David Hackett

Areas of Specialization: Genocide prevention & international law, psychology of atrocity crime perpetration, politics of memorialization, geopolitics of the Caucasus (Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Russian North Caucasus) and Eurasia.

David Hackett is a second-year Ph.D. Student in Political Science at Boston University. Having worked in a number of policy-related roles within the United States and the Republic of Armenia surrounding the protection human rights, David joined the Ph.D. program in the fall of 2023. His primary research interests surround genocide prevention and international law, the prosecution of crimes against humanity, the nature of militarized borders, and the geopolitics of the Caucasus and greater Eurasia. He has produced research on the invasion and ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023—and he plans to publish work on the Russo-Georgian War (2008) and Russo-Ukraine War (2022-present) in the near-future.David worked on-site at the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute as a research assistant and editor for the Int’l Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies in 2023; he continues to occupy this role in a hybrid capacity and publishes work with the journal regularly. He has also worked for the Foreign Ministry of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR) at its Representation Office; preceding its dissolution, David helped publish a report with the Lemkin Institute of Genocide Prevention that alerted the international community of impending atrocity crime and ethnic cleansing in the region. He is an alumnus of the Zoryan Institute’s Genocide & Human Rights University Program.

David earned a dual B.A. and M.A. (Five-Year Accelerated M.A. Program) in International Relations from the McCormack Graduate School at the University of Massachusetts, Boston in 2022. Among various volunteer commitments to assisting student growth within the Greater Boston area, he has a keen interest in teaching at the university level; having taught courses during his M.A. in the Department of Student Equity, Access, and Success (SEAS) and working as a TA in the Ph.D. program at BU, he continues to teach an introductory Political Science course in UMass Boston’s annual Directions for Student Potential summer program. He will teach “Introduction to International Relations” at BU in the Summer I Session of 2025.