Saghar Sara Birjandian is a scholar-practitioner with years of experience working on transitional justice and atrocity prevention initiatives in Canada, Uganda, the United Kingdom, and the United States. She is currently a Charles E. Scheidt Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Fellow at the Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention, State University of New York at Binghamton. Her research focuses on developing and applying critical and decolonial approaches to transitional justice policy development that evade mainstream and non-mainstream prescriptions.
Expert
To facilitate inclusion in transitional justice policy and practice, Saghar's research and work in Canada and Uganda demonstrate the utility in using relationalism and norms-typologies to differentiate between prescriptive and descriptive problem-analysis; the necessity of abandoning field-specific jargon to contextualize problem-mapping; and the value of using soft systems thinking to sequence problems stemming from mass violence for response in line with affected communities’ experiences and interests.
Fields of expertise: Social change / social transformations
