CGIS Knafel Building, Room K354, 1737 Cambridge Street, K450, Cambridge, MA 02138
Outside Speaker Seminar Series with Kieran McEvoy (co-sponsored by the Global Scholars Network on Identity and Conflict)
Abstract: This paper emerges from an ongoing book length project supported by the Leverhulme Trust. The book draws from extensive fieldwork research conducted in Northern Ireland, Colombia, Peru, Nepal, Guatemala, and Uganda on the role of apologies by non-state armed groups (NSAGs) in addressing past harms involving 50 interviews with ex-combatants and over 90 interviews with victims of political violence. It also draws upon extensive reviews of the relevant interdisciplinary literature. The paper considers ‘how armed groups think’, exploring the factors which may encourage (or not) organisations that have previously been involved in political motivated violence to engage with transitional justice processes such as truth recovery, reparations, and apologies for past harms. Reflecting on the author’s direct experience working with armed groups in Northern Ireland for over three decades, it also proposes a schema by which the legitimacy of such apologies can be assessed.
Biography: Kieran is the Senator George J. Mitchell Chair in Peace, Security and Justice at the Mitchell Institute and a Professor of Law and Transitional Justice at Queens University Belfast. He is currently a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow (2023-26) and was a Visiting Scholar at Fordham Law School in 2024. He has conducted research in over a dozen post conflict or post authoritarian societies and is longstanding peace and human rights activist in Northern Ireland. He has authored or co-authored four books, co-edited eight books or special issues and over seventy journal articles and scholarly book chapters. His most recent book Lawyers in Conflict and Transition (2022 with L. Mallinder and A. Bryson) was published by Cambridge University Press. His is a past winner of the British Society of Criminology book of the year award and has been awarded the Socio-Legal Studies Association Article of the Year three times. His research interests include human rights, transitional justice, restorative justice, prisons, lawyers, amnesties, victims, ex-combatants, armed groups, and apologies. He was previously a Global Law Fellow at NYU Law, a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar at Harvard Law School, a Visiting Professor at the School of Law Berkeley, and a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge and the London School of Economics. He has been elected as Fellow of the British Academy (2020) and the Royal Irish Academy (2019), the most prestigious indicators of scholarly esteem in the respective jurisdictions.