Stanford Humanitarian Program
We support solutions to humanitarian issues by employing interdisciplinary research and leveraging practitioner engagement.
Our research is informed by disciplines including law, political science, and technology policy, and it is performed in collaboration with implementers (including policymakers, aid groups, government agencies, U.N. institutions, international organizations, community leaders, and others). Our ultimate aim is to support practicable, research-based solutions that can help minimize harm to communities during ongoing humanitarian crises.
Humanitarian crises that intersect with technology.
The Stanford Humanitarian Program focuses on community-wide harms that occur within and as a result of humanitarian crises. We understand humanitarian crises as those caused by major events that seriously threaten the well-being of communities, including armed conflict, mass atrocities, environmental degradation, or climate change. We see the issues that arise out of these contexts as being diverse, complex, and often life-threatening, having the potential to cause wide-spread suffering and displacement.
In today’s world, humanitarian crises often raise issues that intersect with technology, such as how technology could be used to better protect civilians or humanitarians operating in active conflict zones, or how social media interacts with the incitement of violence. We are predominantly focused on this intersection, considering the responsible application of technology where it can demonstrably improve conditions, and providing recommendations where there is evidence that technology is worsening the situation.
We focus on this intersection because we think addressing community harms that arise from today’s humanitarian crises requires an understanding of technology’s ability to provide solutions or amplify harms. To do this well, we believe research needs to be both interdisciplinary as well as collaborative with those in the field. We launched the Stanford Humanitarian Program to address this need.
Our Work
Through direct partnerships with implementers, we provide expert research accompanied by concrete policy recommendations.
We produce interdisciplinary research rooted in law, political science, and technology policy and accompany that research with concrete recommendations. Our work is intended to inform practicable policy solutions, and is thus tailored to be accessible and immediately usable for practitioners working on humanitarian crises.
Our WorkMeet the Team
Allen S. Weiner
Allen S. Weiner, JD ’89, is an international legal scholar with expertise in such wide-ranging fields as international and national security law, the law of war, international conflict resolution, and international criminal law (including transitional justice). His scholarship focuses on international law and the response to the contemporary security threats of international terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and situations of widespread humanitarian atrocities. He also explores assertions by states of “war powers” under international law, domestic law, and just war theory in the context of asymmetric armed conflicts between states and nonstate armed groups and the response to terrorism. In the realm of international conflict resolution, his highly multidisciplinary work analyzes the barriers to resolving violent political conflicts, with a particular focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Weiner’s scholarship is deeply informed by experience; he practiced international law in the U.S. Department of State for more than a decade advising government policymakers, negotiating international agreements, and representing the United States in litigation before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the International Court of Justice, and the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal. Senior Lecturer Weiner is director of the Stanford Program in International and Comparative Law and director of the Stanford Center on International Conflict and Negotiation. Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 2003, Weiner served as legal counselor to the U.S. Embassy in The Hague and attorney adviser in the Office of the Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State. He was a law clerk to Judge John Steadman of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.
Bailey Ulbricht
Bailey Ulbricht is the founding Executive Director at the Stanford Humanitarian Program, where she works on legal projects aimed at reducing harm in conflict settings and other insecure environments. She has a particular interest in how technology exacerbates harms, or conversely, how it can be used to address and ultimately reduce harms. Before coming to Stanford, she founded the humanitarian ed-tech nonprofit Paper-Airplanes, was a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant in Turkey, and was a humanitarian worker with refugee communities on the Turkish-Syrian border, through which she was selected as a Davis Peace Fellow. Bailey has two masters' degrees in Islamic Law and Islamic Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, where she was a Marshall Scholar. She received her B.A. in International Relations magna cum laude from Carleton College and her J.D. from Stanford Law School.
Frishta Qaderi
Frishta Qaderi is a first-year law student at Stanford Law School broadly interested in resource governance, human rights, and public international law. She recently completed a three-year ethnographic project examining the relationship between anthropocentrism, transboundary river management, and the rule of law in Uzbekistan’s Zarafshan River Basin. Frishta is a Knight-Hennessy Scholar, Marshall Scholar, and a Fulbright Research Fellow. She holds an M.Phil. from the University of Oxford and a B.A. from Brown University.
Danny Sharp
Danny Sharp is a 1L at Stanford Law School and an adjunct fellow with the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Danny is an aspiring international legal historian. He seeks to explore a renewed U.S. relationship with international law and reimagine legal statecraft as a tool of U.S. foreign policy. Currently, he is researching the international law of hostage-taking as well as comparative international and regional legal frameworks for dispute resolution. Before law school, Danny worked full time as a staffer for the Middle East Program at CSIS and spent a year working for an economic development advisory firm in Jordan. He holds a B.A. in Near Eastern studies from Cornell University.
Raghav Ganesh
Raghav Ganesh is a Computer Science major at Stanford (BS + MS) specializing in the AI track and minoring in History. He has worked on numerous ML projects, involving work with Computer Vision, Reinforcement Learning, and Graphics, both independently and through internships at NVIDIA. With regards to history, Raghav’s coursework has been focused on military history and cold war geopolitics.
Vikram Sivashankar
Vikram is a junior studying Computer Science at Stanford University. His interests include algorithms, AI, and cyber safety. Previously, he worked on cyber safety projects, including the development of social media ingest pipelines, at the Stanford Internet Observatory.
Chase Small
Chase is an International Relations Major, Data Science Minor, and CISAC Honors Student at Stanford University. Previously, Chase studied election and vaccine mis- and disinformation at the Stanford Internet Observatory. Chase’s senior thesis is on foreign influence in discussions on Facebook in India about the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Afi Blackshear
Afi is a 3L at Stanford Law. He graduated from UC San Diego with a B.A. in Political Science. In law school, Afi has developed a strong interest in technology, innovation, and privacy. This includes coursework and research in antitrust, data privacy, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and other converging issue areas, as well as his current research focused on Humanitarian Notification Systems with the Stanford Humanitarian Program.
Marie Wako
Marie Wako, a Fulbright scholar, is an LLM candidate at Stanford Law School and an associate lawyer at Nishimura & Asahi in Tokyo, Japan. Marie has experience with assisting private companies and government agencies with export control laws and economic sanctions, as well as in international public law and international trade law matters. Prior to joining her law firm, she worked with government agencies and international organizations, including the chambers division at the International Criminal Court and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Meghan Anand
Meghan Anand is a 3L at Stanford Law School focused on the intersection of national security, emerging technology, and international trade. At SLS, Meghan serves as a Member Editor of the Stanford Law Review and is co-president of the National Security Law Society. She is also a Research Assistant for the AU’s Tech, Law, and Security Program and has worked at the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs at the State Department. Before law school, Meghan was a management consultant assisting aerospace, defense, space, and tech companies with corporate strategy and M&A across AI, new space, and other technology areas. She graduated from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service with a major in Technology and International Affairs and minors in International Business and Computer Science.