InterAction

Steven Rocker is the Senior Advocacy and Research Associate at InterAction. In this capacity, he assists with and is responsible for InterAction's budget and appropriations work, the Public Policy Committee, the Millennium Challenge Account working group, G8/G20 summit advocacy, and the InterAction Weekly Policy Update.

Steven, a native of Mobile, Alabama, graduated from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) in spring 2007 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in International Studies and U.S. History. After graduating, Steven worked as a Volunteer Coordinator at Impact Alabama, a non-profit organization affiliated with the AmeriCorps program that is dedicated to decreasing poverty in Alabama by empowering college  students and recent graduates to affect systemic social change through programs in health, finance, and education.

In the fall of 2008, Steven enrolled in American University’s School of International Service, and in the spring of 2010, he graduated with a Master of Arts degree in International Affairs with a specialization in U.S. Foreign Policy.  While in graduate school, Steven served as a Teaching Assistant to Professor Elizabeth Cohn and as a Research Assistant at the U.S. Institute of Peace’s Academy for International Conflict Management and Peacebuilding.

In the spring of 2006, Steven participated in the University of Pittsburgh-sponsored Semester at Sea program, where he visited Brazil, South Africa, Mauritius, India, Vietnam, Myanmar (Burma), and China, among other countries. This formative experience continues to shape his academic and personal interests, which include global democratization and governance, the Great Lakes region of Africa, South Asia, the impact of domestic politics on U.S. foreign policy, U.S. policy toward ‘Weak States,’ and United Nations (UN) peacekeeping, the last of which Steven wrote his Master’s thesis on, which is entitled The Clear and Present UN Peacekeeping Resource Crunch: Justification and Prospects for Increased U.S. Involvement.

In the future, Steven hopes to pursue professional opportunities that increasingly allow him to deal with the global issues that are important to him in a substantive way as well as gain varied experiences in the non-profit, public, and private sectors.