Dr Simon Robins
Research Fellow, ESRC Transformative Justice in Tunisia and Egypt project

Profile

Biography

I am a practitioner and researcher with an interest in humanitarian protection, human rights and transitional justice. For the last decade I have combined academic research with a consulting practice focusing on evaluation and programme support with international agencies, including the UN and NGOs, with an emphasis on states emerging from conflict and violence. I am a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Applied Human Rights at the University of York.

My consulting work has sought to provide policy and programmatic support to a range of humanitarian and human rights related programming, including extensive engagement with monitoring and evaluation, and in particular of protection and rule of law. My academic work is driven by a desire to put the needs of victims of conflict at the heart of efforts to address its legacies, and this has led to my engaging with victim-centred and therapeutic approaches to histories of violence. My research has focused on addressing legacies of violence after conflict, taking a critical perspective on transitional justice and a focus on emancipatory approaches driven by victims. I have tried to drive my research through innovative participatory approaches that see knowledge production and activism as inseparable. I have worked extensively on the issue of persons disappeared and missing in armed conflict, as well as dead and missing migrants at the EU’s southern border. I have worked for many years in both Nepal and Tunisia, and have broad experience in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.

Publications

Selected publications

This is a selection of my recent published academic work.

• Boss, Pauline and Simon Robins (2023) Names Without Bodies and Bodies Without Names: Ambiguous Loss and Closure after Enforced Disappearance, in Maria Giovanna Bianchi and Monica Luci (eds), The Crime of Enforced Disappearance: Between Law and Psyche (forthcoming), Routledge. 
• Paul Gready, José Antonio Gutiérrez Danton, Piergiuseppe Parisi and Simon Robins (2023) Transitional justice as a driver of transformation in Colombia, CAPAZ. (Spanish version)
• Robins, S. (2023). Toward a necropolitics of uncertainty: A review of The Politics of the Dead in Zimbabwe 2000–2020: Bones, Rumors & Spirits, by Joost Fontein. Rochester, NY: James Currey, 2022.
• Robins, Simon and Paul Gready (eds.) (2022) Transitional Justice in Tunisia: Innovations, Continuities, Challenges, Routledge. 
• Robins, Simon, et al. (2022) Transitional justice from the margins: Collective reparations and Tunisia’s Truth and Dignity Commission. Political Geography 94.
• Robins, Simon (2021). The Affective Border: Missing Migrants and the Governance of Migrant Bodies at the EU’s Southern Frontier. Journal of Refugee Studies, 34(2).
• Gready, Paul and Simon Robins (2020) Transitional Justice and Theories of Change: Towards evaluation as understanding, International Journal of Transitional Justice, 14(2). 
• Mirto, Giorgia, et al. (2020) Mourning Missing Migrants: Ambiguous Loss and the Grief of Strangers. in: Border Deaths: Causes, Dynamics and Consequences of Migration-Related Mortality, edited by Paolo Cuttitta and Tamara Last, Amsterdam University Press, 2020: 103–16. 
• Gready, Paul and Simon Robins (2019) From Transitional to Transformative Justice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Bhandari, R. K., & Robins, S. (2018). Nepal. In The Elgar Companion to Post-Conflict Transition. Edward Elgar Publishing.
• Robins, Simon (2018) Missing in Migration: From Research to Practice. Practicing Anthropology 40(2): 24–27.
• Gready, Paul and Simon Robins (2017) Rethinking civil society and transitional justice: lessons from social movements and new civil society, The International Journal of Human Rights, 21(7): 956-975.
• Robins, Simon (2017), Failing Victims? The Limits of Transitional Justice in Addressing the Needs of Victims of Violations, Human Rights and International Legal Discourse, 11(1).
• Kovras, Iosif and Simon Robins (2017) Missing Migrants: Deaths at Sea and Unidentified Bodies on Lesbos, in Migrating borders and moving times: Temporality and the crossing of borders in Europe, edited by Hastings Donnan, Madeleine Hurd, Carolin Leutloff-Grandits, Manchester University Press.
• Robins, Simon (2016) Transition but not Transformation: How Nepal’s liberal peace fails its citizens, in: Nepal Transition to Peace: A decade of the Comprehensive Peace Accord. Kathmandu: NTTP/ USAID.
• Robins, Simon (2016) Discursive approaches to ambiguous loss: Theorizing community-based therapy after enforced disappearance, Journal of Family Theory and Review 8(3): 308-323.
• Kovras, Iosif and Simon Robins (2016) Death as the Border: Managing Missing Migrants and Unidentified Bodies at the EU’s Mediterranean Frontier, Political Geography 55: 40-49.
• Robins, Simon  (2015) Corpses as Political Subjects, Death Studies, 39:10.
• Robins, Simon and Wilson, Erik (2015) Participatory Methodologies with Victims: An Emancipatory Approach to Transitional Justice Research, Canadian Journal of Law and Society, 30(2).

• Kurze, A, Lamont, C. and Robins. S. (2015) Contested spaces of transitional justice: Legal empowerment in global post-conflict contexts revisited, International Journal of Human Rights, 19 (3).
• Robins, Simon (2015) Mapping a Future for Transitional Justice by Learning from Its Past, Int. Journal of Transitional Justice, 9:181-190.
• Robins, Simon (2014) Constructing Meaning from Disappearance: Local Memorialisation of the Missing in Nepal. International Journal of Conflict and Violence, 8(1). 
• Gready, Paul and Simon Robins (2014) From Transitional to Transformative Justice: A New Agenda for Practice. Int. Journal of Transitional Justice,  8(3).
• Robins, S. (2013) Families of the Missing: A Test for Contemporary Approaches to Transitional Justice, New York / London: Routledge Glasshouse. This is the book of my PhD work with families in Nepal and Timor-Leste.
• Robins, S. (2013) ‘An empirical approach to post-conflict legitimacy: Victims’ needs and the everyday‘, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 7 (1).
• Robins, S. (2012) ‘Transitional justice as an elite discourse: Human rights practice between the global and the local in post-conflict Nepal‘, Critical Asian Studies, 44(1).
• Robins, S. (2012) ‘Challenging the therapeutic ethic: A victim-centred evaluation of transitional justice process in Timor-Leste‘, Int. Journal of Transitional Justice, 6(1):  1-23.
• H. Wasti, P. Mahat, R. Karn & S. Robins (2011), ‘Victims’ families needs for truth and justice – Challenges for human rights groups and the Nepali justice system’ in We need the truth: Enforced Disappearances in Asia, ECAP, Guatemala.
• Robins, S. (2011), ‘Towards victim-centred transitional justice: Understanding the needs of families of the disappeared in postconflict Nepal‘, Int. Journal of Transitional Justice 5(1), March 2011.
• Robins, S. (2010), ‘Ambiguous loss in a non-Western context: Families of the disappeared in post-conflict Nepal‘, Family Relations 59 (July 2010): 253 – 268.
• Robins, S. (2010) A participatory approach to ethnographic research with victims of gross human rights violations:  Studying families of the disappeared in post-conflict Nepal’, in Ozerdem, A. and Bowd, R. (eds), Participatory Research Methodologies in Development and Post Disaster/Conflict Reconstruction, Ashgate, 2010.
• Robins, S., (2009), Whose voices? Understanding victims’ views of transition, Journal of Human Rights Practice, 1(2): 320 (2009).
• Robins, S. (2009), ‘Restorative approaches to criminal justice in Africa: The case of Uganda‘, in: The Theory and Practice of Criminal Justice in Africa, (African Human Security Inititaive) ISS Monograph series no. 161, June 2009.