Professor Phil Clark

Phil Clark is a Professor of International Politics at SOAS University of London. He specialises in conflict and post-conflict issues, including transitional justice, peacebuilding and reconciliation after mass atrocity in Rwanda, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi.

His most recent books are Distant Justice: The Impact of the International Criminal Court on African Politics (CUP, 2018) – which was shortlisted for the Raphael Lemkin Award for best book on genocide and mass violence – and The Gacaca Courts, Post-Genocide Justice and Reconciliation: Justice without Lawyers (CUP, 2010). He is currently completing a book on welfare, post-genocide inequality and reconciliation in Rwanda, to be published by Hurst and Co.

His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, the Washington Post, the Guardian, Dissent, the East African, Prospect, the Times Higher Education Supplement, The Australian and the BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera websites. He is a regular radio and TV contributor on the BBC, France 24, Al Jazeera, CNN, Deutsche Welle, TNT and Monocle 24.

Professor Clark has a DPhil in Politics from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar.

He welcomes PhD proposals on any of the following topics: causes of and responses to genocide and other mass atrocities; transitional justice, peacebuilding or reconciliation; the politics of Central Africa; the politics of international criminal justice, including the ICC; traditional or customary approaches to dispute resolution.

Prof. Clark’s current work focuses on international, national and community-based responses to mass violence in Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan. He has written extensively on the gacaca community courts in post-genocide Rwanda and the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Prof. Clark was technical advisor and co-author of a 2007 UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights project surveying popular perceptions of transitional justice and peacebuilding in northern Uganda. He has advised the Danish, Sudanese, Swedish, Ugandan and UK governments, the ICC, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Human Rights Watch and Crisis Group on conflict issues in Africa.

History, Politics and Law of the African Great Lakes; Transitional Justice Theory and Practice; the Politics of Violence; Community-Based and Customary Law; Conflict Resolution and Reconciliation; the Politics of International Criminal Justice; Peacebuilding, Security and Post-Conflict Reconstruction; Moral and Political Philosophy