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Arnaud Kurze a researcher and activist. His work focuses on human rights, social movements and transitional justice.

About

Dr. Arnaud Kurze is Associate Professor of Justice Studies at Montclair State University. He is also the Director of Project AROS Lab, a collaboration between Montclair and US-based and international organizations to promote innovative research, experiential learning, and digital literacy. Since July 2025 he is a Senior Fellow at the Global Governance Institute in Brussels, Belgium as part of the Artificial Intelligence and Global Governance program. His scholarly work on transitional justice in the post-Arab Spring world focuses particularly on the intersection of youth activism, art, technology, and collective memory.

From 2016-2025 Dr. Kurze was a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC studying youth resilience in North Africa and the Middle East. He has published widely in academic journals, contributed to edited volumes and is author of several reports on foreign affairs for government and international organizations.

Dr. Kurze is the co-author of Mapping Queerness in Times of Uncertainty (2025), Justicecraft: Imagining Justice in Times of Conflict (2024) and of Mapping Global Justice: Perspectives, Cases and Practice (2022). He is also the co-editor of the book, New Critical Spaces in Transitional Justice: Gender, Art & Memory (2019). He has given many interviews on a variety of topics, including bridging the gap between theory and practice on climate justice, the politics of collective memory in US society and beyond, LGBT issues in the Middle East and Tunisia’s democratization process, among others. He has been the recipient of many awards and fellowships, including the Library of Congress and Fulbright.

Download Kurze CV – full (last 5 years)

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Research

Youth, Art & Resilience

Seeking Alternative Justice Amid Political Change

This research project focuses on youth and injustice. More precisely on how and why the former deal with the latter. Its originality lies in looking at some of the old problems from a new perspective. It zooms in on art-inspired contentious politics and exploring the concept of resilience. Of particular interest are contexts that impede direct forms of resistance or civil disobedience in world politics. Mountains of books are available on regime change, particularly non-violent transformations. In recent years political transitions literature relied increasingly on transitional justice studies as a lens to shed light on past wrongdoings. These focused notably on accountability issues and memory politics. Such scholarship is often based on state-centric analysis, exploring how governments deal with the past. Bottom-up studies, which put the accent on civil society, have also found growing attention. Yet marginalized and less institutionalized actors have generally received much less attention among these scholarly efforts. Yet societies continue to encounter difficulties coping with the aftermath of violence and oppression. As a result, this project fills this void by scrutinizing the role of less visible and informal actors from a cross-regional perspective.

Role of Youth

The mediatization of the Arab Spring brought youth centerstage, They have nonetheless been actively engaged in transition processes in the past. Unfortunately, little is known about the increasing engagement and advocacy of youth in these transitional contexts. Instead, when inquiring about the role of youth during these processes many questions remain unanswered until now. An essential question in this context revolves around why these youth-fueled alternative practices have increased? And why have they considerably affected more traditional and formal forms of transitional justice? In relation to this, why should they not be considered a panacea to cope with the intricate consequences of political violence and conflict? Finding answers to these questions requires examining the challenges, tensions and a genealogy of transnational advocacy networks. It also requires scrutinizing their collective action, and the rise of social media. The latter reduces geographical and physical boundaries but poses other difficulties.

new insights

This project aims at understanding this transnational and transversal interconnectedness against the backdrop of a selection of case studies of current youth movements dealing with past human rights abuses, war crimes and other social injustice. It illustrates the difference between how youth activists approach questions of past human rights violations and more conventional measures implemented after mass atrocities and the fall of repressive and dictatorial regimes. Homing in on the role of youth in these contexts helps us gain a fuller understanding of dilemmas and tensions that arise when seeking justice.

Youth activism therefore emerged as a response, seeking alternative forms of addressing apparent injustices. Strategies of youth in their collective action repertoire include street art, performance activism and social media campaigns, among others. Contrary to some of the established transitional justice mechanisms, youth-led activities occur also in less institutionalized and informal settings. The project hence illustrates how this performance-based advocacy work has fueled the creation of new forms of expression and spaces of deliberation to contest the culture of impunity and challenge the politics of memory in different transitional contexts.

Take away

The project provides two sets of answers. First, it offers a contextual background to understand these new, alternative transitional justice practices, framing justice against the backdrop of space in times of change. Second, it provides a conceptual framework that links youth, art and resilience, followed by a number of case studies to illustrate this complex phenomenon.

Photo credit: Robert Goddyn

Project

Transversal Climate Justice: A Multi-Year Research Agenda

My research sits at the intersection of transitional justice, global governance, and climate justice, examining how communities, civil society actors, and institutions respond to injustice amid compounding political, social, and environmental pressures. This work is anchored in the justicecraft framework — an analytical lens I have developed with colleagues over the past decade for understanding how justice is practiced, contested, and reshaped from below.

A central strand of this agenda advances what my co-author Christopher K. Lamont and I call transversal climate justice: an approach that moves beyond disciplinary and transnational framings to trace how climate change connects to migration, public health, development, and human rights. Climate change is not only an environmental problem but a justice problem — its burdens fall unevenly on populations who have contributed least to its causes, and its governance is shaped by histories of inequality that cut across borders and scales.

Building on this foundation, a multi-year line of empirical research examines the gendered and intersectional dimensions of climate-related human mobility. Recent collaborative work in Progress in Disaster Science analyzes how National Adaptation Plans in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Fiji shape — and too often constrain — women’s agency across the mobility cycle. An ongoing companion project investigates how civil society organizations across African countries operate as de facto governance actors in translating gender-sensitive adaptation commitments into practice. Together, this research reframes mobility not as a failure of adaptation but as a potentially transformative risk-management strategy, provided governance systems expand rather than restrict the capabilities of those most exposed to climate risk.

Alongside this climate-justice agenda, I continue to work on youth-led, art-based activism as a site where new justice claims emerge — a subject developed in my book manuscript under review with a major University Press, “Alternative Justice.” I direct Project AROS Lab (PAL) at Montclair State University, where undergraduate researchers are integrated into this broader program, and I hold affiliations with the Global Governance Institute in Brussels, NYU, and Columbia.

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