John Brewer

Professor of Post Conflict Studies, Queen's University Belfast
John D Brewer is Professor of Post Conflict Studies in the Senator George J Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen’s University Belfast. He was awarded an honorary DSocSci from Brunel University in 2012 for services to social science and the sociology of peace processes. He is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy (2004), a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2008), an Academician in the Academy of Social Sciences (2003) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (1998). He has held visiting appointments at Yale University (1989), St John’s College Oxford (1991), Corpus Christi College Cambridge (2002) and the Australia National University (2003). In 2007-2008 he was a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow. He has been President of the British Sociological Association (2009-2012) and is now Honorary Life Vice President, and is also a member of the Governing Council of the Irish Research Council and of the Council of the Academy of Social Science. In 2010 he was appointed to the United Nations Roster of Global Experts for his expertise in peace processes. He is the author or co-author of fifteen books and editor or co-editor of a further three. His latest books are Peace Processes: A Sociological Approach (Polity Press, 2010), Religion, Civil Society and Peace in Northern Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2011), Ex-Combatants, Religion and Peace in Northern Ireland (Palgrave, 2013) and The Public Value of Social Sciences (Bloomsbury, 2013). He is General Editor of the book series Palgrave Studies in Compromise after Conflict. He is Principal Investigator on a £1.26 million cross-national, five-year project on compromise amongst victims of conflict, funded by The Leverhulme Trust, focusing on Northern Ireland, South Africa and Sri Lanka (@compromisestudy). He regularly teaches peace and reconciliation workshops in Sri Lanka. In 2013 he gave the Academy of Social Science Annual Lecture, in March 2014 the Annual Lord Dunleath Lecture, in April the Annual Lord Patten Lecture and in May 2014 he spoke at the Westminster Faith Debate on the motion that religion is a positive force in peace building. In June 2014 he delivered the Annual David Stevens Memorial Lecture.