Louise Mallinder
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Louise Mallinder is a Professor of Law at Queen’s University Belfast and the Deputy Director of the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice.
Her research focuses on the intersections of law and peace, focusing on themes such as transitional justice, human rights, international law, and amnesty laws. Her books include the award-winning Amnesties, Human Rights and Political Transitions (Hart 2009), the co-authored Lawyers in Conflict and Transition (CUP 2022), and the forthcoming co-edited Elgar Concise Encyclopedia on Law and Peace (Elgar 2026).
She is a member of the Royal Irish Academy, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and the Higher Education Academy. In addition, she is a member of the Institute for Integrated Transitions Law and Peace Practice Group and the Executive Board of the Committee on the Administration of Justice, a human rights organisation based in Northern Ireland.
Louise Mallinder joins the Paris IAS in May 2026 for a one-month writing residency.
Research topics
Transitional justice ; law and peace ; amnesty laws ; Northern Ireland.
Justice Before Peace? The Design, Architecture and Impacts of Transitional Justice during Armed Conflicts
This research project examines whether and how transitional justice laws and policies developed during ongoing armed conflicts express visions of the postconflict future and the extent to which they create mechanisms that reflect those visions. Drawing on desk-based analysis of academic literature and publicly available legal and policy documents from multiple conflict-affected contexts, it explores how transitional justice is conceived, designed, and justified when active hostilities continue and the nature of any future political settlement remains uncertain.
The study contends that transitional justice during conflict is often a political project. This project may be expressed through legal and technical forms of compliance with a states’ international objectives to investigate, prosecute and punish serious violations. However, the selection and design of these mechanisms, can have diverse political objectives including promoting transition, reinforcing the status quo, or supporting a state’s war aims. By identifying and analysing the normative goals expressed in legal and policy documents, it fills a gap between case-specific studies and broader theory, offering a systematic account of how transitional justice is imagined, instrumentalised, and constrained in aparadigmatic settings. This project enables a more nuanced understanding of transitional justice’s temporalities, its relationship to power, and its potential— and limits—as a tool for shaping postconflict futures.
Key publications
Mallinder, L, Killean, R, and Dempster, L, Encyclopedia of Law and Peace (Elgar forthcoming 2026).
McEvoy, K., , & Bryson, A. (2022). Lawyers in conflict and transition. Cambridge University Press.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139016544
Mallinder, L. (2008). Amnesty, Human Rights and Political Transitions: Bridging the Peace and Justice Divide. Hart Publishing.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3366/E1364980909000833
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