Professor Vanja Hamzić

Vanja Hamzić is Professor of Law, History and Anthropology at SOAS University of London. 

He holds two First Class Honours degrees from the University of Sarajevo, an LLM with Distinction from the University of Nottingham and a PhD from King’s College London. Professor Hamzić has worked extensively as an activist and researcher with international and civil society organisations across South and Southeast Asia, Europe, the Middle East and West and South Africa. Prior to joining SOAS, he held academic appointments at City, University of London and King’s College London.

Professor Hamzić’s interdisciplinary research—encompassing history, anthropology and critical legal studies—centres on the formation of human selfhood, with particular attention to intersections and interpellations of gender, sexuality, class, race, language and religion. His principal fieldwork sites include Pakistan, Indonesia, Senegal and Louisiana. While Professor Hamzić’s longstanding focus is the Islamic legal tradition in its historical and contemporary diversity, he also explores its influence on, and intersections with, South Asian, Southeast Asian, West African and circum-Atlantic legal and cultural traditions. 

His scholarship has particularly illuminated the resilience of gender-nonconforming individuals and communities—such as khwajasara of Pakistan, waria of Indonesia and numerous historical identity formations across West Africa—in navigating and resisting the forces of racial capitalism, colonialism, enslavement and other legally sanctioned forms of oppression. Central to his work is how these communities have developed and maintained rich, insurgent vernacular knowledges—rooted in oral traditions, rites of passage and everyday rituals—that have withstood both the epistemic violence of nation-states and legal institutions, and the persistent ‘will to disappear’ inscribed in colonial and postcolonial archives.

In addition to his core research, Professor Hamzić actively contributes to global debates in legal and social theory, human rights, racial capitalism, Marxism(s), decolonial and postcolonial studies, the Cold War, feminist and queer legal theories, the interdisciplinary ‘archival turn’, global law and governance studies, social anthropology and philosophy. His published work engages with critical concepts such as alegality, distemporality, thereness, legal violence, Third World feminisms and decolonial queer theory, Muslim Marxism, the unknowable and the Lacanian Real.

Professor Hamzić’s current book project examines gender nonconformity alongside cosmological and legal pluralism in eighteenth-century Senegambia, focusing on how enslaved gender-variant West Africans survived the Middle Passage and navigated the early racial capitalist gender regimes of colonial Louisiana—first French, then Spanish. This work aims to develop an interruptive approach to circum-Atlantic colonial and postcolonial historiography, critically addressing the pervasive silences of the archive.

He has served as Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Colonialism, Empire and International Law; co-founded and co-chaired the Centre for Ottoman Studies; contributed as a member of the Steering Committee of the Centre for Gender Studies; and participated in the Decolonising SOAS Working Group. He is affiliated with several other SOAS research centres and was Associate Director of Research at SOAS from 2019 to 2022. He also serves on the Academic Senate. 

Externally, Professor Hamzić was a core faculty member at Harvard University’s Institute for Global Law and Policy and is an Associate Academic Fellow of the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple. In 2016–17, he was a Residential Member of the School of Social Science in the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.