About

Kamari Maxine Clarke is an Adjunct Professor at UCLA and a Distinguished Professor at the University of Toronto. She has conducted research for more than twenty years on issues related to legal institutions, human rights, international law, religious nationalism, and the politics of race and globalization. Her work explores theoretical questions concerning culture and power, and details the relationship between new social formations and contemporary problems. One of her key academic contributions is ethnographically demonstrating how legal and religious knowledge regimes produce practices that travel globally. In addition to her scholarly work, Professor Clarke has served as a technical advisor to the African Union legal counsel and has produced policy reports to assist the AU in navigating international law and United Nations challenges. She has published nine books, including 'Affective Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Pan-Africanist Pushback' (2019), 'Fictions of Justice' (2010), and 'Mapping Yorùbá Networks' (2004). Her research interests encompass culture and power, legal anthropology, affect theory, transnationalism, globalization and diaspora theory, social and cultural theory, the anthropology of Africa, race and globalization, social movements, international law, religious nationalism, expertise, and geospatial technologies. Her regional focus includes Nigeria-West Africa, the USA, and international institutions such as the International Criminal Courts and Tribunals in The Hague, the African Union in Addis Ababa, and the African Court of Justice and Peoples' Rights.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Anthropology
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Criminology
• Philosophy
• Law
• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Library science
• History
• Theology
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• Plus de preuves, mais pas plus de justice : les limites des technologies visuelles dans les affaires de droits de la personne

  2026-03-30

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• More evidence doesn’t mean more justice: The limits of visual technologies in human rights cases

  2026-03-30

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• “A Dead Child Is Better than a Missing One”

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-09-09

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Transitional Justice, Legal Non-Performatives, and the Sentiments of <i>Moving on</i>

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-11-27

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Transitional Justice in African Contexts through the Institutionalization of Emotional Affects

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2024-02-22

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter explores transitional justice in African contexts through the institutionalization of emotional affects. Over time, the development of the rule of law has led to an increased demand for global justice involving the expansion of judicial institutions. The term transitional justice correlates to a constellation of legalistic modalities ranging from criminal trials to amnesties. The chapter elaborates on the key concepts concerning the African Transitional Justice framework, which focuses on African governance concerned over injustice and inequality in the global order and the use of Pan-Africanist emotional affects. It considers how consistent patterns of controversy and conflict within justice narratives forced the re-examination of the making of international justice frameworks.

  PublisherDOI

• Male Victims of Sexual Violence and Factors Associated With Reporting to Law Enforcement in the United States

  The Journal of Men s Studies · 2024-04-24 · 6 citations

  articleSenior author

  Of the violent crimes, sexual assault remains the least likely to be reported to law enforcement across various countries, particularly for male victims. Addressing this gap in the literature, this study uses National Crime Victimization Survey data from 1992 to 2020 to examine the relationship between victim, offender, and situational characteristics to the reporting of rape for male victims by both male and female offenders. Of the 330 male victims, only one in six (16%) reported it to law enforcement. In the multivariate model, men were less likely to report the incident when the offender was a woman or a juvenile, the victim was college educated and lived in a rural area, and when the incident was a completed rape and occurred at night-time. Older victims are more likely to report, and when a weapon is used or there are injuries. Implications for efforts to increase reporting among victims of male sexual violence are discussed.

  PublisherDOI

• New frontiers in international human rights: Actionable nonactionables and the (non)performance of perpetual becoming

  2023-03-30

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This article explores the emergence of various international justice narratives that operate as legal nonperformatives, making the law and law making seem liberatory. It shows that the ratification of a treaty may not qualify as a form of state expression or a speech act advocating human rights. Instead, it can be interpreted through semiotics as sending a signal about a stance. By examining this proleptic space, we can begin to make sense of what we cannot yet see, and perhaps begin to forecast whether the core tenets of international human rights will soon be reinvented or merely perpetuated.

  PublisherDOI

• Rendering the absent visible: victimhood and the irreconcilability of violence

  Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute · 2022 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Criminology

  Abstract Contemporary justice‐making processes often focus on reconciliation or legal retribution, but not on the complexity of victimhood beyond individual subjectivity or refusals of state propositions for social repair. In Colombia, where drug cartels and state‐sponsored violence had terrorized the population for over fifty years, it was not forgiveness and acceptance that punctuated the turn of the twenty‐first century, but the refusal to reconcile with the state's duplicity regarding the disappearance and death of thousands. This essay illustrates how irreconciliation as an affective sentiment is taking shape in Colombia through forms of reattribution that take the form of victim visibilizations . In analysing the strategic use of victim visibilizations as a refusal of state accountability , their expansion of the notion of victimhood, and their politics of irreconciliation, I show how even with the state's remorse‐driven discourses, the public's understanding that political, judicial, and social accountability was not possible and pushed them to chart new strategies for disclosure and healing.

  PublisherDOI

• Deconstructing the Complexities of Violence

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022-09-01 · 2 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  Akenroye and Clarke discuss the difficulties of fitting the moral ambiguities of violent conflict into the neat victim/perpetrator binaries of international criminal law. At center stage in this chapter is a discussion of the trial of Dominic Ongwen in the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The trial centered on the culpability of a man whose horrific acts of violence in the Ugandan civil war of the early 2000s led the ICC to issue 70 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity against him. The ambiguities of the case and the reference point of the trial's arguments center on Ongwen's recruitment as a child soldier under the notorious Lord's Resistance Army headman, Joseph Kony. At what point does a child's transition into adulthood change the conditions of their responsibility for crime? At what point is a child soldier expected to repudiate his or her superiors and escape the scene of atrocity? And if repudiation and escape are called for in this and other cases of this kind, how might this example extend to other forms of aberrant socialization, the "brainwashing," for example, that can lead an entire nation to accept and act on ideas of the inhumanity and need to eliminate a national minority?

  PublisherDOI

• New frontiers in international human rights: Actionable nonactionables and the (non)performance of perpetual becoming

  Journal of Human Rights · 2022-03-15 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article explores the emergence of various international justice narratives that operate as legal nonperformatives, making the law and law making seem liberatory. It shows that the ratification of a treaty may not qualify as a form of state expression or a speech act advocating human rights. Instead, it can be interpreted through semiotics as sending a signal about a stance. By examining this proleptic space, we can begin to make sense of what we cannot yet see, and perhaps begin to forecast whether the core tenets of international human rights will soon be reinvented or merely perpetuated.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• The International Criminal Court and the Pursuit of Justice

  NSF · $226k · 2013–2015

Frequent coauthors

• Abel S. Knottnerus

  4 shared

• Philip D. McCormack

  United States Department of Justice

  4 shared

• Charles Chernor Jalloh

  3 shared

• Mark Goodale

  University of Lausanne

  3 shared

• Sara Kendall

  University of Kent

  3 shared

• Vincent O. Nmehielle

  African Development Bank Group

  3 shared

• Peter Geschiere

  2 shared

• Eefje de Volder

  Impact

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• SSHRC Insight Impact Award