Simon Robins

Simon Robins is a practitioner and researcher with an interest in humanitarian protection, human rights and transitional justice. For the last decade he has combined academic research with a consulting practice focusing on evaluation and programme support with international agencies, including the UN and NGOs, with an emphasis on states emerging from conflict and violence. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Applied Human Rights at the University of York and an Associate Editor of the Journal of Disappearance Studies.

His consulting work has sought to provide policy and programmatic support to a range of humanitarian and human rights related programming, including extensive engagement with monitoring and evaluation, and in particular of protection and rule of law. He has a long association with the International  Committee of the Red Cross and until recently was a Research Advisor to the Red Cross Red Crescent Missing Persons Centre, hosted by the ICRC. 

His academic work is driven by a desire to put the needs of victims of conflict at the heart of efforts to address its legacies, and this has led to his engaging with victim-centred and therapeutic approaches to histories of violence. His research has focused on addressing legacies of violence after conflict, taking a critical perspective on transitional justice and a focus on emancipatory approaches driven by victims. He has tried to drive his research through innovative participatory approaches that see knowledge production and activism as inseparable. He has worked extensively on the issue of persons disappeared and missing in armed conflict, as well as dead and missing migrants at the EU’s southern border. He has broad experience in multiple contexts in Africa and Asia.