Dr Rebekka Friedman is a Reader (Associate Professor) in International Relations. Her research and teaching focus on peacebuilding, conflict and peace studies, transitional justice, gender, memory, healing and trauma. 

Rebekka has a PhD and MA in International Relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a BA Joint Honours in Political Science and International Development from McGill University. She is a previous editor of Millennium: Journal of International Studies. From 2018-2019, Rebekka was a fellow of the Policy Institute (KCL). She was a visiting fellow at the Fletcher School at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts in 2018.

Teaching

• Transitional Justice and International Criminal Law (7SSWM223)
• Gendering Global Politics (6SSW3033)
• Conflict, Security and Development (7SSWM140)

PhD supervision

She is currently supervising PhD students working on the following areas:

• Popular acceptance of the Colombian peace process
• Women cadres in the Khmer Rouge
• Post-conflict education and transitional justice in Sri Lanka
• The relationship of counterinsurgency and genocide in Sri Lanka

Research Interests

• Legacies of violence
• Transitional justice
• Peacebuilding
• Feminist peace research
• Memory and trauma

Research

Rebekka's broader research is interested in gendered and less visible legacies of violence and recovery in conflict-affected areas and on the intersection of peacebuilding and care. Rebekka’s recent work has focused on broadening understandings of harm, particularly in relation to forced separation during conflict. From June 2025, she will be working on an ERC Consolidator grant on 'relational harm'.

Rebekka has carried out research on families and communities affected by state-enforced disappearances. She was a co-investigator of the UKRI GCRF Gender, Justice and Security Hub and led the ‘Legacies of the Disappeared’ project within the Hub. She led an ESRC Future Research Leaders grant, entitled, Hidden Voices.

Rebekka has an interest in ethnographic and visual participatory methods and made a documentary film as part of her work in Sri Lanka, (https://vimeo.com/video/337980673; password: CSD2020).

Selected Publications

• 'Gendered nostalgia and Post-War Sri Lanka: Women's Perspectives on Loss and Violence', with Hannah Partis Jennings International Feminist Journal of Politics (March 2025), 27:2, pp. 327-349. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616742.2025.2472218
• 'A Lens into the Everyday: Visual Ethnographies and Making a Multistoried Film in Sri Lanka'. European Journal of International Relations (October 27, 2024). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13540661241280957.
• ‘Violations of the Heart: Parental Harm in War and Oppression’, with Hanna Ketola, Review of International Studies (October 2023), 50:2, pp. 393-412. doi:10.1017/S0260210523000499.
• ‘Hidden and Heard: Protesting Disappearances in Sri Lanka’, with Hannah Partis-Jennings, King’s College London Policy Institute (2019), pp. 1-24.
• ‘Remnants of a Chequered Past: Female Combatants and the Renegotiation of Agency in Northern Sri Lanka’, International Studies Quarterly, 62:3 (2018), pp. 632-642. Online ISSN: 1468-2478.
• ‘Implementing Transformative Justice: Survivors and Ex-Combatants at the Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación in Peru’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 41:4 (2018), pp. 701-720. doi:1080/01419870.2017.1330487.
• Competing Memories: Truth and Reconciliation in Sierra Leone and Peru (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). ISBN:
• ‘Culturally-Mediated Grieving: Women’s Experiences in Northern Sri Lanka’, in ‘Bridging Theory and Practice: Gender and Transitional Justice’ Special Issue, Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security Occasional Paper Series (2016), pp. 20-37.
• Evaluating Transitional Justice: Accountability and Peacebuilding in Post-Conflict Sierra Leone, Kirsten Ainley, Rebekka Friedman and Chris Mahony (eds) (London: Palgrave, 2015). ISBN: 978-1-137-46821-5
• ‘The Pitfalls and Politics of Holistic Justice’, with Andrew Jillions, Global Policy, 6:2 (2015), pp. 141-150. ISSN:1758-5880.

Please visit the Research Portal for a list of publications.