In this presentation Kieran McEvoy will ex plore the intersection between law\, politics and agency in seeking to enco urage armed groups to take responsibility for past human rights violations. Drawing on almost three decades of experience in working with armed groups in Northern Ireland\, as well as comparative fieldwork conducted in over a dozen conflicted\, authoritarian or transitional societies\, the talk exam ines how to get armed groups to engage with transitional justice processes such as truth recovery\, reparations\, apologies and acknowledgement for pa st harms. It will examine the limitations of legalistic engagement with arm ed groups and the controversial topic of amnesties or limited forms of immu nity to encourage such processes. Kieran McEvoy will also propose a schema by which the legitimacy of reparative actions by armed groups such as truth recovery or apologies can be assessed.
Kieran McEvoy is the Senator George J. Mitchell Cha ir in Peace\, Security and Justice at the Mitchell Institute and a Professo r of Law and Transitional Justice at Queens University Belfast. He is curre ntly a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow (2023-26) and was a Fulbright Disti nguished Researcher and Fellow in the Harvard Human Rights Program 2001-200 2. He is longstanding peace and human rights activist in Northern Ireland\, and he has authored or co-authored four books\, co-edited eight books or s pecial issues and over seventy journal articles and scholarly book chapters . He has been elected a Fellow of the British Academy (2020) and the Royal Irish Academy (2019)\, the most prestigious indicators of scholarly esteem in the UK and Ireland respectively.
Anna Crowe (mode rator) is a Senior Clinical Instructor and the Associate Director of Harvar d Law School's International Human Rights Clinic. She supervises students o n projects focused on gender and armed conflict\, the use of international trade restrictions on conventional arms and law enforcement equipment to pr event rights violations\, and refugee rights\, particularly rights to a leg al identity and freedom of movement. She has developed and implemented proj ects with Amnesty International\, the Norwegian Refugee Council\, Control A rms\, and Privacy International among others. Anna was a constitutional law yer for the New Zealand government in the Crown Law Office and served at th e New Zealand Supreme Court as a clerk to the Chief Justice.
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