Kate Ferguson, Protection Approaches (UK)
Kate heads Protection Approaches research and policy work, establishing evidenced, equitable and creative pathways to structural change. This includes undertaking, commissioning, and coordinating research, providing technical advice to policy stakeholders, and creating opportunities for knowledge exchange. She leads their political engagement strategy, developing working groups and building constituencies of influence in the UK and abroad. She manages PA’s fundraising portfolio for research and policy programmes, including Stronger Communities and Atrocity Prevention.
Kate is an experienced analyst and strategist driving a prevention-first approach to foreign policy and the cycle of crises. She is a regular commentator on domestic and international issues relating to identity-based violence in the press and continues to publish academic writing. Her book, Architectures of Violence: The Command Structures of Modern Mass Atrocities, was published in 2020 by Hurst and Oxford University Press.
Before founding PA, Kate worked in political strategy and research across a number of roles in the third sector, academia, the UK parliament, and as a private consultant. Between 2012-2018 she lectured on subjects relating to the histories of rights and violence at the University of East Anglia. She was a founding Editor of Refugee History, where she helped develop the concept and online platform. She received her PhD in 2015 from the University of East Anglia on devolved structures of modern mass atrocities and has an MPhil in Russian and East European Studies from the University of Oxford. Kate was made inaugural Chair of Policy at the European Centre of the Responsibility to Protect in 2018 where she works with the executive team to identify strategies for academic impact and is an occasional guest lecturer. She serves on the Board of Trustees of Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of East Anglia.