Projects

Building Democracy and Justice After Conflict

War weakens democratic governance and the capacity to deal with crimes committed during the conflict. The international community’s response to this has been haphazard. This project will advance new ways of thinking about building the structures for democracy and justice after conflict. The focus will be the potential contribution of international law to this enterprise. Through national and international collaboration, the project will develop not only innovative theoretical models to ground international norms about governance and justice after conflict, but also practical proposals to implement them.

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Peacebuilding Compared

The United Nations is putting foreign troops and police into peacekeeping operations more than in the past. So are other organizations like the African Union. What works in peacebuilding? What are the kinds of interventions that create wars and make things worse for the people? How can international peacebuilding and international law contribute to justice and human development after armed conflict? These are the questions we seek to answer in the Peacebuilding Compared Project.

This research will analyse peacebuilding strategies from diverse contexts in search of keys to effectiveness. Restorative and responsive regulatory theory, useful in many other domains, will be tested on unique data on governance of peacebuilding. Responsive theory will doubtless be revised or rejected as a general social science theory. This ambitious project will cover up to 48 country cases. Each case will also stand alone as contextually rich accounts of successes and failures of peacebuilding in that nation.

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Australia's First Bill of Rights

The ACT Human Rights Act Research Project is a joint project of the ANU and the ACT Government, supported by a grant from the Australian Research Council.

The project will document the impact of Australia’s first Bill of Rights - the ACT Human Rights Act 2004 - over its first five years. Our research will test the predictions of supporters and critics of bills of rights against the ACT experience. The results of the research will assist in the five year review of the ACT Human Rights Act and will make an important contribution to the national debate about a bill of rights.

Project website