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 has been elected as a Fellow of the British Academy and is an active member of its Law Section, 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 and an honorable mention by the US based Law and Society Association.

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. In 2024, he was appointed a Visiting Scholar at Fordham Law School and in 2025 at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University as part of his Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship.

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. He has been awarded research grants worth almost £7m, including 10 ESRC and AHRC awards and has been Principal Investigator on 9 major research projects. He has been appointed as a member of the Research Excellent Framework Law Panel 2025-2029.

He established the Routledge Transitional Justice series in 2011 and continues as sole series editor, publishing over 48 books to date. He is an Associate Editor of Social and Legal Studies and serves on 4 other editorial boards including the International Journal of Transitional Justice. He has supervised 24 PhD students through to completion, mostly as first supervisor. He has been an external examiner of almost 30 PhD students in a range of national and international universities including London School of Economics, Kings College London, Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Helsinki, Melbourne, Australian National University, Monash, Hong Kong, Berlin, and Western Canada.

He is a long-standing peace and human rights activist. In 2014 he authored a Research Excellence Framework Impact Case Study on Using Community Restorative Justice to Supplant IRA Paramilitary Punishment Violence and Improve Community Relations with the Police Service of Northern Ireland. In 2021 he led a team (also involving Prof. Louise Mallinder, Prof. Anna Bryson and the human rights NGO, the Committee on the Administration of Justice, CAJ) on another REF Impact Case Study on addressing the legacy of the conflict in Northern Ireland. Both Impact Case Studies were awarded 4* (the highest possible score), demonstrating ‘outstanding’ impact. He is a long-standing board member of CAJ and Community Restorative Justice Ireland. He is also a member of the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust Peace and Security Committee.