Benjamin Thorne is a Lecturer in Law, and he completed his ESRC funded PhD in Law at the University of Sussex in 2020. Benjamin is an interdisciplinary scholar with main themes of interest within socio-legal studies, transitional justice, and critical theory. Previously, Benjamin was a Visiting Researcher at University of Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, and the Aegis Trust (Rwanda) Peace Education Team.
One area of focus for him is the connections between memory, transitional justice, and legal atrocity archives. Related, Benjamin is the author of the recently published monograph with Routledge, The Figure of the Witness in International Criminal Tribunals: Memory, Atrocities and Transitional Justice (2022). This book, which combines disciplinary approaches from international criminal law, social and cultural studies, and memory studies, investigates the way in which the pre-trial process at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda set up conditions for how individual memories of human rights violations are collectively understood.
More generally, Benjamin is interested in questions around visuals, sounds, as well as the broader sensory field, in how people experience crime, law and justice, particular in the international context. Currently, Benjamin is conducting collaborative research exploring the role visuals arts can have as a form of justice for victims of sexual violence committed during conflict. Furthermore, he is working on research through artistic expression exploring themes of memory, human senses and legal archive material and which has been published with the Law and Humanities Journal (2021). Related an ongoing area of exploration is participatory arts methods in the context legal archive material from atrocity trials and their potential use by local communities.
Undergraduate
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