Sue Eckert

The Honorable Sue Eckert is a senior associate with the Humanitarian Agenda at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), where she focuses on issues related to financial access and the impact of sanctions and counterterrorism measures on humanitarian action. Previously, Ms. Eckert served as assistant secretary of commerce for export administration responsible for dual-use export control and sanctions policies; she also was a former staff member of the House of Representatives' Committee on Foreign Affairs, where she oversaw national security, nonproliferation, international trade, and technology transfer issues. From 1998 to 2016, Ms. Eckert was senior fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, where she codirected research projects on UN sanctions (coauthoring the Interlaken manual Targeted Financial Sanctions: A Manual for Design and Implementation, the book Targeted Sanctions: The Impacts and Effectiveness of United Nations Action [Cambridge University Press, 2016], and a series of three “Watson Reports”) and the financing of terrorism (coediting the book Countering the Financing of Terrorism [Routledge, 2007]). In 2017, she undertook the first quantitative study, Financial Access for U.S. Nonprofits, of the challenges that U.S. nongovernmental organizations face in transferring funds abroad to support humanitarian programs. Based on this research, she currently serves as a consultant to the World Bank on de-risking and unintended consequences of anti-money laundering (AML), countering the financing of terrorism (CFT), and sanctions policies; and she is a senior adviser to the NY-based International Peace Institute on counterterrorism, sanctions, and humanitarian action. Ms. Eckert is on the faculty of the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs at Yale University and works extensively with the U.S. government, the United Nations, and other international organizations and member states, most recently on reform of sanctions to promote humanitarian action in conflict environments.