Kamari Maxine Clarke

Kamari Maxine Clarke is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Toronto and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. For more than twenty-five years, she has conducted research on issues related to legal institutions, human rights and international law, religious nationalism, the politics of race and globalization. She has spent her career exploring theoretical questions concerning culture and power and detailing the relationship between new social formations and contemporary problems. One of her key academic contributions has been to demonstrate ethnographically the ways that legal and religious knowledge regimes produce practices that travel globally. In addition to her scholarly work, she has served as a technical advisor to the African Union (AU) legal counsel and produced policy reports to help the AU navigate various international law and United Nations challenges. Clarke has published nine books (3 monographs and 6 edited volumes) with over 50 peer-refereed journal articles and book chapters. She is the author of Affective Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Pan-Africanist Pushback (2019, Duke), Fictions of Justice (Cambridge, 2010), and Mapping Yorùbá Networks (Duke, 2004). Clarke is the recipient of the 2019 Royal Anthropological Institute’s Amaury Talbot Book Prize for her latest book, Affective Justice (Duke, 2019). She is also a recipient of a Distinguished Chair in Transnational Justice and Socio-legal Studies, a recipient of the 2021 Guggenheim Prize for career excellence, and a recent recipient of the 2025 SSHRC Impact Award.