Kieran McEvoy is the Senator George J. Mitchell Chair of Peace, Security and Justice and Professor of Law and Transitional Justice at the Senator George J Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, Queen’s University Belfast. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Member of the Royal Irish Academy and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. He is also currently a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow (Sept 23-Sept 26) working on a project on Apologies, Political Violence and Dealing with the Past.

He has conducted research in over a dozen conflicted or transitional countries contexts on topics including politically motivated prisoners, ex-combatants, victims, amnesties, truth recovery, human rights, restorative justice, apologies and the role of lawyers in conflict transition. He has authored or co-authored four books, co-edited eight books or special issues, a four volume Handbook of Transitional Justice and over seventy journal articles and scholarly book chapters. His research has garnered a number of awards including the British Society of Criminology book of the year award and the Socio-legal Studies Association article of the year, 3 times.

He has held visiting professor positions at the University of Cambridge, the London School of Economics, Fordham University Law School and the University of California, Berkeley. He has also been the recipient of a Global Law Fellowship at New York University and spent a year at Harvard Law School as a UK Fulbright Distinguished Research Scholar.

He has conducted a large number of comparative research projects on conflict and the transition from violence in countries including Colombia, South Africa, Chile, Tunisia, Argentina, Uruguay, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Israel, Palestine, Spain and Italy. In recent years these have included a project on Transforming Cultures of Violence from below: A Comparative model of Community-Based Peace-Building (with H. Mika, £270,000-funded by Atlantic Philanthropies) and ‘Beyond Legalism: Amnesties, Transition and Conflict Transformation (with L Mallinder £305,000, AHRC). He was Principal Investigator on another AHRC funded project on Amnesties Prosecution and the Public Interest in Northern Ireland (with L. Mallinder and G. Anthony, £91,482); and an ESRC funded comparative project (Lawyers in Conflict and Transition, £490,000 - with L. Mallinder and A. Bryson). He was also Principal Investigator on an ESRC funded project on Apologies, Abuses & Dealing with the Past (with A.M. McAlinden, A. Bryson, S. Maruna and M. Macarthaigh, £545,838, completed 2022). He was also mentor\Senior Co-Investigator on a number of additional projects including; an AHRC funded project Voice, Agency and Blame: Victimhood and the Imagined Community in Northern Ireland (with C. Lawther PI and L. Dempster, £199,761, completed 2018); an ESRC funded project Truth, Accountability or Impunity? Transitional Justice and the Economic Crisis’ (with I. Kovras PI, S. Wheeler and N. Loizides, £521,000 -completed 2019) and another AHRC funded project Reparations, Responsibility and Victimhood in Transitional Societies (with L. Moffatt, C. Lawther and K. Hearty, £655,198, completed 2022). In addition, he worked as Co-I with Colin Harvey PI, A. Bryson, R. O’Connell (UU) and A. Kramer on an ESRC funded project on Brexit and Northern Ireland: The Constitutional, Conflict Transformation, Human Rights and Equality Consequences (£237,202, completed 2019).