David Hackett

Areas of Specialization: Political violence, authoritarianism, human rights/international law, geopolitics of Eurasia (Caucasus, Central Asia, Russia/Ukraine)

David Hackett is a third-year Ph.D. Student in Political Science at Boston University. His primary research interests surround political violence and civilian welfare in conflict, human rights and international law, and the geopolitics of the Caucasus and greater Eurasia.

He has produced research on political violence surrounding the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and regularly spends time conducting interviews and meeting individuals along the Armenian-Azerbaijani line of contact. He worked for the Foreign Ministry of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR) at its Representation Office to advocate for populations under threat of violence; preceding its dissolution, he helped publish a report with the Lemkin Institute of Genocide Prevention that alerted the international community of impending atrocity crime and ethnic cleansing in the region. David has since worked on-site at the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute as a research assistant and editor for the Int’l Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies in 2023; he was awarded the Lemkin Scholarship in 2025. He is an alumnus of the Zoryan Institute’s Genocide & Human Rights University Program in Toronto.

David earned a dual B.A. and M.A. (Five-Year Accelerated M.A. Program) in International Relations from the McCormack Graduate School at the University of Massachusetts, Boston in 2022. Among various volunteer commitments to assisting student growth within the Greater Boston area, he regularly teaches Political Science courses as an instructor of record at BU and UMass Boston alike and advises undergraduate students on their research.