IJR Research and Practitioner Fellows are independent and non-residential experienced researchers and practitioners who are experts in areas that link to IJR’s areas of work in the field of justice and reconciliation. They are thought leaders in their fields of expertise and have during collaborations and partnerships with the IJR added value to the Institute’s work. If the opportunity arises, they might be approached to assist the Institute with the implementation of its projects and research outputs. They will contribute to the work of the Institute through the design and implementation of research projects. Research Fellows will also be encouraged to highlight strategic opportunities and latest trends to the attention of the IJR. In some instances, IJR research and practitioner fellows will bring opportunities for collaboration and partnership to the IJR which will contribute towards fulfilling the organisation’s vision and mission of promoting justice and reconciliation. Research Fellows are not remunerated by the Institute, but can be contracted as IJR Independent Contractors where their specific expertise is required in the fulfillment of a Project.
Dr. Ingrid Roestenburg-Morgan
Dr. Ingrid Roestenburg-Morgan is a Senior Research Fellow with the IJR. Ingrid is South African but is currently based in the Netherlands. Her area of expertise covers International Criminal Law and Human Rights part of which has focused on transitional justice. Prior to undertaking her Ph.D she was employed as a Legal Officer at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (UN-ICTY). In her spare time Ingrid serves as Chair of the Board for an international NGO ActionAid in The Netherlands. Ingrid’s deep passion and commitment to Africa, has motivated her in using her research and talents for the benefit of those most disadvantaged, without a voice and agency. Her wish is to see an Africa and a world free of poverty and discrimination where each person can realize his or her full potential.
Dr. Fanie du Toit
Du Toit is currently overseeing a process to build community capacity for insider mediation in Myanmar’s Rakhine State as a step towards reintegration following the 2017 violence which caused 700,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee to Bangladesh. Previously (2016-2018) he was Chief Technical Advisor for UNDP Iraq, facilitating inter-sectarian dialogue in communities fragmented during and after ISIS rule. During the preceding 16 years, he was a programme manager and then executive director of the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation (IJR) in South Africa, focusing on issues related to post-TRC reconciliation and transitional justice, and worked with colleagues from other African states on similar processes.
His latest book, Political Transitions that work—Reconciliation as Interdependence, by Oxford University Press in collaboration with Notre Dame University, appeared in July 2018. As Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, he completed a D.Phil in the Philosophy of Religion in 1995, and in 2005 he received a further Masters’ degree in Justice and Transformation from the University of Cape Town (UCT). In 2007 he received UNESCO’s International Prize for Peace Education on behalf of the IJR. He is also an Honorary Associate Professor at UCT’s Department of Political Studies and a member of the Advisory Board of the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution
Peter Knoope
Peter Knoope is an IJR Senior Research Fellow and he is a Brussels-based independent expert with around 30 years of experience in diplomacy and international cooperation. He currently holds fellowships in four institutions in the areas of human security, conflict and terrorism prevention, peace building and justice (The Hague and Cape Town, South Africa). Through the fellowships he has for example carried out analyses on drivers of radicalisation and designed and delivered training programmes on preventing radicalisation and conflicts in Sudan, Yemen, Iraq and Nigeria and Cameroun. He has also provided advisory services on conflict resolution in Central African Republic targeting to politicians, national and local authorities and practitioners.
Peter Knoope has experience across the humanitarian-security-development cooperation nexus from high-level bilateral and multilateral cooperation to designing of national and country-specific cooperation strategies, research, public relations and diplomacy in the areas of justice, security and human development. In 2005-2009 he served as the Deputy Director (Policy and Strategy) in the National Coordinator for Security and Counter Terrorism in the Ministry of Justice, The Hague. He is the founder of the International Centre for Counterterrorism (ICCT) in the Hague and served as the Director of ICCT from 2009-2014.
Andries Odendaal
Andries Odendaal has, for the past three decades, worked in the field of local peacebuilding under the auspices of, i.a., the South African National Peace Secretariat, the Centre for Conflict Resolution at the University of Cape Town, the Centre for Mediation in Africa at the University of Pretoria, and the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation. He served on the Expert Panel of the Bureau for Crisis Prevention and Recovery of UNDP, was a regular resource person for the UN Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR), and a Jennings Randall Senior Fellow at the US Institute of Peace in 1909-2010. He has written several journal articles and book chapters, and is the author of A Crucial Link: Local Peace Committees and National Peacebuilding (USIP: 2013).
Kate Lefko-Everett
Kate Lefko-Everett is an independent researcher and evaluator with more than fifteen years of experience working in Southern Africa. She specialises in research design, qualitative and quantitative methods, data analysis and monitoring and evaluation (M&E). Kate’s background is in civil society research. She managed the IJR’s South African Reconciliation Barometer Survey from 2009 to 2013, and previously worked as a researcher at Idasa in both the Political Information and Monitoring Services (PIMS) and Southern African Migration Project (SAMP). She has conducted social and policy research in the areas of social cohesion, public participation and good governance, and migration and xenophobia. She has published widely, including as commissioning editor of Rethinking Reconciliation: Evidence from South Africa (Human Sciences Research Council Press, 2017) as well as in academic journals, international research reports and the popular press.
Marian Tankink
Marian Tankink (PhD) is a medical anthropologist and former community psychiatric nurse. She was awarded her PhD for her research on how refugee women from Afghanistan, Bosnia Herzegovina, and South Sudan respond to personal experiences of sexual violence in their countries of origin, or during flight.
She works as a freelance researcher and trainer for (international) organisations, mainly in the Great Lakes district in Africa. Her specialisation is on the relationship between gender, violence, psychosocial wellbeing and mental health from a family or community perspective in (post) conflict areas and among refugees.
From 2014-2019 she was Editor in Chief of ‘Intervention, Journal of Mental Health and Psychosocial Support in Conflict Affected Areas’.
Since 2015 she works with the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation in South Africa on linking the fields of Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) and Peacebuilding.
Yvonne Sliep
Prof Yvonne Sliep is an independent consultant with twenty-five years of international experience. She has done work for IJR since 2017 on integrating mental health and psychosocial support and peace building. She is in an honorary position at the University of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa in the School of Psychology. Yvonne completed her masters in 1989 on Traditional Healing and Mental Health. Her PhD on an African model for HIV/AIDS counselling was accepted as the national strategy for Malawi in 2005. She developed a critical reflexive model that has been applied in post-graduate studies and national programmes and in policy frameworks. She was the principle investigator of a multi-country project in social capital and care from 2008- 2013. Her area of expertise lies in collective healing, social cohesion and working with narratives in research and practice. She has published widely in academic journals, books, international reports and training manuals.