ALC is very pleased to announce that ALC Alumnus and current Chair of the ALC Alumni Network, Njoki Wamai, was awarded her PhD in Politics and International Studies from University of Cambridge in June 2017. Many congratulations to Dr. Wamai from all at ALC!.
Dr Wamai sat and passed her PhD viva in November 2016 and the PhD was finally Approved following minor corrections in June this year. The thesis is titled "Peace, Justice and Moving On: Local Political Contestation of the International Criminal Court in Kenya." The thesis is currently being turned into a book manuscript and centers on the politics of the ICC intervention at the everyday level in Kenya.
The internal examiner described the thesis as "perhaps the first piece of academic work to provide such a comprehensive account of the non-elite politics of the ICC’s intervention and to locate the ICC’s failure in the complex fabric of local and national, elite and popular, material and symbolic, violent and consensual, politics in Kenya. The thesis thus makes a novel contribution to the expanding critical literature on transitional justice and the politics of the ICC". The external examiner described the thesis as "excellent and much needed contribution to research on the effects of International Criminal Court (ICC) interventions beyond the Court’s Hague-based centre... One of the most important contributions of this thesis is its effort to shift the frame, decentring the ICC intervention in Kenya as one of many post-conflict initiatives that may appear relatively unimportant in the lives of everyday Kenyans."
Her thesis is ground breaking in offering a distinct and provocative intervention into the debates over contemporary Kenyan politics, in particular taking to task the tendency to privilege elite agency and manipulation in considering ethnic and clientelist politics.
Following the successful completion of her PhD, Njoki has since been appointed for one year as a post doctoral research associate at the University of Cambridge in the Politics Department's Centre for Governance and Human Rights (CGHR) to develop her research further through publications and support the centre's Justice and Accountability thematic group.
Many congratulations again to Dr. Wamai.
