Judith Kelley

Dr. Judith Kelley is the Terry Sanford Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Political Science and the Senior Associate Dean at the Duke Sanford School of Public Policy. She is also a senior fellow with the Kenan Institute for Ethics. Dean Kelley’s work focuses on how states, international organizations, and NGOs can promote domestic political reforms in problem states, and how international norms, laws and other governance tools influence state behavior. Substantively, her work addresses human rights and democracy, international election observation, and human trafficking.

Past work has focused on the International Criminal Court, the European Union, and other international organizations. Her newest work focuses on the global fight against human trafficking. She is leading a major research project to study the effectiveness of the diplomacy of the United States on human trafficking, and she is the principal investigator on a grant from the National Science Foundation for this project. Her work has been published by Princeton University Press, Cambridge University Press, and in journals such as the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Common Market Studies. Her book, Monitoring Democracy: When International Election Observation Works and Why It Often Fails (Princeton 2012) was “One of Choice’s Outstanding Academic Titles for 2013” and also received the Chadwick F. Alger Prize, which is awarded by the International Studies Association to recognize the “best book published in the previous calendar year on the subject of international organization and multilateralism.” Her newest book is on human trafficking and the rising phenomenon of global ratings and rankings. “Scorecard Diplomacy: the Grading States to influence their reputation and behavior,” is published by Cambridge University Press, 2017.