dr. (Jeff) JD Handmaker

Profile

I joined the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS), which is the Hague Campus of Erasmus University Rotterdam in February 2007. Among my external academic appointments, I have been a senior research fellow in the School of Law at the University of the Witwatersrand since January 2007, an Editor (since 2013) of the South African Journal on Human Rights (from Feb 2017- Feb 2019 Editor-in-Chief), a visiting research fellow in the Department of Sociology at Princeton University in 2017, a member of the teaching staff for the MSc in Law and Society at Leiden University and as a  Fellow and co-ordinator of a Theme Group at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciencies (NIAS) of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in the 2020/21 Academic Year.

I studied law in England (1992: LLB, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne and 1994: LLM, with Merit, School of Oriental and African Studies, London) and was called to the English bar in 1995. After fifteen years as a legal and human rights practitioner, mainly in South Africa and The Netherlands, in 2009 I obtained a PhD in the sociology of law at Utrecht University with a thesis on Advocating for Accountability: Civic-State Interactions to Protect Refugees in South Africa, which was published by Intersentia (Antwerp).

As a practitioner, I took on different tasks, including as assistant to a British Member of Parliament (on miscarriages of justice), as legal advisor for the Dutch Refugee Council, in various functions for the South African organisation Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR) and as director of Rea Hamba Advice, an international legal practice that was based in The Hague. I trained government officials, police officers, military personnel, lawyers, NGOs and journalists and advised governments, the United Nations and civil society organisations in the development sector on a wide range of human rights and legal issues, developing particular experience outside Europe in Southern Africa and Palestine.

As a researcher, since 1999, I have published scholarly work, in academic and other journals, as well as four books and one special issue of a journal. My academic research has been in three, overlapping areas, all concerning the potential for legal mobilization to lead to progressive structural change.

Firstly, I have theorized and evaluated the structural opportunities and constraints of civic-state interactions in the context of human rights advocacy and in particular public interest litigation, with a particular focus on refugees and migrants. While this area of research has focused primarily on South Africa, I have also written on legal mobilization in Latin America, Palestine and the Netherlands. This area of reseach has also critiqued the deleterious effects of evaluating legal doctrine without critically taking into account the social, historical and political context and the pedagogies of legal learning from crisis.

A second, related area of research has been to critically evaluate the content and implementation of laws and policies and the roles of civic actors in the framing and enforcement of these policies. In this area, I have focussed primarily on refugee laws and policies in South Africa, but I have also examined the negative consequences of experts reproducing the concept of ‘irregular migration’, and the uncritical application of legal-doctrinal concepts in legal-political analyses of armed conflict and international criminal justice.

A third research area has critically evaluated efforts by civic actors, states and international institutions, to enforce international (criminal) law, both through international tribunals and in national legal systems.

Applying for grants is a challenging, though inevitable aspect of working in academia. In 2005, I received an NWO-WOTRO award to support field research in South Africa from the Dutch National Science Foundation (NWO). Since working at ISS, I participated in various grants, including a two-year programme funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), a two-year research and capacity-building programme funded by Hivos and a teaching project in Suriname. In a project led by Sanne Taekema the Erasmus School of Law I was jointly awarded a five-year (2015-2020) matching grant from the Erasmus Trust Fonds amounting to a total of 1.8 million euros. In addition to the NIAS-KNAW fellowship (2020-21), I have also been awarded several Erasmus+ Mobility grants.

In 2021, I developed a Consortium involving six universities and 15 different organizations to establish a Legal Mobilization Centre, for which I am currently seeking funding.