About Carly A. Krakow

Carly A. Krakow is a writer, journalist, scholar, professor, editor, and activist based in New York City and London. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Al Jazeera, The Progressive, Opinio Juris, Jadaliyya, E-International Relations, openDemocracy, Truthout, Common Dreams, the journal Water, and Passport: The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations Review.

Her areas of expertise include environmental and climate justice; international law and human rights; the health impacts of toxins; and the rights of displaced and stateless people, Indigenous communities, and people with disabilities. She writes and speaks widely about climate, environment, and human rights matters and recently spoke at COP28 in Dubai, the UN Climate Change Conference, for events hosted by the World Health Organization (WHO), UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), UNESCO, and more. Her original concept “toxic saturation” addresses forced toxic exposure’s long-term health and environmental consequences in the context of war, including the Iraq and Vietnam wars, and in sacrifice zones worldwide. Her research also analyzes environmental injustice as “a totalitarianism of our time,” engaging with theorists including Hannah Arendt.

Carly is an NYU Gallatin School faculty member. She currently teaches Environmental Racism and Environmental Injustice: Rights, Citizenship, and Activism, an interdisciplinary course she designed. She is completing her PhD in International Law at the London School of Economics as a Judge Rosalyn Higgins Scholar and Modern Law Review Scholar. She was a 2022–23 Scholar in Residence at NYU School of Law’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice. Her work has been awarded funding from LSE, NYU, the Council for British Research in the Levant, and others.

She hosts The Catch-Up with Carly A. Krakow, an international current affairs video podcast. She is Managing Editor for Special Projects and Environment Co-Editor at Jadaliyya, an online magazine specializing in the politics and culture of the Middle East. For the Arab Studies Institute, she has hosted and produced numerous broadcast and podcast programs.

Her fiction, humor, and poetry have appeared in publications including Across the Margin, where her short story was named a “Best of Fiction” piece.

Carly has extensive experience researching and reporting on international climate negotiations and human rights issues, including at COP28 in Dubai, UAE; COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt; UN Headquarters in New York; and policy institutions in The Hague and Geneva. Over multiple periods of research in Palestine, she has investigated water access, exposure to toxins, and environmental justice projects in the occupied West Bank. In South Africa, she analyzed the impacts of Cape Town’s water crisis on the city’s most marginalized communities. In Greece, she examined living conditions and healthcare access for asylum-seekers and refugees. Additionally, she has written about human rights at the US-Mexico border, the devastating effects of war in Yemen, and the impacts of the climate crisis, pollution, and toxic poisoning in communities throughout the United States. She also writes about film, literature, and political theory.

Carly earned her MPhil in International Relations and Politics from the University of Cambridge, where she wrote a Distinction-awarded dissertation on the international law and politics of water access in the Middle East. She earned her BA summa cum laude with a concentration in Human Rights Law, Environmental Policy, and Comparative Literature from NYU. She received NYU Gallatin’s highest academic honor, the Richard J. Koppenaal Award.