PROFESSIONAL BIOGRAPHY
Robert David Irish is a democracy and governance specialist. His specialties include project and personnel management, post-conflict electoral evaluations, and social and political analysis. Professional skills incorporate report writing and editing with staff training and relationship building. Fifteen years of experience in the fields of law and international relations provide strong leadership, organizational, and communication skills.
Robert is currently an Election Liaison Officer for IFES in Iraq. His primary duties include monitoring and evaluating electoral activities, identifying operational challenges, recommending solutions, and reporting on findings. The liaison officer team is responsible for working with the provincial election offices to identify material and technical needs and to fulfill them by coordinating with the central election commission and strategic international partners.
Prior to his work in Iraq, Robert was the Long-term Observer Coordinator for the IRI election observation mission to Pakistan. In this role, he managed and counseled ten teams of LTOs as they observed, assessed, and reported on electoral processes and political conditions related to the parliamentary elections in February 2008. Before Pakistan, he worked for NDI in Sierra Leone, where he was a Team Leader in the Southern province from April until August 2007. The LTO project focused on observing and assessing the electoral processes and socio-political conditions leading up to the national elections. One of his strengths was in building relationships among regional and local stakeholders. He also arranged logistics for the short-term observation mission and served as an editor, author, and photographer for weekly reports, issue memoranda, and the program newsletter: “Election Watch: Sierra Leone”.
In January of 2007, Robert was a LTO for IRI in Bangladesh. The mission was suspended due to political instability but not before completing a report on the political climate and administrative preparedness for elections in Sylhet division. In February 2006, he was a short-term election observer for IFES in Haiti. His team assessed seven polling centers in the Gros Morne region of Artibonite, where they met with polling supervisors, observed ballot counting procedures, and reported findings to the national observer team. In September 2005, he observed the German parliamentary elections, where he conducted an exit poll and met with a polling station manager in Berlin-Pankow. Robert was an international observer for The Carter Center in Ethiopia in the summer of 2005. The project focused on assessing numerous post-election hearings in the Amhara region regarding complaints of voting irregularities. He also coordinated a document review, issue-coding, and translation exercise to assemble briefing books for the national observer teams.
Prior to his studies, Robert worked seven years as a Senior Paralegal for the law firm of Bingham McCutchen in San Francisco, managing large caseloads, supervising paralegal teams, and organizing documentation. Professional experiences include nine years of management, eight years of technical editing, and 15 years of corporate office responsibilities. Practical skills include project management, strategic analysis, conducting briefings, communicating goals, preparing budgets, assembling proposals, arranging logistics, and training staff.
Robert completed his Master of Science in Political Science/International Relations, cum laude, from the Universiteit van Amsterdam. Areas of study included democracy and governance issues as well as international law, American foreign policy, and the global political economy. Robert also holds a Bachelor of Arts, cum laude, in International Relations from San Francisco State University, where he was managing editor and four-time author for “The International Relations Journal”.
Robert’s career interests are in assessing, designing, and implementing democracy assistance programs and monitoring and evaluating governance-building projects in developing countries. He is currently based in Berlin, Germany.