Professor Tobias Kelly

IAS Spotlight Series: Pacifism and Nonviolence

University of Edinburgh

Tobias Kelly is Professor of Political and Legal Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests include human rights, war and peace, and political and legal anthropology. He has carried out ethnographic and archival research in Israel/Palestine, the UK and at the UN, and published monographs on the legacies of the Oslo Peace Process as well as the documentation of torture.

His current research examines the history of claims of conscience in twentieth century Britain, starting with exemption from military service for socialist, anarchists and Christian pacifists, amongst others, and following through to examine the growth of modern human rights and humanitarianism, and the turn to legal claims of conscience by the religious right. As part of this project, he is writing a book on British conscientious objectors to military service that asks what their turbulent lives can tell us about the ethical tensions of war and humanitarianism.

He is co-editor of Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism and International Development, and editor of the Ethnographies of Political Violence series with University of Pennsylvania Press.