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Assistant professor and Director of the Master of Human Rights program, University of Manitoba

Kjell Anderson is a jurist and social scientist specialised in the study of human rights, mass violence, and mass atrocities. He is the author of Perpetrating Genocide: A Criminological Account (Routledge 2019), and the forthcoming volumes The Dilemma of Dominic Ongwen: From Child Abductee to War Criminal (Rutgers University Press, 2020); and Approaching Perpetrators: Insights on Ethics, Methods, and Theory (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020).

Anderson’s work experience encompasses advocacy for victims of torture and sexual violence in Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo for FACT-Rwanda (Forum des Activistes Contre la Torture), leading the rule of law program at The Hague Institute for Global Justice, working at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on indigenous issues, acting as a legal researcher at the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and teaching at the University of the Fraser Valley, Leiden University, the University of Amsterdam, the National University of Rwanda, and the National University of Ireland. He has also been a researcher in the Transitional Justice Program at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies (Amsterdam), and a visiting researcher in the Department of Sociology at the University of the South Pacific (Suva, Fiji) and at the National University of Juridical Sciences (Kolkata, India). He has given transitional justice training workshops in South Africa, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, and Burundi and has contributed to short courses at the Free University Berlin, the Bergen-Belsen International Summer School, and for Aegis Trust at the Kigali Memorial Centre.

He is a former vice president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars and is currently on the Board of Directors of the Sentinel Project for Genocide Prevention, as well as the Advisory Board of an AHRC funded project on “Compromised Identities? Reflections on Perpetration and Complicity under Nazism” at University College London.

He holds PhD and LLM degrees in International Human Rights Law (from the National University of Ireland and Utrecht University, respectively), as well as MA and BA degrees in Conflict Studies (from Carleton University and the University of Saskatchewan).

His current research focuses on perpetrators of international crimes, the criminology of genocide, transitional justice, and the Dominic Ongwen trial at the International Criminal Court. Beyond legal and archival sources, his research has involved qualitative interviewing in the field. This includes, for example, interviewing perpetrators and victims of genocide and crimes against humanity in Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Bosnia, Cambodia, India, and Bangladesh. In 2016 Anderson was part of a fact-finding mission on Islamic State atrocities against minorities. As part of a team of researchers he visited sites of violence in northern Iraq and interviewed victims from the Yazidi, Christian, and Shia communities.

Experience

  • –present
    Assistant professor and Director of the Master of Human Rights program, University of Manitoba