Ivana Radačić

Dr. Ivana Radačić is an adjunct faculty member with the Human Rights Practice Program at the University of Arizona. A human rights academic and activist based in Zagreb, Croatia, she is the former Vice-Chair of the UN Working Group on discrimination against women and girls. During the 2023-23 academic year, Dr Radačić was a Fulbright visiting scholar at the University of Arizona, undertaking a research and teaching project on spiritual activism, self-care, collective care and human rights. She is also a research advisor at Ivo Pilar Institute of Social Sciences in Zagreb and a part-time lecturer at the University of Osijek. 

Ivana holds a PhD in law from the University of London, MPhil in criminological research from the University of Cambridge and LLM from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the University of Zagreb. For her post-doctoral project at the University of Melbourne she was awarded Endeavor Research Award. She was a visiting lecturer at different universities in Europe, Central America, Australia and New Zealand. She has also been a lecturer and a fellow at the Women’s Studies Center in Zagreb and the Women’s Human Rights Training Institute for the Central and Eastern Europe region in Sofia.

Her research and teaching areas are women’s rights and gender equality; international human rights; gender, sexuality and the law; and self-care, collective care and human rights. Her most recent four-year research project (2019-2023), funded by the Croatian Science Foundation, was on regulation of sex work in Croatia, and she previously lead a comparative project on sex work, funded by the International Social Research Foundation (2015-2017). She was a member of the European Union COST action Comparing European Prostitution Policies (2013-2017). 

She has published extensively in the areas of human rights, feminism, gender, sexuality and law, mostly in international journals and books. She is the author of the book Sexual violence – Myths, Stereotypes and the Legal System (TIMpress, 2014). 

Dr Radačić has cooperated with many international institutions and NGOs on human rights research, training and litigation and has been involved with drafting national human rights laws and policies. She also worked at the European Court of Human Rights and litigated women’s rights cases before it. As the Council of Europe expert on women’s rights she has co-authored a training manual for judges on women’s access to justice. She served as an expert member of the Parliamentary Committee on Gender Equality in Croatia.

In addition to her work on social justice, Ivana has been very interested in well-being, self-development and spirituality. She is a certified Kundalini yoga teacher and has finished a four-year integrative body-oriented psychotherapy training and many workshops on different therapeutical and healing modalities. She is also a practitioner of conscious dance practices and she plays cello and African djembe. She has been leading women’s circles and workshops, exploring mostly feminine archetypes. 

She is passionate about bridging the gaps between social activism and spirituality and healing practices.