معرفی
Tobias Kelly is Professor of Political and Legal Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh's School of Social and Political Science. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from the London School of Economics (2003) and has previously worked at the Institute of Law of Birzeit University, the Crisis States Programme at LSE, and the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at Oxford University. His current research focuses on the cultural history of war, violence, and human rights, with a particular emphasis on conscientious objection and pacifism.
Professor Kelly's research interests span political and legal anthropology, political violence, pacifism, human rights, anthropology of Britain, historical anthropology, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His work explores the intimate politics of conscience, particularly through his ERC-funded project on British conscientious objectors during the Second World War, which resulted in his book Battles of Conscience: British Pacifists and the Second World War (2022). He is currently developing a new project on the cultural and social history of private detectives.
His publication record shows a consistent focus on the intersections of law, violence, and human rights, with recent work examining torture documentation, humanitarian ethics, and the politics of conscience in wartime Britain. His scholarship often bridges historical and contemporary concerns, connecting the moral dilemmas of past conflicts with present-day human rights challenges.
Professor Kelly co-edits the Ethnographies of Political Violence series with University of Pennsylvania Press and has held visiting positions at New York University and the University of Oxford. At Edinburgh, he supervises PhD students working on human rights, political anthropology, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, political violence, and pacifism.
