Nergis
Canefe

Nergis Canefe is a Professor at the Department of Politics, York University, Toronto, Canada and a graduate faculty member at Graduate Programmes in Social and Political Thought, Socio-Legal Studies, Humanities, Osgoode Hall Law School and Graduate Programme in Public Policy and Law at the same institution. She received her PhD at York University, Programme in Social and Political Thought and her SJD (PhD in Law) at Osgoode Hall Law School, Canada. She is a Middle Eastern-Canadian scholar of applied political philosophy, comparative politics and international criminal law. Before joining York University, she was the inaugural post-doctoral fellow of the Past and Present Society, Oxford University, a research fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, and the European Institute, London School of Economics. She also held teaching posts at Binghamton University, New York, USA, Bogazici and Bilgi University in Turkey, and Shanghai University, China. She was a Harley Harlett scholar at Osgoode Hall Law School and has held two consecutive fellowships at IWM (Institute of Human Sciences) in Vienna, Austria (2021/2022). She is the current and immediate past Vice President of the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM), and the inaugural program co-director for the organization’s Arts and Forced Migration initiative. She has served on the Advisory Board of the Center for Forced Migration, Northwestern University, USA, and Delhi School of Transnational Affairs (DSTA), Delhi University, India. She is the co-editor of journal Journal of Conflict Transformation and Security, and is a member of the Editorial Boards of the Nations and Nationalism (1998-2006), Displaced Voices: Journal of Living Archives, and Mülkiye SBF Dergisi. She has been a frequent guest editor for the journal Refuge published by MCRG, Kolkata, India. She served as the Associate Director for the Center for Refugee Studies (2008-2013), and is an associate faculty member of both the CRS and Nathanson Center at Osgoode Hall Law School, Canada. She is also an adjunct faculty associate at the Center for the Study of Human Rights Law, Bilgi University Faculty of Law since 2009, and Center for Human Rights Law at Bilkent University Faculty of Law since 2022. She is a member of the Turkish chapter of IVR (International Association for the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy). She is also the advisory board member of Lives in Dignity Grant Facility and the Western Minaret Organization. Canefe is a practicing visual artist and mural painter with several exhibitions and installations in public spaces in Canada, Turkey and Cyprus. Since 2017, she has been experimenting with art/essay format in her academic publications. She has widely published on historical injustice, accountability regimes, politics of dispossession, mass displacement, excesses of nationalism, trauma and memory as well as ethics of witnessing and war crimes/crimes against humanity nexus. Her most recent research addresses the dispossession of unorthodox minorities in the Middle East, and, ethics of witnessing vis-à-vis work on human suffering. Current Projects:  Statelessness as a Permanent State (York University, Canada)  Ethics of Witnessing and Redefining Collective Responsibility (IWM visiting fellow, Vienna, Austria) Fields of Research: • Global Politics of Dispossession • Critical Forced Migration and Citizenship Studies • Trauma, Memory, Atrocities of War and Societal Crimes • Jurisprudential debates on International Criminal Law • Nationalism and Mass Violence • Theories of Justice and Debates on Collective Responsibility • Politics and Ethics of Hope