Christine Bell

Christine Bell is Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Edinburgh, a founder of the Global Justice Academy, and a member of the Constitutional Law Centre. She read law at Selwyn College, Cambridge (1988) and gained an LLM in law from Harvard Law School (1990), supported by a Harkness Fellowship. She is a former director of the Human Rights Centre at Queens University of Belfast and the Transitional Justice Institute at the University of Ulster. She has participated in a number of peace negotiations at track I and track II level, provided training in human rights and gender to Norwegian and Swiss foreign office staff involved in mediation, and acted as expert adviser to a number of UN departments on peace mediation. In 2007 she won the American Society of International Law’s Francis Deake Prize for her article on “Peace agreements: their nature and legal status”. She has authored two books: On the Law of Peace: Peace Agreements and the Lex Pacificatoria (Oxford University Press, 2008), which won the Hart Socio-Legal Book Prize, and Peace Agreements and Human Rights (Oxford University Press, 2000).