Theodore Macdonald

Theodore Macdonald is a Lecturer in Social Studies at Harvard University and was a  Fellow at the University Committee on Human Rights Studies. From 1979-1994 he was Projects Director for the human rights NGO Cultural Survival and then Associate Director of the Program on Nonviolent Sanctions and Cultural Survival at Harvard's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs until 2005. His research and teaching focus on human rights, ethnicity and conflict, Latin American indigenous peoples and the State, common property, and individual/collective property and citizenship rights. He recently co-edited, with David Maybury-Lewis, Manifest Destinies and Indigenous Peoples(Harvard U. Press, 2009). He undertook the ethnographic research and subsequently served as witness for the plaintiff in the precedent-setting 2001 indigenous land and natural resource rights case, Awas Tingni vs. Nicaragua, heard, and determined in favor of the community, before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.