Political Anthropologist Professor Nayanika Mookherjee has been honoured with the 2025 Rivers Memorial Medal, one of the highest accolades in Anthropology.
The Medal is awarded by the Royal Anthropological Institute for outstanding contributions to anthropology, with an emphasis on fieldwork and a significant body of theoretical literature.
Professor Mookherjee is Co-Director of our Institute of Advanced Studies, and her interdisciplinary work explores how societies remember violence and imagine fairer futures.
Her research spans war crimes tribunals, memorials, wartime sexual violence, graphic ethnography, digital surveillance and nearly three decades of fieldwork in Bangladesh.
Using ethnography and visual storytelling, Professor Mookherjee examines how memories of conflict shape politics, aesthetics, and ethics today.
Her work has shaped global conversations on ethical testimonies, public memories and gendered violence during conflict.
It has contributed substantially to the well-being of survivors and ethical discussions on sexual violence during conflict.
In 2022, Professor Mookherjee theorised and edited the volume ‘On Irreconciliation’ to explore the politics of non-forgiveness, justice and the possibilities of accountability after conflict.
The work allowed an important examination of the rule of law within processes of unresolved genocidal injustices, debates relating to enslavement, memorialisation, removal of statues and institutional responses to bullying and harassment.
The concept of Irreconciliation has had extensive interdisciplinary interest and resonance.
Professor Mookherjee was invited to deliver the 2023 Firth lecture on this theme at the Association of Social Anthropology of UK’s annual conference.
The lecture generated discussions among those researching genocide, state violence, reparative justice as well as those working on climate change and mental health.
The theoretical frameworks has been widely deployed by academic and non-academic communities within and beyond anthropology.
Professor Mookherjee is currently preparing a book on the ‘Arts of Irreconciliation and the Futuring of Bangladesh’ covering the debates of the liberation war of the country and the 2024 uprising.
Professor Mookherjee said she was honoured to receive the 2025 Rivers Memorial Medal, adding: “The research among various communities has meant so much for my learning, thinking, writing and teaching.
“I am absolutely delighted with this recognition.
“For various survivor communities a critique of the symbolic performance of redressal has become very important.
“This creates the possibility of not only registering the impact of violence.
“It also creates a political space for them in the face of the corrosive realities that the lack of acknowledgement of injustice engenders.
“It is also important to critically understand various forms of irreconciliation and victimhood.”
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