ECACTJ

I joined the School of Law in 2012 and I lecture in criminology and direct the MSc in Global Crime, Justice and Security. My teaching and research interests are in the field of global problems of crime and responses to these. Previously, I lectured in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh and worked as a researcher for the Home Office and Cardiff University.

I divide my research into two main areas. The first focuses on reform in post-socialist, post-authoritarian and post-conflict states with a holistic perspective on the criminal justice sector. This includes conceptual and empirical work on democratisation. I have a particular interest in international aspects of governance. A series of publications explore these matters in the context of Bosnia and Herzegovina, including the book, Making the Transition (2011).

A second strand of my work focuses on international crimes, including genocide. I am presently working on empirical analysis of police participation in war crimes and ethnic cleansing in one region of Bosnia in relation to legacies of the Yugoslav state and the initial democratisation processes in the early 1990s.

Barbora Hola works as Senior Researcher at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR) and as Associate Professor at the Department of Criminal Law and Criminology at  VU University of Amsterdam. She has an interdisciplinary focus and studies transitional justice after atrocities, in particular (international) criminal trials, sentencing of international crimes, enforcement of international sentences, rehabilitation of war criminals and life after trial at international criminal tribunals. Barbora has published extensively on these subjects and presented at international conferences and universities in Europe, Africa and the America’s. In 2013, the Netherlands Organization for   Scientific Research (NWO)  awarded Barbora the prestigious VENI grant for a research on sentencing of international crimes by national courts in Bosnia and Rwanda. In 2015 Barbora, together with Lily Rueda, received a Research Talent Grant for a project focusing on the role of sanctions in the ICC complementarity assessment. In 2016, the NWO WOTRO  funded a project on cycle of violence in post-conflict settings, in which she cooperates with  colleagues from the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement and the Prison Fellowship Rwanda. In 2017, Barbora was one of the four candidates who received the highly competitive ‘WISE’ (Women in Science Excel) fellowship from the NWO to develop her research line on empirical studies of international criminal and transitional justice after atrocities. Besides her research and teaching in the Master’s programme International Crimes and Criminology, Barbora is a co-director of the Center for International Criminal Justice, a knowledge centre dedicated to interdisciplinary studies of mass atrocity crimes and international criminal justice (www.cicj.org).  

Nandor Knust studied law at the universities of Frankfurt and Paris. He worked at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania and he carried out several field research visits to the Great Lakes Region of Africa.

As a member of the International Max Planck Research School for Comparative Criminal Law (IMPRS-CC) he completed his dissertation about a pluralistic model of Transitional Justice in 2011 that was awarded with the Otto-Hahn-Medal for outstanding scientific achievements.

He is heading the International Criminal Law Section of the MPICC and serves as Scientific Coordinator of the IMPRS-CC.

Nandor Knust is/was lecturer at a plurality of universities such as the University of Mannheim; Tumaini University, Tanzania; Arcadia University (with the East African Community) in Arusha, Tanzania and the School of Governance, Law and Society at the Tallinn University, Estonia and the Campus Helsinki, Finland.

Kjersti Lohne holds a doctorate in Criminology from the University of Oslo (2015). Her doctoral thesis, Advocates of Humanity: Human Rights NGOs in International Criminal Justice, analyses the cultural meaning of global justice-making through international criminal law, and focuses specifically on the role that human rights NGOs play in the materialities and imaginaries of international criminal justice. It is based on a multi-sited ethnography including interviews with key players in The Hague (and other places in the Netherlands) and in Uganda as well as Belgium, Norway, Rwanda and the UK.

His project role is to develop and apply a theory of ‘moral neutralisation’ to explain the denial strategies that are (I) used by perpetrators (and bystanders) when destroying bodies; (II) challenged, entrenched or transformed by the identification of bodies; (III) overcome – or possibly even further employed – in order to commemorate of the victims of mass violence. He is also interested in exploring the destruction of bodies as punishment (that is, as a subject of penological analysis), and in comparing the ways in which former criminals and former criminal states come to terms with their past.

Current positions

• 2015-              Freelancer at Smeulers: training, research and consultancy
• 2014-              Professor in international criminology at the University of Groningen (0,2 fte)
• 2011-              Professor in international criminology at Tilburg University (0,2 fte)

• 2014-             Co-chair European Criminology Group on Atrocity Crimes and Transitional justice
• 2014-             Associated researcher at NIOD
• 2013-             Member of the editorial advice board of Genocide Studies International
• 2012-             Research fellow at Intervict
• 2012-             Initiating member of the  African Low Countries Network (ALCN).
• 2012-             Member of the advisory board of Young Professionals Research Intiative
  
• 2006-             Member of the editorial board of the book series Supranational Criminal Law, Intersentia
• 2006-             Editor-in-chief of the newsletter Criminology and International crimes as off 2014 member of the editorial board
• 2005-             Initiator and manager of the Supranational Criminology network

• 2009            Open Competition - scholarship (207.000 Euro) awarded by NWO (MaGW) for the project: ‘Breaking the chain of command
• 2008            Best Practice: Capita Selecta Sierra Leone by the Educational Centre of VU University, Amsterdam
• 2005            VENI-scholarship (200.000 Euro) awarded by NWO for the project: ‘A criminological approach to individual criminal responsibility’
• 1993            Honourable mentions of my master-thesis on perpetrators of international crimes at the PIOOM-Award Ceremony.