Kamari Clarke

Professor, Criminology & Sociolegal Studies

Campus

Cross-Appointments

Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies
Department for the Study of Religion
Department of Anthropology

Areas of Interest

  • Transnational Justice, International Criminal Law and Justice
  • Ethnographies of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and Adhoc Criminal Tribunals
  • Sociolegal Studies, Legal Anthropology
  • Critical Race Theory, Globalization and Race
  • Contemporary Social and Cultural Theory
  • Geopolitics and the Postcolonial State; Culture, Power and the Anthropology of Violence

Biography

Kamari Maxine Clarke is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Toronto. For more than twenty years, she has conducted research on issues related to legal institutions, human rights and international law, religious nationalism and the politics of race and globalization. She has spent her career exploring theoretical questions concerning culture and power and detailing the relationship between new social formations and contemporary problems. One of her key academic contributions has been to demonstrate ethnographically the ways that legal and religious knowledge regimes produce practices that travel globally. In addition to her scholarly work, she has served as a technical advisor to the African Union (AU) legal counsel and produced policy reports to help the AU navigate various international law and United Nations challenges. Clarke has published nine books (3 monographs and 6 edited volumes) with over 50 peer-refereed journal articles and book chapters. She is the author of Affective Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Pan-Africanist Pushback (2019, Duke), Fictions of Justice (Cambridge, 2010), and Mapping Yorùbá Networks (Duke, 2004). Clarke is the recipient of the 2019 Royal Anthropological Institute’s Amaury Talbot Book Prize, as well as the 2019 finalist for the Elliot Skinner book award for her latest book, Affective Justice (Duke, 2019). She is also a recipient of a Distinguished Chair in Transnational Justice sand Socio-legal Studies and a recipient of the 2021 Guggenheim Prize for career excellence.