Juliana Nnoko

Juliana Nnoko is a senior researcher in the women’s rights division at Human Rights Watch. Her work focuses on land and land-based resource rights, violence against women, and on the impacts of large-scale commercial land deals, tourism development, and armed conflict on access to land, including for women, in rural, Indigenous, and Afro-descendant communities in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. She has carried out research and advocacy on a number of human rights issues, including the rights of Maasai communities to ancestral land in Tanzania; armed conflict and Afro-descendant women’s access to land in Colombia; violence against women during the Covid-19 pandemic in Kenya; the rights of women to matrimonial property in Kenya; loss of land and risks to peatland by oil palm plantations in Indonesia; rights to customary land and forced evictions by commercial farmers in Zambia; and the right to housing more broadly.

Her work incorporates an intersectional lens to investigate land rights violations related to gender, race, ethnicity, and indigeneity. Most recently, her research focused on Indigenous Maasai women in Tanzania; Iban Dayak women in West Kalimantan, and forest-dependent Orang Rimba women in Jambi, Indonesia; and Afro-descendant women in Nariño, Colombia. Juliana has authored numerous Human Rights Watch reports, she has been published in peer-reviewed journals on the right to land, she is a contributing author of an academic book on Covid-19 and Human Rights; and she has written for publications including Aljazeera, Reuters, and Foreign Policy.

Prior to joining Human Rights Watch, Juliana taught at Iowa State University, US, and the University of Buea, Cameroon. She holds a PhD in Sociology and Sustainable Agriculture from Iowa State University, and a Master’s in Public Policy from the University of Northern Iowa.