Julia Viebach

Dr Julia Viebach is a socio-legal scholar based at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB), where she is a Lecturer in Criminology specializing in transitional justice, mass violence, memorialization, and human rights documentation. Drawing on Southern and Critical Criminology, African and postcolonial studies, and legal anthropology, she interrogates how societies live together after mass atrocity and the fundamental rupture of social bonds.

Julia’s past research focused on survivors’ experiences of trauma and meaning-making through memorial practices in post-genocide Rwanda. Her current work examines Rwanda’s gacaca courts through a decolonial lens. Her second and main research strand critically interrogates the politics of documentation and archiving in transitional justice, exploring how documentation practices involve power relations and produce systematic silences. She is particularly interested in the intersection of digital technologies with human rights documentation and archiving practices in transitional justice.

She is co-host of QUB’s Lawpod podcast series Can the Record be Trusted?, which examines these challenges across diverse contexts. Her public engagement work includes curating the award-winning Kwibuka Rwanda photographic exhibition and Traces of the Past display at Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum—both developed in partnership with Rwandan communities and recognized with the University of Oxford Vice-Chancellor’s Award for outstanding public engagement with research. She has co-produced several reports such as the transitional justice methods manual and the role of atrocity archives in transitional justice.

Julia has published widely on transitional archives, gacaca courts, and memory practices, including two edited books, and has consulted for various development aid organizations and German government bodies. She holds a PhD in Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of Marburg.