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Professor Chase has published widely on human rights, democracy, and transitional justice in the Middle East and globally.  His more recent work has moved toward a focus on city-level action. This has included projects with the L.A. Mayor’s office on translating global norms – from human rights, the Sustainable Development Goals, and transitional justice – into local policy in L.A. For example, he led a student research team on the  project on how to conceptualize truth and accountability processes around racial injustice both locally in Los Angeles and across the United States. A Colombian-U.S. dual citizen, he has conducted extensive field research in Colombia on its ambitious transitional justice process, and he is currently extending that fieldwork to other parts of Latin America as well as Europe. This comparative fieldwork contributes to his current research examining whether transitional justice tools developed for post-conflict contexts can be adapted to address unresolved injustices and reduce polarization in the U.S.—and, if so, which lessons from global experiments may prove most relevant.

Chase serves on three boards reflecting these transnational connections: the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies' Rowaq Arabi journal; Proceso Pacífico, which promotes community-based truth processes in Mexico, Colombia, and the United States; and the U.S. Human Rights Cities Alliance, which leads efforts to integrate human rights into city governance. His recent short essays exploring the salience of human rights cities appear in Open Global Rights and can be found 

These various strands and their interconnections are all represented in Chase’s most recent book, the co-edited Human Rights at the Intersections: Transformations through Local, Global, and Cosmopolitan Landscapes (Bloomsbury, 2023). In addition to numerous chapters and articles, his previous books are Handbook on Human Rights and the Middle East and North Africa (Routledge, 2017), Human Rights, Revolution, and Reform in the Muslim World (2012), and Human Rights in the Arab World: Independent Voices (co-edited with Amr Hamzawy, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). Chase has received Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law (Basque Country, Spain), Harvard Law School, Fulbright, and U.S. Institute of Peace fellowships. He has also worked with transnational non-governmental organizations across the globe, as well as with the World Health Organization, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the United Nations Development Programme, and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.