Atif Choudhury is a Program Manager with the Rule of Law Collaborative (ROLC), which he joined in February 2021. Atif manages its ongoing project supporting think tanks in Sri Lanka as well as its five-country research project analyzing Chinese foreign development activities, economic coercion, and malign influence in South Asia. Atif also serves as an instructor and content creator for ROLC’s Justice Sector Training, Research, and Coordination Program (JUSTRAC), and managed ROLC’s two-year project in Bangladesh.
Before joining ROLC, Atif was a Senior Program Associate with the Carter Center, where he managed track 1.5 dialogue-based programming and conducted research on U.S.-China and Africa-U.S.-China issues. He has worked on projects involving rule of law development, international elections, post-conflict issues, and maritime law. Atif also independently developed two proposals on Libya de-confliction and CVE in the Sahel, and was invited to present his working paper on Gulf of Guinea piracy at the 2020 Development Studies Association Ireland conference. In law school, he drafted an elections law briefing in Cambodia; a report on the Bangladeshi judiciary; and transitional justice reports in Sudan, South Sudan and Ethiopia. As a Tetra Tech DPK Global Development Fellow, Atif worked with the Timorese Ministry of Justice to draft a report on their community legal education initiatives and worked with the Judicial Services Monitoring Programme to help draft the first state-of-legal aid report in Timor-Leste.
Atif’s publications have been featured in outlets such as The Oxford Political Review, The Diplomat, the Carter Center, the Huffington Post, the Dhaka Tribune, William and Mary Law School’s the Comparative Jurist, the Vanderbilt Political Review, and the Advocates for International Development Student Blog. He holds an LL.M. in Public International Law from Queen Mary University of London, a J.D. from William and Mary Law School, and a B.A. in Political Science and Medicine, Health & Society from Vanderbilt University.