Kamari Clarke

Biography

Kamari Maxine Clarke is a Professor at Carleton University in Global and International Studies. Her research spans issues related to the rise of the rule of law movement, international courts and tribunals, the export, spread and re-contextualization of international norms, secularism and religious transnationalism, The United Nations and African Union treaty negotiations, and Africa’s insertion into international law circuits. By exploring the increasing judicialization of politics in international criminal law circuits, her work explores the implications for rethinking culture, power, and justice in the contemporary period. She works on theories of legal pluralism, law, aesthetics and politics, and social and political theory. Trained in Canada and the US, and formerly a professor at Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania, Professor Clarke has taught multiple generations of students in anthropology, law, politics, the humanities, and social sciences. She has conducted field studies in Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, The US-South and has worked on institutional studies of the International Criminal Court and the African Union. Professor Clarke has served as an expert advisor to the African Union and through research funding with the Open Society Initiative and collaborators with the Pan African Lawyer’s Union (PALU) and the West Africa Civil Society Institute (WACSI) she is currently collaborating with Charles Jalloh on a research project and publication concerning The African Union’s expansion of the criminal jurisdiction of the African Court of Justice and Human Rights. Professor Clarke is currently completing a book on the ICC-rule of law and social movement campaigns and their affective resonances and limits. She is the author of over forty books and articles and has held numerous prestigious fellowships, grants and awards – a two-year President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, a Social Sciences and the Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC) fellowship, research funds from the Ford Foundation, Wenner-Gren Foundation, National Science Foundation (NSF), and in her leadership capacity at Yale University as the director of the African Studies Council she secured a four-year 1.5 million United States Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center (NRC) and Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) grant.

Research Interest

Global and International Studies