Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
Political Science
Mark Berlin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. degrees from the University of California, Irvine. His research examines politics at the intersections of international law, domestic law, and human rights, with a particular focus on domestic and international accountability for violations of human rights and the laws of war. Prof. Berlin's research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, and he was formerly a guest researcher at the Peace Research Institute in Frankfurt, Germany. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on international law, international organizations, human rights, and the politics of torture. Prof. Berlin also holds a Bachelor of Music degree from Berklee College of Music, and before pursuing his graduate studies, worked as a music producer and recording engineer in Chicago.
Prof. Berlin recently published a book, Criminalizing Atrocity: The Global Spread of Criminal Laws against International Crimes (Oxford University Press), which examines how and why countries around the world over the past 70 years have adopted national criminal laws against genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. He is currently working on a number of research projects related to the prevention of and accountability for torture. The largest of these projects focuses on the now well-documented use of torture by Chicago Police detectives against criminal suspects throughout the 1970s and 80s. Specifically, the project examines why the system of police oversight and accountability in Chicago failed for so long to stem the abuses, as well as how efforts to achieve justice for the survivors developed over time.
Education
Ph.D., University of California, Irvine, 2015
Courses Taught
- POSC 4601 International Law
- POSC 4611 International Organizations
- POSC 4653 The Politics of Torture
- POSC 6651 The Politics of Human Rights
Publications
Book
Journal Articles
- Mark Berlin. 2022. 鈥淒oes Criminalizing Torture Deter Police Torture?鈥 Forthcoming in American Journal of Political Science.
- Mark Berlin. 2020. 鈥淩evising the 鈥楬ibernation鈥 Narrative: Technocratic Legal Experts and the Cold War Origins of the 鈥楯ustice Cascade.鈥欌 Forthcoming in Human Rights Quarterly.
- Ryan Scoville and Mark Berlin. 2019. 鈥淲ho Studies International Law? Explaining Cross-National Variation in Compulsory International Legal Education.鈥 European Journal of International Law (vol. 30, no. 2).
- Mark Berlin and Geoff Dancy. 2017. 鈥淭he Difference Law Makes: Domestic Atrocity Laws and Human Rights Prosecutions.鈥 Law & Society Review (vol. 51, no. 3).
- Berlin, Mark. 2016. "Why (not) Arrest? Third-party State Compliance and Noncompliance with International Criminal Tribunals." Journal of Human Rights (vol. 15, no. 4).
- Berlin, Mark. 2013. "From Pirates to Pinochet: Universal Jurisdiction for Torture." In The Politics of the Globalization of Law: Getting from Rights to Justice, edited by Alison Brysk. New York: Routledge.