Criticism that the International Criminal Court (ICC) provides a distant and thus problematic form of justice led the ICC to establish the Access to Justice project in 2017, to make the trial of Dominic Ongwen in The Hague more accessible to the local victims in Northern Uganda. The ICC sentenced Ongwen to 25 years’ imprisonment and issued an order for submissions on reparations for victims. This project (2022-2026) explores the development of local social dynamics and perceptions of justice in Uganda after the end of the Access to Justice project, particularly in relation to reparations.
ANTHUSIA (2018-2013) is a multi-disciplinary research project in the Anthropology of Human Security in Africa conducted by a consortium of four universities in Aarhus (Denmark), Edinburgh (United Kingdom), Leuven (Belgium) and Oslo (Norway). The consortium also collaborates with numerous nonacademic and academic partner organisations with expertise in a variety of different human security issues in Africa that will contribute to the ESRs’ training and the project’s impact and dissemination. The project is funded by the EU under Horizon 2020. See project website.
The Eur-Asian Border Lab aims to catalyse trans-regional synergies and intellectual conversations among scholars studying borders and bordering across different world regions. It aims to test theoretical ideas in diverse empirical settings and apply insights from academically peripheral regions to the heart of mainstream theorization of border studies. The project focuses on taking research on bordering to new volumes, seeing borders as increasingly imagined, constructed, perceived and navigated in new spaces, virtual or literal, in the wake of more sophisticated and transformative technologies. It seeks to learn more about the borders’ potential in issues such as trade, community building and mobility, but in turn also the disadvantages such as conflict, illegality and injustice and more. See https://borderlab.eu.
This project (2021-2024), which is about human-wildlife conflicts, investigates the radical transformations of the social and natural landscape in the Danish-German borderland, caused by the construction of a wildlife fence in order to prevent the migration of wild boars and the spread of African Swine Fever. The project wishes to contribute to an understanding of how national spaces and borders are co-produced through the spatial strategies of fencing, discourses of biosecurity and the invasive other. The project explores how technological interventions like wildlife fencing relate to larger political narratives of walls, borders and flows. See project website.
This project (2018-2023) provides a new perspective on gender and futures by placing marriage in Uganda and its decline at the centre, showing how this most fundamental gender relation implicates the filiation of children, livelihoods, education, health and people’s imaginations, expectations and hopes for the future. This contributes knowledge to relevant social gender policies, and creates debate in the wider public. The project is addressing gender-related conflicts. See project website.
This project (2017-2025) is a randomised controlled trial developed in collaboration between the Danish National Police’s former National Prevention Center and researchers from Aarhus University and the Cambridge Center for Evidence-Based Policing. With a view to evidence-based development of the Danish restorative justice programme (Konfliktråd), the project aims to compare the effects of two different ways of organising meeting between victims and offenders in Denmark: victim-offender mediation (VOM) and restorative justice conferencing (RJC). Register, observation, questionnaire and interview data are collected as a basis for the comparison. See project website.
This project (2023-2026), which is about human-wildlife conflicts, studies the history and present roles of feral animals in forming frontiers. Frontiers continue to be critical material and discursive formations that structure the relations of extraction, migration, domesticity, and race. While classical articulations of resource frontiers might see the formation of animal resource frontiers as, primarily, the appropriation of value through the exploitation of cheap nature, this project argues that the animals themselves need to be centred as an active agent in ongoing frontier production. See project website.
This COST Action (2021-2025) addresses the need for increased interdisciplinarity in our understanding of how societies confront their past to contend with environmental, economic and social changes brought on by sudden events and by slow and creeping transformations. The future of peace, prosperity, politics, work and climate will depend upon how we remember socio-cultural and political changes. Transformative practices of remembrance – as objects of study and as critical interventions – will be shared collaboratively across Arts and Sciences in order to reveal the ways in which humans confront large-scale processes of change. See project website.
This project (2022-2024) focuses on the protracted displacement crisis in the Republic of Georgia and how this form of displacement pushes our thinking and use of the concept of crisis. The project deepens our understanding of the tangible impact of protracted crisis, the use of the term 'crisis' in policies and political strategies, and the impact chronic, normalised crisis has on the affected population. Crisis often implies an immediacy and urgency. But what if a crisis simply continues and turns into something chronic? What if a crisis loses its urgency and becomes normalised in everyday life? Can we still call it a crisis? When does a crisis end? See project website.
This project (2019-2021) aimed to carry out an impact assessment of the International Criminal Court’s (ICC’s) Access to Justice project, which the court had implemented to make the trial of Dominic Ongwen in The Hague more meaningful and accessible to local victims in Northern Uganda. The impact assessment was financed by the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affair, which had also financed the ICC project. The report is available here.
The project (2009-2012) aimed to strengthen the capacity of Gulu University to play a useful role in stabilisation and recovery efforts in Northern Uganda after the civil war through interdisciplinary academic and policy oriented contributions to understanding human security transformations and dynamics. The ENRECA Gulu project, implemented at Gulu University in Northern Uganda, was a joint partnership between Gulu University and the Danish universities of South Denmark, Copenhagen and Aarhus. See project website.
This project (2013-2019) examined links between land, trust/mistrust and governance with emphasis on gender and generation. It explored how differently positioned people manage, mitigate and engage conflicts in a setting of co-existing formal and parallel legal authorities. Case studies included: claims to land based on descent; women’s rights to land and security; individual and communal rights in relation to commercial interests; the discourses of traditional vs universal human rights in relation to property. The project compared the bases of trust in clans, customary leadership, NGOs, religious organisations and government agencies. See project website.
The RISEZAsia project (2016-2020) studied the emergence of new Special Economic Zones (SEZ) that promotes the development of remote and resource rich borderlands across Asia. Theoretically the project wishes to develop tools for critical engagement with the unique forms of exclusion and marginalisation in borderlands instigated by SEZs. In addition to its contribution to theoretical framings of borderland political economy, the research is significant for documenting the processes through which Asian borderlands currently are experiencing some of the largest land-grabs and related conflicts in modern history. See project website.
