Dr Eric Hoddy
Lecturer

Profile

Biography

Eric is a social scientist with research interests in human rights practice and leadership, climate and development, and transitional justice in post-conflict settings.

Eric has held research positions with Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies (Sweden), the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at The University of Sheffield (UK), and the WorldFish research centre (Malaysia). He is an AoEC-certified Executive Coach, and outside of his academic role at York provides leadership coaching to human rights leaders and professionals.

Eric serves as the Risk and Ethics Officer for the Department of Politics and IR and is a member of the University’s internal coaching team.

Research

Overview

My current research is investigating the ‘Holocene’ limits of transitional justice in a new context of accelerating Earth system change and a weakening rules-based order. I’m interested in how justice practices must be adapted in response, for example by becoming more anticipatory than purely reactive and by treating injustice as intergenerational.

In addition, I am investigating human rights leadership through a virtue-ethics lens. This work is exploring the importance of character development for safeguarding the moral standards and integrity of human rights practice. It has an applied edge, informing the design of training material and my personal coaching model with human rights leaders and practitioners.

Recent funded research:

• ‘Reimagining participation in an era of crisis: Lessons from Poverty Truth Commissions’. This project is seeking to understand the dynamics of participation in poverty truth commissions and whether and how participation can help us respond to some contemporary challenges: stalled progress on poverty reduction, the spread of misinformation and the decline in democratic politics.

Other funded projects:

• From everyday forms of resistance to transformational climate change adaptation of the urban poor
• Human Rights Leadership
• Developing the research and practice agenda on transformative justice
• Transitional Justice in the Anthropocene

Available PhD research projects

Eric is happy to consider supervision of PhD projects related to:

• Leadership
• Development and environment
• Social movements and activism
• Transitional justice
• Human rights practice

Publications

Selected publications

A socio-legal perspective on land market informality and accountability in urban land governance, 2025. World Development. With Simon Halliday, Jon Ensor, Amelia Macome, Christine Wamsler, Emily Boyd.

Adverse Incorporation and Local Economies of Peace, 2025. Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding.

Human Rights Leadership: An Action Research Project, 2024. UNESCO HRD Hub working paper no.3, University of York. 

Legal culture and climate change adaptation: An agenda for research, 2024. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change. With Simon Halliday, Jon Ensor, Amelia Macome, Christine Wamsler, Emily Boyd.

Human rights leadership in challenging times: an agenda for research and practice, 2023. The International Journal of Human Rights. With John Gray.

Safeguarding the land to secure food in the highlands of Peru: The case of Andean peasant producers, 2022. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems. With Silvia Sarapura Escobar.

External activities

Overview

• Peer Review College member, Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)
• Member of the Advisory Committee to the UNESCO Chair in Sport for Development, Peace and the Environment (SDPE)
• Editorial Board member, International Journal of Social Research Methodology.

Teaching

Undergraduate

• Green Politics 
• Green Justice

Postgraduate

• Transitional Justice and Human Rights 
• Leadership for peacebuilding and human rights professionals 

Other teaching

• Research ethics training (all levels)