Kamari Maxine Clarke is a Distinguished Professor at the Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies and the Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies. For more than 20 years, Clarke has conducted research on issues related to legal institutions, international legal domains, religious nationalism and the politics of globalization and race. She has spent her career exploring theoretical questions of culture and power, as well as the field of law and anthropology, detailing the relationship between new social formations and contemporary problems. One of her key contributions has been to demonstrate ethnographically the ways that legal and religious knowledge regimes produce practices that travel globally. By mapping the way that particular cultural forms travel, and by highlighting why and how some travel more than others, she has established herself as a leader in this area and a central interlocutor into new ways of managing power and regulating social practices.

Professor Clarke has taught at Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, Carleton University and the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of nine books and over sixty peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. These include her publication Fictions of Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Challenge of Legal Pluralism in Sub-Saharan Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Affective Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Pan-Africanist Pushback (2019, Duke), and Mapping Yorùbá Networks (Duke, 2004). She 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 2021 Guggenheim Prize winner for career excellence.

From 2013-2018 Professor Clarke was involved in a range of global solutions projects related to the building of institutional capacity in the Global South. One such project is related to the building of an inter-institutional network of scholars and practitioners in the formation of critical approaches to international law. Another one is connected to the interstices of International Criminal Law and meanings of justice and led to the formation of the African Court Research Initiative (ACRI). Over the past decade she has served as a consultant for several inter-governmental and governmental agencies and think tank organizations, including the US Department of Defense, US Department of State, the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), Global Affairs Canada (GAC), and African Union (AU).