Genevieve Bates (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at the University of British Columbia, specializing in transitional justice and the international and domestic politics of accountability for human rights violations.

Dr. Bates will be on leave from July 2022 to June 2024, completing a post-doc at Brown University where she will be working on her book project.

My research is focused on how, if at all, human rights violators are held accountable for the things they’ve done, and what impact accountability can have on international and domestic politics. In one line of research, I ask if the international community, especially criminal courts and tribunals, can push the parties responsible for human rights abuses committed during conflict to hold themselves accountable for the crimes they’ve committed. How might threats from institutions like the International Criminal Court impact on-the-ground negotiations about justice and accountability? In a second line of research, I ask how the promises and pitfalls of accountability can shape transitions from dictatorship to democracy. Do transitional justice mechanisms help or hurt new democracies? When does transitional justice support further democratization, and when can it contribute to democratic erosion? Does transitional justice in non-transitional contexts — like the push for racial justice in the United States — face the same kinds of challenges as in new democracies? I use a variety of methodological approaches to help answer these questions, including game theory, interviews and archival work, and quantitative analysis.

Bates, Genevieve, Ipek Cinar, and Monika Nalepa. “Accountability by Numbers: A New Global Transitional Justice Dataset (1946-2016)” Perspectives on Politics 18(1):161–184, 2020.