Rahel Dette

Rahel Dette is a McCloy Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Previously, she was a non-resident fellow at GPPi and a junior consultant for internet and sustainability at the Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), where she advises the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). In her work, she focuses on the impact of digitization on government services and aid efforts, as well as the challenges this bring along, including data protection and digital security. 

From 2012 to 2015, Rahel was a research associate at GPPi, where she contributed to the project Secure Access in Volatile Environments as well as research on the uses of information communication technologies (ICT) for humanitarian action in conflict environments.

Her previous research projects took Rahel to Israel-Palestine, where she studied results of peace negotiations, and to Tunisia, where she investigated the impacts of the Arab Spring, with an emphasis on the political economy of the new regime and post-revolution tourism strategies. She expanded this project to write an alternative tour guide that combines research, travel tips, and people’s stories of the uprising and its aftermath. 

Rahel holds a bachelor’s degree in political science and Middle East studies from Brown University. There, she worked as a research assistant to two professors, developing new courses on Middle East politics and history. She also organized multiple campus-wide lectures and dialogue and mediation projects, and coordinated the university’s international orientation program. Originally from Berlin, she moved abroad starting in 2006, when she attended the United World College of the Atlantic in Wales.