About Scott

Scott Straus is Professor of Political Science and International Studies at UW-Madison. Scott teaches classes on genocide, violence, human rights, and African politics. His book on the Rwandan genocide, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Cornell University Press, 2006), won the 2006 Award for Excellence in Political Science and Government from the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers as well as an honorable mention from the African Studies Association for the Herskovits Prize. Scott also co-edited, with Lars Waldorf, Remaking Rwanda: State Building and Human Rights after Mass Violence (University of Wisconsin Press, 2011). A third book on Rwanda, Intimate Enemy (Zone Books, 2006), includes transcripts of interviews Scott conducted with jailed Rwandan perpetrators and photographs taken by Robert Lyons. Scott also co-authored Africa's Stalled Development (Lynne Rienner), translated The Great Lakes of Africa (Zone Books), and has published in Foreign Affairs, World Politics, Politics & Society, Journal of Genocide Research, African Affairs, and Genocide Studies and Prevention. Scott has received fellowships from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Rsearch Council, and the United States Institute of Peace. In 2009, Scott was awarded the campus-wide William H. Kiekhofer Distinguished Teaching Award. In 2011, he was named a Winnick Fellow at the Committee on Conscience at the U.S. Memorial Holocaust Museum. Before starting in academia, Scott was a freelance journalist based in Nairobi, Kenya.

Scott is the Faculty Director of the Wisconsin Human Rights Initiative. For more information, see http://humanrights.wisc.edu/

Current CV (PDF).