KENNESAW, Ga. | Jan 2, 2025

After news of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Kristina Hook’s thoughts immediately went to her many friends and colleagues gained from her years of fieldwork in Ukraine.

“I will never forget the sleepless first night of Russia’s full-scale invasion. I called a Ukrainian family very close to me, where their daughter told of hearing the deadly whistle of cruise missiles flying above their residential neighborhood in Kyiv,” she said. “This memory sparked a flurry of new professional service roles for me.”

Hook, now an assistant professor of conflict management in Kennesaw State University’s School of Conflict Management, Peacebuilding and Development, has spent years dedicating her research and advocacy work to give voices to the marginalized all over the globe.

In some of this high-profile work, Hook last year served as Principal Author of an independent legal inquiry into violations of the United Nations Genocide Convention by Russian Federation state actors, published by the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy and the Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights. This report found there is reasonable grounds to conclude that the Russian Federation is responsible for the commission of genocide in Ukraine, a charge that has no statute of limitations in international courts.

“Accountability for these crimes and others, if upheld by individual courts, can follow people until their dying days,” Hook said, pointing to a 26-year-old manhunt for one of the Rwandan genocide’s notorious propagandists.

Hook’s interest in how Russia’s aggression affects Ukrainian society first led her to Ukraine in 2015, a year after Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea, a southern coastal peninsula in Ukraine. She studied the history of an artificial famine, the Holodomor, induced by Joseph Stalin in 1932-1933. Conducting interviews and anthropological participant-observation in 34 cities and towns of Ukraine, she gathered research on how modern Ukrainians were coming to terms with this legacy against the backdrop of the Russia-Ukraine war. Many of the areas where Hook has worked have been devastated by Russia’s full-scale invasion, blurring the lines between past and present violence for many of its victims.

“Working on subjects of mass atrocities can take a toll, but if it feels harrowing to research or to document these types of crimes, we need to turn our gaze to the people that are living through them,” she said. “So yes, it can be trying, but I think for most of us working in this field, myself included, that's a powerful motivation to wake up every day and do the job that you're trained to do. To document what you’re seeing and to use your scientific methods to tell the truth and speak out for those who are affected.”

After Russia’s escalation and full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Hook translated her existing research into advocacy. What her work has recorded would be difficult for anyone to recount ¾ civilian recollections of sexual violence and executions at the hands of Russian forces, witnesses to warplanes and drones leveling residential city blocks, willful starvation tactics, and children who have been taken from their families and stripped of their Ukrainian identity and hidden away inside Russia or Russia-controlled areas. Some of Hook’s interviews were with elderly Ukrainians who had seen similar scenes play out in their homeland in the ’30s and ’40s under the Holodomor, Stalinist terrors, and the Nazi occupation of Ukraine.

Childhood experiences shaped Hook’s dedication to working with victims of catastrophes.

The Florida native took an early interest in humanitarianism as she watched multiple hurricanes sweep through her hometown during her school years. These experiences propelled her desire to work with those who faced similar disasters.

“I became very interested in areas that had fewer resources to recover than we did – places where the infrastructure is underdeveloped, where early warning systems aren’t in place – so I began a career in global humanitarianism, working in issues like food security,” Hook said. “Soon, I realized that violence is a foundational cause for many of these issues, and that has to be addressed before you can focus on getting basic things like food and water regularly to people.”

Hook has worked in 30 countries including across Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East, East Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean.

She has earned many recognitions and awards, including a U.S. Department of State Meritorious Honor Award, Society for Applied Anthropology's Human Rights Defender Award, and the Kellogg Institute Award for Distinguished Dissertation on Democracy and Human Development, as well as research grants, a Conference USA faculty honor and various Kennesaw State University honors, including a 2024 Outstanding Early Career Scholar Award. She is working on a book recounting more than 100 interviews with Ukrainian national leaders over nearly a decade, as they shared their concerns of an emboldened Moscow but their pride in a resilient Ukrainian society.

In addition to her research and teaching at KSU, Hook is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. She previously served as a U.S. Department of State policy adviser for mass atrocity prevention, as a nonresident research fellow at the Marine Corps University, and as a U.S. Presidential Management Fellow.

Over her years working internationally as an expert in the Russian-Ukrainian war and consultant in conflict management topics, Hook has also traveled the globe to speak on human rights issues. She has shared her expertise with media ranging from Foreign Affairs, USA Today, CNN, Washington Post, and others and at venues including the University of Cambridge, Oxford University, the Canadian Museum of Human Rights, The Vatican, and Harvard University. She recently testified on her research at a U.S. Congressional briefing organized by the bipartisan Helsinki Commission, comprised of members of the U.S. House, Senate, and executive branch.

It was through mutual connections and research within Ukraine that Emily Channell-Justice, director of Harvard’s Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program, connected with Hook in 2020. Since then, the two have found opportunities to collaborate, and Channell-Justice says Hook’s commitment to the people whose experience she studies is an inspiration.

“I admire Kristina’s academic work for its important contribution to Ukrainian studies and to anthropology, but I equally admire her advocacy work, because it’s so important to keep talking about Ukraine as the war goes on,” Channell-Justice said.

Katie Kaukinen, dean of the Radow College of Humanities and Social Sciences, said Hook serves as a role model for the Ph.D. students and scholars alike.

“Dr. Hook’s commitment to humanitarianism and peacebuilding worldwide, but particularly in Ukraine, is a tireless effort and one of which Radow College and KSU could not be more proud,” Kaukinen said. “Her documentation of the price of war and Russia’s unprovoked aggression will have long-lasting implications in world history and represent an essential function of rigorous academic research.”

– Story by Thomas Hartwell

Photo by Darnell Wilburn

This article also appears in the fall issue of Summit Magazine.

A leader in innovative teaching and learning, Kennesaw State University offers undergraduate, graduate and doctoral degrees to its more than 47,000 students. Kennesaw State is a member of the University System of Georgia with 11 academic colleges. The university’s vibrant campus culture, diverse population, strong global ties and entrepreneurial spirit draw students from throughout the country and the world. Kennesaw State is a Carnegie-designated doctoral research institution (R2), placing it among an elite group of only 7 percent of U.S. colleges and universities with an R1 or R2 status. For more information, visit kennesaw.edu.