Kathleen Kuehnast

Kathleen Kuehnast is a Senior Fellow with the Alliance for Peacebuilding, and the former director of Women, Peace, and Security at the United States Institute for Peace. Kuehnast works across policy, practice, and scholarship to integrate gender analysis into scholarship, project design and program implementation. She is the co-author of USIP’s Gender Inclusive Framework and Theory (GIFT) and co-editor of Women and War: Power and Protection in the 21st Century. Kuehnast is a co-founder of the Missing Peace Initiative since 2012, which focuses on amplifying the work of scholars on conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) to policymakers. As a socio-cultural anthropologist, Kuehnast conducted extensive research in Central Asia on the impact of rapid political change on gender relations. Before USIP, she spent 15 years as a senior social scientist with the World Bank. Dr. Kuehnast is a recipient of two post-doctorate awards, including the Mellon Foreign Fellowship at the Library of Congress and the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute Fellowship. Kuehnast is recently a recipient of the University of Minnesota’s 2024 Alumni of Notable Achievement Award and the 2016 United Nations Association-NCA Perdita Huston Human Rights Award