Mijke de Waardt

Mijke de Waardt is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and a researcher at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR). Her work bridges victimology, anthropology, and transitional justice, focusing on the impact of judicial/non-judicial procedures on survivors of political violence and human rights abuses globally.

• Affiliations: Faculty of Law, NSCR, and past roles at CEDLA, VU’s Social/Cultural Anthropology department, and INTERVICT.
• Research Themes: Reparations systems, survivor participation in transitional justice, and the socio-legal effects of measures like Peru’s national reparations program, Colombia’s Victims and Land Restitution Law, and the Global Survivors Fund’s initiatives in Guinea, DRC, and Iraq.
• Methods: Ethnography, participatory research, visual methods, and mixed approaches to study state-survivor relations in post-conflict societies.

Her Dutch-focused projects include evaluating victim impact statements’ expansion and compensation for sexual violence survivors’ healthcare costs. Collaborations span international institutions like the ICC, ECCC, and ECtHR, analyzing reparative measures’ real-world impacts on survivors.

Key areas of contribution include understanding barriers to help-seeking for sexual violence victims, the role of social support in transitional justice, and the politicization of victimhood in conflict zones.