Sofie Budhoo Bjerregaard

Research

In my ph.d. research, I investigate the role of the International Criminal Court's four-year-long outreach project called the ‘Access to Justice Project’ (AJP) in the Village of Odek, Northern Uganda. Here, I explore the AJP's effects on local social dynamics and long-term sustainable peace in the Odek sub-county in Northern Uganda. The AJP was initiated across communities in Northern Uganda in 2017 after critiques that the ICC represents a particularly problematic kind of distant justice process. The project targeted affected communities in the trial of Dominic Ongwen, a former brigadier in the Lord’s Resistance Army, with the aim of rendering the trial visible and meaningful to local victims. The AJP represented an unprecedented level of access and involvement of locals in any ICC court proceeding through a broad range of outreach activities. While the AJP was generally experienced as positive and the local community members currently view the ICC in an overall positive light, the data also shows that the AJP simultaneously increased expectations of reparations amongst Ongwen’s victims and increased local tensions regarding the division and management of the forthcoming reparations. This data became the starting point for my PhD project which aims at examining the consequences of the increased access to international criminal justice and the involvement of the ICC has for the chances of creating long-term sustainable peace in Northern Uganda.  I do this by ethnographically examining how such localisation of international criminal trials affects local social dynamics, perceptions of justice and the court in Odek village, Northern Uganda.

My Ph.D. project is a part of the IRFD-funded mixed method research project 'After Access to Justice' which I am conducting in collaboration with my supervisor Christian Gade.