Sophie Rutenbar is an Expert Consultant at the Global Initiative (GI-TOC), a Non-Resident Fellow with the Prevention, Peacebuilding and Protracted Crises Program of NYU’s Center for International Cooperation, as well as a Non-Resident Fellow with the Brookings Institution Foreign Policy Program, having recently completed a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellowship based at both institutions.

Until early 2024, Rutenbar was the Mission Planning Officer for the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH), working in the front office of the UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Haiti. As part of her role, Rutenbar led development of a UN-wide Integrated Strategic Framework and regularly served as the special assistant to the Special Representative.

Before joining the BINUH start-up in late 2019, Rutenbar served as Political Affairs Officer with the Policy Planning Team of the United Nations Department of Peace Operations. In this role, she worked extensively on peacekeeping and peace and security reform processes, including supporting the Action for Peacekeeping initiative (2018-19), the Secretary-General’s Peace and Security Restructuring (2017-18) and the High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (2015). She has also worked with the UN Mission in South Sudan, the Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on the Global Response to Health Crises, and an initiative to strengthen the supply chain for all United Nations presences around the world. She joined the United Nations in 2013 as the first-ever US-sponsored Associate Expert (Junior Professional Officer) in the United Nations Secretariat.

Before the UN, she worked in Sudan, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Thailand and Zambia.

Through the Marshall Scholarship, she received master’s degrees in Conflict, Security and Development from King’s College London and Human Rights from the London School of Economics, and she was a Eugene McDermott Scholar at the University of Texas at Dallas. A Truman Scholar, she previously served as co-president of the board of the Truman Scholars Association. She is also a Security Fellow with the Truman National Security Project.