A Harriman alumna who has worked for decades on human rights and democracy promotion says there is an urgent need to transform the field.

Sarah E. Mendelson (HI 1991; GSAS Ph.D., 1993) a political scientist and human rights scholar and practitioner, had not intended to work in the U.S. government. But when Barack Obama ran for president in 2007, she was so enthusiastic about the candidate that she volunteered with his campaign’s multilateral and human rights policy team. That, in part, led to her joining his administration in 2010 as deputy assistant administrator in the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Mendelson was the lead on the agency’s work on democracy, human rights, and governance, and what she observed was disturbing. “I witnessed an epidemic of closing space around civil society,” she said in a September 2025 interview with Harriman Magazine.

By then, Mendelson had been working on democracy promotion and human rights for more than fifteen years. At the National Democratic Institute in Moscow in the mid-1990s, she worked with political parties “on the role of focus groups and surveys and listening to citizens.” It was an exciting period, but there was little organization and much competition among the liberal candidates in Russia. “I remember thinking, uh oh, this might not go well,” she said.

In 2001, Mendelson joined the Center for Strategic and International Studies as a senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Program, working closely with Russian human rights organizations like Memorial. By the time she started at USAID, Mendelson was well aware of the diminishing space for civil society in Russia, but she couldn’t have foreseen what happened in 2012, when President Vladimir Putin expelled USAID.

“I almost quit over that,” Mendelson said, recalling how many viewed it as an isolated incident, while she worried “that if Russia can do this, then it’s going to happen in other places, which of course it did.”

In 2015, Mendelson was confirmed as the U.S. Ambassador to the Economic and Social Council at the United Nations. There, she sat on the NGO committee, which acted more like the “anti-NGO committee” because of members like Russia, Iran, and China. Even in countries with friendlier attitudes, she noticed another alarming trend: “NGOs in many places were more clearly aligned with donors in Geneva, New York, or Washington than their local populations.”

Then came the first Trump Administration and the pandemic, making clear “that democracy in the United States had a lot of problems and that we could not continue walking around the world doing democracy promotion in the same way we had for decades,” she said.

In 2018, Mendelson joined Carnegie Mellon University where she has focused on reframing approaches to human rights. She directs a program called “Sustainable Futures,” which draws on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals as a framework to address global and local human rights issues.

With the second Trump administration eviscerating USAID, the need to reframe approaches to human rights and development is all the more urgent, said Mendelson. “There’s a lot of reimagining that needs to happen,” she said. “As one colleague put it, we didn’t ask to be handed a blank piece of paper, and we need to rethink how we do this work.”◆

Featured photo: Ambassador Mendelson addresses the United Nations General Assembly on October 19, 2016, to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the adoption of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Photo courtesy of the United States Mission to the United Nations