Dr Nicola Palmer is a Reader in Criminal Law at The Dickson Poon School of Law and the author of Courts in Conflict: Interpreting the Layers of Justice in Post-Genocide Rwanda (paperback OUP, 2019). She has written on questions of resistance to mass violence, methodological approaches to transitional justice and the intersections of plural legal processes set up in response to exceptional violence with support from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the British Academy.

Dr Palmer was previously the Global Justice Research Fellow at St Anne’s College, Oxford and convenor of the Oxford Transitional Justice Research (OTJR) network. She received her DPhil in law from the University of Oxford in 2011 where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. Prior to this, she worked at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (UN ICTR), following her undergraduate in law and economics at Rhodes University, South Africa.

Since 2014, Nicola has worked as an international research advisor on the Aegis Trust’s Research, Policy and Higher Education (RPHE) programme, engaging in an innovative peer-to-peer exchange with Rwandan researchers working on post-conflict reconstruction. 

Research interests

Dr Palmer's broad research interests are in international criminal law, transitional justice, legal anthropology and socio-legal and central African studies.