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Sara Kendall studies the discursive forms and material practices of international law and global governance. After earning her doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley, where she wrote her dissertation on the Special Court for Sierra Leone, she worked as a researcher in the Department of Public International Law at Leiden University, where she studied the effects of International Criminal Court interventions in Kenya and Uganda. She also taught international relations at the University of Amsterdam before coming to Kent. She is currently working on a book-length project on the International Criminal Court, in which she uses approaches and insights drawn from the humanities, the interpretive social sciences, and critical legal theory.
Research
Sara’s research addresses legal responses to – and complicity with – forms of violence, broadly understood. One strand of this research has focused on the ways in which the juridical field attempts to contain or respond to mass atrocity, specifically through the sub-fields of international criminal law and international humanitarian law. Her current research project focuses on the ‘restorative turn’ in international criminal law through a reading of International Criminal Court practices. A second strand focuses on law’s production and reproduction of violence through recourse to humanitarian logics, and in particular, on the role of humanitarianism in justifying (state) violence from the colonial period to the present.
Sara has published on the implications of the victim as a legal category in international criminal law, the political economy of international criminal tribunals, legal pluralism and ‘hybridity’ at the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and the rise of expert knowledge in post-Cold War constitution-drafting practices. Her work has appeared in Law and Contemporary Problems; Leiden Journal of International Law; African Journal of Legal Studies; Journal of Law, Culture and the Humanities;and Studies in Law, Politics and Society. Her current book-length project explores the effects of International Criminal Court interventions based upon observations of the court’s work in Uganda, Kenya, and the Netherlands.
Research Areas: International (criminal) law, global governance, critical theory, political theory, anthropologies of law
Major projects
Researcher, Netherlands Scientific Organization (NWO) funded project based at Leiden University, investigating the social, political, and legal effects of International Criminal Court interventions. Sara’s co-edited new book: Contested Justice: The Politics and Practice of International Criminal Court Interventions (Cambridge University Press, December 2015) is available for download here.