Overview
Marika Sosnowski is a legal anthropologist with primary research interests in the fields of critical security studies (mainly ceasefires), local/rebel governance and legal systems (particularly issues around citizenship and belonging) with a geographical focus on Syria.
From June 2023 until May 2026 she is based in the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness at Melbourne Law School working on an innovative and interdisciplinary slow scholarship project with 10 international scholars which examines the legal after-life of war and revolution. The project aims to better understand how people internalise and experience the law at an everyday level after mass violence or world-shaping events in a range of contexts including Myanmar, Colombia, Cyprus, North Korea, Pakistan, Syria, Jordan, Germany and Australia; and how these afterlives map onto first-hand encounters at checkpoints, with sexual and gender-based violence, with access to documents and citizenship rights, in frozen conflicts, with movements for peace, transitional, youth and criminal justice.
Marika’s academic work has been published in Third World Quarterly, Citizenship Studies, International Studies Quarterly, the Leiden Journal of International Law and Civil Wars among others. Her first book Redefining Ceasefires: Wartime Order and Statebuilding in Syria came out in June 2023 with Cambridge University Press and her second book, 58 Facets: on law, violence and revolution in September 2025 with Melbourne University Press.
Marika was awarded the 2024 Woodward Medal in Humanities and Social Sciences for her ‘peacebuilding efforts framed around depth of research, ethical care, and academic rigour’.
Other Faculty and University Responsibilities
Memberships and affiliations
Research Associate, GIGA Hamburg
Authoritarian and Challenging Environments Research Group (ACERG) member
European Association for Social Anthropology (EASA) member