Impact Awards—2025 Insight Award: Kamari Maxine Clarke

How do communities survive and rebuild after mass violence? It’s a consequential question at a time when rising conflict and political instability are prevalent, and one that Kamari Maxine Clarke, a distinguished professor at the University of Toronto, has the insight to answer. She has spent 20 years conducting research related to globalization, human rights, international law, as well as how artificial intelligence (AI) and new geospatial tools are being used to document violence in a range of war-torn regions in the Global South.

A new question recently took form in Clarke’s mind when she started documenting more geospatial technologies like satellites and drones in the sky.

“I wondered, what happens when you arm communities with technological, forensic and legal knowledge so they can foster safety in their neighbourhoods, potentially changing their livelihoods and, in turn, their lives?”

Knowledge and empowerment are crucial in countries with prolonged conflicts. As Clarke explains, in communities that have suffered violence, “spatial memory” can too often set off the next cycle of violence, when a group seeks vigilante justice for a wrongdoing.

“Take the location where someone was shot, or where an abduction happened—maybe the victim’s family still has to cross that street every day to catch the bus to go to school. Those after-affects can be more profound than the moment of violence itself,” she says. “Sometimes that lingering, that ongoing experience and suffering, is the impetus for retaliatory violence.”

By putting tools and training into the hands of local communities to help stop the cycle of violence, Clarke is the 2025 SSHRC Impact Award winner in the Insight category.

On receiving this prestigious award: “It’s truly wonderful news for all of us,” Clarke says, “and the award funds can be re-invested in the research project to further support communities in need.”

She believes the spread of these new technologies does not democratize justice. “But, by training community members, they can then engage in the design of new technological tools needed to attend to their particular circumstances. These tools can help communities and advocates find the missing—dead or alive—and also address violence and injustice in the longer term.”

With the help of two collaborators—Sara Kendall at the University of Kent’s law school and Jennifer Burrell, an anthropologist at the State University of New York—Clarke has conducted research and community training in Nigeria, where armed conflict persists; in Mexico, where thousands of people have been “disappeared;” and in The Hague, home to the International Criminal Court and the United Nations’ International Court of Justice.

The research team’s overarching goal in Nigeria was to understand the contours of local knowledge and empower communities in the peace-building process. The communities learned how to use AI-related technologies to document incidents, make predictions about future violence and develop solutions. In Mexico, the mothers of the “disappeared” worked with forensic experts to learn how to conduct searches for loved ones.

Clarke adds, “In studying the impact of these new technology projects, part of what we tried to do with the community-based groups we worked with was to put certain process and consultation structures in place so that groups like traditional governance councils could expect support from local and regional governments. In order to ensure that retaliation isn’t the only viable option for dealing with violence in communities, this included training on strategic outreach to authorities and how to make sure there’s buy-in from governmental officials in the first place, so that people can seek help from those resources or those institutions.”

The team amplified the project’s reach and sustainability by employing a peer training model, enabling locally trained leaders to pass the skills they acquired to others.

“Some of the women we trained in the community actually developed their own models for training other women. Witnessing it in action brought tears to my eyes,” Clarke says.

Furthermore, several women the team trained in Nigeria went on to become major community figures, serving as representatives on boards and a human rights commission.

Clarke’s work has even helped establish a new field of study—the anthropology of geospatial technologies—with interdisciplinary relevance across sociolegal studies, anthropology, international law and science and technology studies.