Zoha Siddiqui
William & Mary
Queen's University Belfast (QUB)
Foreign Affairs
Zoha Siddiqui studies Conflict Transformation and Social Justice at Queen's University Belfast. A graduate of William & Mary, she studied International Relations and Transitional Justice, the process by which states redress mass violence. She became interested in the 1947 partition between India and Pakistan and how witnesses to partition, including her own grandparents and great grandparents, dealt with the grief, trauma, and tumult of that time. She is interested in the Good Friday Agreement, which succeeded in ending decades of sectarian violence, but left questions of criminal justice for human rights violations committed during the Troubles unaddressed. As Co-Director of the Exodus Project, Zoha studied challenges faced by vulnerable groups in displacement crises. Her work resulted in policy recommendations presented to USAID and other organizations to improve the quality of life for Venezuelan migrant communities in Colombia. She is also the Co-Founder and Co-Director of HER, a non-profit organization, that has led to the creation of 13 libraries for over 20,000 students attending underfunded girls' schools in rural and urban areas of Pakistan and Morocco. Zoha has co-authored several articles, including for Foreign Policy, on the role of international justice institutions in the ongoing war in Ukraine. She has also been involved in education rights for prisoners in Argentina and has analyzed and indexed evidence in legal cases on enforced disappearances during Guatemala’s Internal Armed Conflict. Zoha’s aspiration is to become an international lawyer, to advance victims’ rights through courts and law.