Sophia is a doctoral student at University College London. She was previously a Visiting Doctoral Student at Queen’s University Belfast (School of Law) and a Davis Fellow for Peace at Middlebury College (Arabic) in 2021.
 
Her interdisciplinary research project focuses on the role of domestic courts in consociational systems of power-sharing and involves data collection through interviewing in Northern Ireland and Lebanon. She seeks to understand how courts react to consociations and the implications of their judgments for the broader political set-up.
 
She holds an LLM as well as an MA in Conflict Resolution in Divided Societies from King’s College London, a Maîtrise en Droit in International Law from Panthéon-Assas University/Paris II, and the German First State Examination in Law (Humboldt University of Berlin).

Project Description:

Sophia’s research project examines the role of domestic courts for consociational systems of power-sharing. Consociational settlements are often negotiated after violent conflict and various communities have to be accommodated. Cooperation between political elites is an essential characteristic in consociational theory – necessary to both the establishment of a stable political system as well as its persistence (Lijphart 1977). Courts in consociations play a crucial but delicate role in the regulation of identity-based conflicts. In light of this, the courts’ role within the political set-up deserves closer examination, especially because they too are subject to consociational design.

With the aim of discerning how courts function and what role they play in consociational systems, Sophia’s research takes a socio-legal approach and goes beyond the traditional legal doctrinal analysis. In addition, using a comparative approach is deemed as the most effective way of studying systematically common patterns and challenges of the courts’ ability in regulating conflict and of analysing the effect of variations in consociational design. Hence, the project examines two deeply divided societies that have adopted a consociational system: Northern Ireland and Lebanon.

The research also seeks to illuminate how judges perceive their role of conflict resolution, and how they and their judgments are being perceived by other actors. Therefore, in-depth, semi-structured elite interviews were conducted with judges and other key actors to shed light on their attitudes with respect to the judicialisation of politics in consociations.