Professor Kieran McEvoy, Senator George J Mitchell Chair in Peace, Security and Justice at the Mitchell Institute, is currently a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow (September 2023-September 2026) working on how armed groups can address past violence and human rights abuses.  In April and May 2025 he took up a Visiting Scholar position at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University as part of his Fellowship.

One of the highlights was delivering a talk on 30 April at the Harvard Law School on Law, Politics and Armed Group Accountability for Past Human Rights Violations.  This session, moderated by Anna Crowe, a Senior Clinical Instructor and the Associate Director of Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic, explored the intersection between law, politics and agency in seeking to encourage 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 examined how to get armed groups to engage with transitional justice processes such as truth recovery, reparations, apologies and acknowledgement for past harms.  The limitations of legalistic engagement with armed groups and the controversial topic of amnesties or limited forms of immunity to encourage such processes were examined.  Kieran also proposed a schema by which the legitimacy of reparative actions by armed groups such as truth recovery or apologies can be assessed.

The visit was also supported by the Global Scholars Network on Identity and Conflict (GSNIC) – a collaboration between the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University and the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice(QUB).  GSNIC creates a unique platform to address identity-based conflict globally, connecting scholars and practitioners from around the world to advance its mission of overcoming intergroup conflict and fostering more inclusive, peaceful coexistence.

Commenting on his visit Professor McEvoy said:

“I spent a year at Harvard over twenty years ago, so it was nice to be back.  Professor Melani Camett, Director at the Weatherhead Center, and her colleagues were wonderful and supportive hosts.

I gave a number of papers to staff and students emerging from my ongoing Leverhulme Fellowship work on armed groups including at the Weatherhead Center, Harvard Law School, Boston College and the University of Massachusetts.  The purpose of these presentations was to ‘road test my ideas’ on armed group accountability and I certainly felt like I had a good intellectual work-out and I am excited and energised to get home and get back to the writing – which is a good sign!

More generally, these are challenging times for academic institutions, academics and students in the US.  My time in Harvard was a timely reminder of the value of international cooperation and engagement on difficult and sensitive conflict related topics – which is precisely what the GSNIC was set up to encourage.  I am very grateful to the GSNIC and the Leverhulme Trust for this opportunity.”