Law and Peace Practice Group /

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 (Cambridge University Press, 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. and Oxford University Press.  

In addition to being a member of IFIT’s Law and Peace Practice Group, Professor Clark is a member of the UN advisory group on reconciliation. In 2014, he founded the Research, Policy and Higher Education (RPHE) programme through the Aegis Trust in Kigali – designed to support the Rwandan research community – and in 2007 co-founded and convened the Oxford Transitional Justice Research (OTJR) network at the University of Oxford. 

His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, the Washington Post, the Guardian, Dissent, the East African, Prospect, Times Higher Education Supplement, the Australian and the BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera websites. He is a regular media 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.

Working languages: English and French

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