Erin Baines

Wall Associate

Title

Associate Professor

Department/School

Liu Institute for Global Issues

Faculty

Arts

University

UBC

Geographic Location

Canada
Erin Baines

Erin Baines is an Associate Professor at the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Columbia.  Her research interests include transitional justice; the politics of humanitarianism and forced displacement; and, the study of gender and armed conflict, with a regional focus on northern Uganda.  Her publications include Buried in the Heart: Women, Complex Victimhood and the War in Northern Uganda (Cambridge, 2016); Vulnerable Bodies: Gender, the UN and the Global Refugee Crisis (Ashgate 2004); and editor of a life history of a woman who spent eleven years inside the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), I Am Evelyn Amony: Life in and After the LRA (University of Wisconsin, 2015).  She has published articles on gender, responsibility and transitional justice, DDR, social repair, symbolic violence and forced marriage in the Journal of Peace Research, the International Journal of Transitional Justice (IJTJ), African Affairs, the Journal of Modern African Studies, and the Journal of Human Rights. Erin sits on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Transitional Justice and the Journal of Narrative Politics and is the Co-founder of the Justice and Reconciliation Project (JRP) in Gulu, Uganda.

Primary Recipient Awards

Erin Baines – International Research Roundtables – 2017

Memory and Civic Responsibility During and After Mass Violence
Principal Investigator(s): Dr. Pilar Riaño-Alcalá, School of Social Work, UBC; Dr. Erin Baines, Liu Institute for Global Issues, UBC

During and following periods of mass violence, confusion arises over who did what and why, as well as who is responsible. Memory projects address questions of responsibility through the documentation of facts, recognition of loss, contesting denial and assigning blame. Official, often state-created or endorsed memory projects include trials, truth commissions, national inquiries, commissioned works of art or monuments, and the creation of museums or archives. Such projects exist alongside unofficial, often victim-led and community-based memory projects, such as the creation of public shrines or tributes to the dead, large-scale marches, sit-ins, protests and demonstrations, creative works such as memory quilts, public art installations or music. Combined, these initiatives usher into public debate the question of a) who is responsible, politically, legally and morally for mass violence, and b) what responsibility does one hold toward another to resist or denounce violence?

The Roundtable “Memory and Responsibility During and After Mass Violence” brought together an interdisciplinary group of twenty-four artists, community leaders and scholars to consider how and why people forget, deny or remember responsibility for mass violence.

Erin Baines – Wall Solutions – 2016

Reparations for war-time sexual violence in northern Uganda
Principal Investegator: Dr. Erin Baines, Liu Institute for Global Issues, UBC
Partners: Ms. Beini Ye, REDRESS, UK; Ms. Evelyn Amony, WAN Uganda
Human rights reports have documented an increase in the rates of mass rape, abduction and forced marriage of girls and women by armed groups in wartime globally. UN Resolution 2106 (July 2013) condemns such violations, and UN Resolution 2122 (October 2013) insists on women’s active participation in prevention and response. In northern Uganda, thousands of girls and women who were abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) between 1987 and 2006 have since returned to their communities where they live in extreme poverty, have little to no access to justice and face social stigma. Often communities reject survivors and their children.  This project will work in close collaboration with REDRESS and the Women’s Advocacy Network (WAN) – a network of 900 survivors in northern Uganda – to explore the possibilities of reparations for survivors and their children.

Co-Principal Investigator Awards

María Wills – International Visiting Research Scholars – 2018