Erin Baines
Research Advisor
An academic by training, Erin Baines is dedicated to investigating and revealing the political economy of armed conflict; and to learn from people who survive, protect one another, and struggle to live together again despite devastation and seemingly overwhelming odds.
As research director of the Justice and Reconciliation Project, Gulu Uganda, she and her research team work with survivors of war atrocities to reconceptualize justice issues and to realize locally owned solutions. Erin also founded PeaceGirl, an initiative to give voice and support to female survivors of sexual slavery and to stop sexual and gender based violence. She is a university professor at the Liu Institute for Global Issues, where she teaches courses on humanitarianism, transitional justice and gender and armed conflict.
Erin received a PhD in International Studies from Dalhousie University in 2000, and after working with the United Nations assumed the position of Director of the Conflict and Development Programme at the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. She is the author of Vulnerable Bodies: Gender, the UN and the Global Refugee Crisis (Ashgate Publishing, London 2004) and was awarded the Henry Frank Guggenheim Prize for her essay on the Role of Academic Research in Reducing Violent Conflict.
“It’s an insatiable curiousity to learn from the displaced and despondent that fuels my pursuit of knowledge; and a refusal to believe that violence and poverty are what it means to be human that drives me to constantly explore new mediums and avenues to realize social change.”
