Professor Janine Natalya Clark

Birmingham Law School
Professor of Gender, Transitional Justice and International Criminal Law

Contact details

Telephone: 0121 414 6316
Email: j.n.clark@bham.ac.uk

Address: Birmingham Law School
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

Professor Janine Natalya Clark joined Birmingham Law School in October 2014. She was promoted to Reader in 2016 and promoted to Professor in 2018. Her research interests include conflict-related sexual violence, transitional justice, international criminal courts, resilience, social-ecological systems, posthumanism, ethnic conflict and reconciliation.

She is currently leading a five-year European Research Council (ERC) project, now in its final year, entitled A Comparative Study of Resilience in Survivors of War Rape and Sexual Violence: New Directions for Transitional Justice (CSRS). She writes frequent blogs and her interdisciplinary work relating to the project has been published in a wide range of journals, including the International Journal of Transitional justice, the Journal of International Criminal Justice, Theoretical Criminology, International Studies Review, the British Journal of Sociology and Memory Studies.

Also linked to the ERC project, her most recent book – Resilience, Adaptive Peacebuilding and Transitional Justice: How Societies Recover after Collective Violence – was published open access by Cambridge University Press in September 2021. The book is co-edited with Professor Michael Ungar, founder of the Resilience Research Centre in Canada. Janine is currently working on a new research monograph. Her previous project, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), sought to tackle sexual violence-related stigma in Bosnia-Herzegovina, an issue that she discusses in her book Rape, Sexual Violence and Transitional Justice Challenges: Lessons from Bosnia-Herzegovina (2017, 2019).

Staff details
Policy information

Qualifications

LLB (Bristol)
MA (Leeds)
PhD (Nottingham)

Biography

Professor Clark received her PhD from the University of Nottingham in 2006 and subsequently spent three years in the International Politics department at Aberystwyth University as an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship and Leverhulme Early Career Fellow respectively. In 2014, she was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. Before joining Birmingham Law School in October 2014, she held Lecturer positions in the Post-War Reconstruction and Development Unit at the University of York (2009-2010), the School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy at Queen’s University in Belfast (2010-2011) and in the Department of Politics at the University of Sheffield (2011-2014). She was promoted to Chair in 2018.

Postgraduate supervision

Dr Clark is interested in supervising research in the following areas:

International criminal justice
Transitional justice
Rape and sexual violence
Genocide
DDR

Find out more - our PhD Law page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

Research

Professor Clark’s research interests include conflict-related sexual violence, transitional justice, international criminal courts (and particularly their impact and effectiveness), resilience, ethnic conflict and post-conflict reconciliation. In 2017, she started a five-year European Research Council Consolidator Grant. The research is exploring the resilience of victims-survivors of conflict-related sexual violence in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Colombia and Uganda, with the aim of developing a new ecological model of transitional justice that fosters resilience.

Other activities

Professor Clark is a member of the UK governments Team of Experts on the Prevention of Sexual Violence in Conflict. She is a member of the Editorial Committee of the Journal of International Criminal Justice. She established the University of Birmingham’s Fieldwork Group; this brings together scholars and researchers from different disciplines across the university who engage in challenging fieldwork.