Founder

Balakrishnan RajAgopal

Balakrishnan Rajagopal is currently a Professor of Law and Development at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and the founder of the Displacement Research and Action Network at MIT. He is also the current UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing. He has more than 25 years of experience in researching and publishing on social movements, displacement, land, property and housing.

He is recognized as a leading participant in the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) Network of scholars and as one of its founders. He is a Counsellor to the American Society of International Law and a member of its Executive Council. He was an invited member of the Expert Group convened by the UN at its Fourth Summit on Least Developed Countries in Istanbul in 2011 and an Expert member of the academic advisory committee to the UN Secretary General’s 2023 Report on Inclusive Policies and Programmes to address Homelessness. He has been a human rights advisor to the World Commission on Dams, and to several UN bodies and INGOs.

He has been a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, DC, the Madras Institute of Development Studies and the Jawaharlal Nehru University, the Institute for Advanced Studies at Hebrew University and Stellebosch University, and a Visiting Professor at the UN University for Peace, University of Melbourne Law School and the Washington College of Law, the American University.  He is or has been on the editorial committee or advisory boards of numerous journals including Transnational Legal Theory, Law and Development Review, Jindal Global Law Review and the Indian Law Review.  

Prior to his academic career, he served for many years with the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Cambodia and received Cambodia’s highest Royal Award for foreign nationals from the King of Cambodia (Royal Order of Sahametrei, 1997). 

He has published numerous scholarly articles in leading law and social science journals and chapters in various volumes.  He is the author/editor of five books including International Law from Below: Development, Social Movements and Third World Resistance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), and most recently Critical Issues in Human Rights and Development (co-editor, Edward Elgar, 2021) and eight UN reports as UN Rapporteur.

His work has been translated into Chinese, Spanish, and French. He also publishes and features widely in the media on human rights and international law issues including the BBC, CNN, WGBH/NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Guardian, Al Jazeera, the Wire, the Interview (with Karan Thapar), the Print, DW (Germany) and many others and has been a columnist at Huffington Post and the Indian Express. 

Research Assistant

Mena Mohamed

Mena Mohamed is a Master in City Planning student at MIT’s Department of Urban Planning and Studies. She is the research assistant for the Displacement Research & Action Network. Prior to coming to MIT, she was a Research Analyst and Lead Generation Manager at the Washington DC Economic Partnership, where she support economic development research and business attraction efforts. Her planning and research interests include displacement and resettlement, transit, and urban development.