and directed the Pathfinders for Justice Program, which created the Justice Action Coalition, the Ibero-American Justice Alliance, and the Young Justice Leaders, and published the Justice in a Pandemic briefing series, among others.
She began her career at the Van Vollenhoven Institute for Law, Governance, and Development at Leiden University, where she conducted socio-legal research in northern Mali.
She then worked for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in N’Djamena, Chad, and at the UN headquarters in New York, working on governance, human rights, access to justice, and the legal empowerment of the poor. She played a critical role in drafting the Report of the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor and in creating UNDP’s first global project on Legal Empowerment of the Poor.
Back in the Netherlands, she was first advisor to the National Ombudsman for eight years, creating and leading the Department for Strategy and Policy. In 2014, she returned to Mali for a year to design the Dutch bilateral program on Security and Rule of Law.
Early in 2018, she returned to New York and joined CIC, where her first assignment was to serve on the review team for the UN’s Global Focal Point for Police, Justice and Corrections.
She currently lives in Paris, France, with her husband. They have two daughters.