Inside the Palais des Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, earlier this summer, a group of Princeton undergraduates presented six weeks of original research to the United Nations Expert Mechanism to Advance Racial Justice and Equality in Law Enforcement (EMLER). The work — an analysis of police use-of-force standards across all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and two federal departments — will help inform the U.N.’s assessment of how U.S. law enforcement policies align with international human rights standards.
The opportunity to present research abroad serves as a model example of how Princeton SPIA approaches its experiential learning programs: The School's regional partnerships result in lasting relationships that allow students to engage in substantive policy work across the globe.
Geneva is one of the recent partnerships in a long line of regional collaboration. Udi Ofer, the John L. Weinberg/Goldman Sachs and Co. Visiting Professor and Lecturer of Public and International Affairs, established a Geneva Policy Task Force in 2025 to allow students to engage with the international human rights system through intensive research conducted alongside United Nations partners.
"There is no better place for students to study how human rights advocacy works in practice," said Ofer, the founding director of the Policy Advocacy Clinic. "Since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the world has built an extensive body of human rights law and a network of institutions intended to defend and advance human rights law. Yet the central challenge today is often not the absence of standards, but the gap between those standards and their implementation. Geneva is where many of the most important debates about that gap take place."
In this environment, the city itself functions as a classroom. Throughout the six-week program, students in this program attended Human Rights Council sessions, consulted with U.N. officials, and conducted research for U.N. mechanisms to address real-world issues.
"Being in Geneva changes how students learn because they receive feedback from the people who will use their work," Ofer said. "Students gain both practice skills and a much broader sense of what is possible after Princeton. They become stronger researchers. They have to navigate complex questions involving both U.S. law and international human rights standards, often across dozens of jurisdictions and multiple legal authorities."
In 2021, following the death of George Floyd, the United Nations established EMLER to evaluate law enforcement policies and practices across the globe, including police use-of-force policies and whether they align with international standards. However, the decentralized nature of the U.S. criminal justice system, with more than 18,000 separate law enforcement agencies and a complex mix of federal and state laws, makes it difficult to collect and analyze the appropriate data on U.S. policies.
Students in the Geneva Task Force researched dozens of jurisdictions and compared state statutes against the 1979 U.N. Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials and the 1990 U.N. Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials. By the end, the students produced a 124-page report with 784 footnotes that reviewed 435 statutes, 114 regulations, and 183 court cases.
“Working in Geneva made real something that had mostly been theoretical for me at Princeton,” said Anya Marino, a junior at Princeton SPIA. “Policy research is not just an academic exercise, but something people with power and influence will read and use. As a student, I've developed the tools needed to do in-depth research, but it was the experience itself that demonstrated to me what it means to be held to that standard. Every claim has to hold up because someone might act on it. This experience is preparing me for my future career because it forced me to take an enormous amount of raw information and turn it into something clear and useful for decision-making. It also taught me how to work under real constraints, with a team, a six-week timeline, and an audience that needs concise analysis and detailed recommendations. I came away from Geneva with real confidence that I can do rigorous work that actually matters to people.”
While Geneva might be one of the newer locations students can immerse themselves in, Princeton SPIA's global outreach provides several other opportunities to engage in today's issues.
Undergraduate students have visited Botswana regularly in each of the last four years as part of a Policy Task Force run through a SPIA study abroad program at the University of Cape Town, in South Africa. The program, taught by University of Cape Town political scientist Jeremy Seekings, examines education policy and race relations in South Africa before students travel to Botswana during their mid-semester break to conduct field research — interviewing farmers, local officials, and residents in villages across the country about the social protection and poverty-reduction policies that shape their daily lives.
Daniel C. Kurtzer, professor of the practice in international relations and the S. Daniel Abraham Professor of Middle East Policy Studies, runs a similar model at the graduate level. His annual Policy Workshop takes students to the Middle East to research a different live diplomatic challenge each year; past topics have included the dispute over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam and the Nile's water supply, and, most recently, how U.S. foreign assistance in the region could shift toward models of mutual economic benefit. Each workshop culminates in a policy report delivered to real government and institutional clients.
Students have also visited the American University of Cairo, Kenya, Uruguay, El Salvador, and Panama.
The task forces, a junior-year requirement for Princeton SPIA majors, pair students directly with policy practitioners, from civil rights attorneys to sitting members of Congress, rather than academic specialists alone. In Geneva, that model has translated into an ongoing research pipeline for the U.N.'s human rights institutions.
"This is a very clear opportunity that goes both ways," said Paul Lipton, senior associate dean for academic administration. "We're providing important support on the research side for U.N. organizations, and our students are interacting with folks who are operating in the world of human rights — doing work that is very real, very applicable, and has direct utility to these international agencies and multilateral organizations."
For the students who participate in these opportunities, the experience refines their research and policy-writing skills while introducing them to career paths in international institutions. Meeting with diplomats and NGO staff helps them understand how they can apply their skills in public service after they graduate.
"Several students have told me that the experience changed both their trajectory at Princeton, as well as what they hoped to do after graduation," Ofer said. "That, to me, is one of the most powerful forms of experiential learning: students developing both new skills and a clearer sense of how they can use those skills post-graduation."