Arnaud Kurze

Biography

Dr. Arnaud Kurze is Associate Professor of Justice Studies at Montclair State University and Director of Project AROS Lab, a collaboration between Montclair and US-based and international partners that promotes innovative research, experiential learning, and digital literacy. Since July 2025 he has been a non-resident Senior Fellow in the AI Governance programme at the Global Governance Institute in Brussels, Belgium.

His research examines how communities, civil society actors, and institutions contest injustice under compounding political, technological, and environmental pressure. Current work spans three strands: youth-led, art-based activism in the post-Arab Spring world; transversal climate justice and the gendered dimensions of climate-related human mobility; and the governance of artificial intelligence and digital public infrastructure in transitional and authoritarian contexts. From 2016 to 2025 he was a Global Fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC, and in 2023–24 a Kluge Center Fellow in Digital Studies at the Library of Congress.

Dr. Kurze is co-author of Mapping Queerness in Times of Uncertainty (2025), Justicecraft: Imagining Justice in Times of Conflict (2024), and Mapping Global Justice: Perspectives, Cases and Practice (2022), and co-editor of New Critical Spaces in Transitional Justice: Gender, Art & Memory (2019). Justicecraft in Bangladesh: Accountability and Political Transformation in a Time of Crisis, co-edited with Christopher K. Lamont and Samina Luthfa, is forthcoming with De Gruyter Brill. His work appears in the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis, Progress in Disaster Science, the Journal of Human Rights, the Journal of Gender Studies, and PARISS, alongside policy briefings for the Global Governance Institute and textbooks on international justice and the Balkans. He is a Fulbright Specialist (2021–2026) and has been interviewed widely on global justice, memory politics, LGBTQ rights in the Middle East, and Tunisia's democratization.

Education

• BA, Sciences Po, France
• MA, University of Hagen, Germany
• PhD, George Mason University

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Research

My research sits at the intersection of transitional justice, global governance, and emerging technology, 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 over the past decade for understanding how justice is practiced, contested, and reshaped from below. I direct Project AROS Lab (PAL) at Montclair State University, where undergraduate researchers are integrated into each of the strands below, and I hold affiliations with the Global Governance Institute in Brussels, NYU, and Columbia.

Transversal Climate Justice

With my co-author Christopher K. Lamont, I advance what we 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.

A multi-year line of empirical research examines the gendered and intersectional dimensions of climate-related human mobility. Collaborative work published in Progress in Disaster Science (2026) analyzes how National Adaptation Plans in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Fiji shape — and too often constrain — women's agency across the mobility cycle. A 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.

AI, Digital Infrastructure, and Democratic Resilience

A newer strand asks what accountability means when justice claims are made, mediated, and suppressed through digital systems. As a Senior Fellow in the AI Governance programme at the Global Governance Institute, I work on how automated systems reshape memory politics and oversight in transitional and authoritarian contexts, and on the case for justice-ready digital public infrastructure — embedding accountability mechanisms into the digital layer on which democratic participation increasingly depends. Related work examines social media as an instrument of atrocity prevention, comparing campaigns across Canada and Syria, and the institutional gap between business and humanities approaches to AI implementation.

Youth, Art, and Alternative Justice

I continue to work on youth-led, art-based activism as a site where new justice claims emerge. Where conventional transitional justice mechanisms — war crimes trials, truth commissions — aim to close the books, youth activists use street art, performance, and digital campaigns to keep public debate open and to contest impunity at the local level. This argument is developed in my book manuscript Alternative Justice: How Youth Deals with Past Wrongdoings, currently under review with a university press.

A related strand extends the justicecraft framework to Bangladesh, asking how accountability claims take shape during rapid political transformation. Justicecraft in Bangladesh: Accountability and Political Transformation in a Time of Crisis, co-edited with Christopher K. Lamont and Samina Luthfa, is forthcoming with De Gruyter Brill.