Research Interests
Transitional justice, punitive justice, restorative justice, legal theory, memory studies, law and anthropology, international criminal law
Research Area
Transitional settings worldwide
Profile
Pierre Druart is a PhD Candidate in the Law and Anthropology Department of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. He holds a Bachelor of Laws from UCLouvain (Belgium) and a joint Master of Laws from KU Leuven (Belgium) and the University of Zurich (Switzerland). His research deals with restorative transitional justice (for more information, see 'Project'). His research project falls within the framework of the Max Planck Fellowship 'The Intergenerational Memory of Mass Atrocities: The Missing Piece of Transitional Justice and Alternative Dispute Resolution', led by Prof. Valérie Rosoux, with the support of Prof. Marie-Claire Foblets and Prof. Hélène Ruiz Fabri.
Why Law and Anthropology?
When a community is facing mass atrocities, legal methods can be useful tools for alleviating some of the adverse impacts of past suffering, offering some form of justice in the present, and deterring future crimes. To achieve positive, appropriate, and tangible results, I am convinced we need to understand the needs of those who are primarily affected by the atrocities, as well as the impacts judicial or extrajudicial mechanisms can have on them. In my research, I wish to complement my legal background with an anthropological approach, to understand for what reasons the people first concerned by the atrocities appeal to this or that transitional justice mechanism. I am convinced this is only possible through a bottom-up approach, which anthropology, with its theoretical and conceptual tools as well as its methodology focusing on immersive fieldwork, offers.