Research

Marie's scholarship is directly influenced by her double training in law and in anthropology. Her first monograph Recalling the Belgian Congo: Conversations and Introspection (Oxford: Berghahn, 2000) was concerned with the way we remember colonialism. Based on her doctoral research, this study has provided her with an awareness of history and global processes which informs the way she approaches and questions (Western) law. Recently she has mainly been working on human rights, rights as culture (i.e. a cultural way of expressing political claims) and migration. Her monograph Who Believes in Human Rights? Reflections on the European Convention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) is both a commentary on the European Convention and a theoretical reflection on the concept of human rights, which she argues is differently conceptualised in four different 'schools'. She is currently writing a follow up to this book in the form of a monograph provisionally entitled Migrants have human rights too! Critical perspectives on the Strasbourg case law. She is co-editor of Paths to International Justice: Social and Legal perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) which explores international judicial procedures from the perspective of ordinary people. She also co-edited Culture and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). She has published over twenty-five articles in academic journals and books.