Iranian part of Women's Peace Network

The former Iranian member of Parliament, Fatemeh Haghighatjoo, is a visiting scholar at UMass-Boston in the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy within the McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies. I recounted her work in Iran and her life in Boston in a profile on Haghighatjoo in the Globe earlier this month.

It's worth noting that she is also a member of the Women Waging Peace Network, set up by philathropist and human rights activist Swanee Hunt. The former US ambassador to Austria, Hunt moved to Cambridge in 1997 to join the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and at the same time she has steadily built up the portfolio of her non-profit organization, Hunt Alternatives Fund, to support a range of peacemaking and women's empowerment initiatives at home and abroad.

The Women Waging Peace Network includes more than 300 prominent women activists who work in development, conflict resolution and related fields in troubled countries. Supporting women's rights is a common thread.

So it's not surprising that Hunt enlisted Haghighatjoo, who has been living in virtual exile in the Boston area since 2005 when she arrived at MIT for a fellowship. A year later, another Hunt organization, the Institute for Inclusive Security, produced a report citing the critical role that women have played in Iran's democracy movement. That report feels prescient now, given the central role of women in the recent protests.

This gives me an opportunity to give appropriate space to the photo of Haghighatjoo taken by Globe staffer Barry Chin, which did not make it into the newspaper version of the profile.

Fatemeh Haghighatjoo at Umass-Boston campus, Photo by Barry Chin, Globe staff