Paddy Hillyard

Paddy Hillyard began his academic career at the then New University of Ulster. He moved to the University of Bristol in 1976. Following the establishment of the new School of Policy Studies in 1995, he became Director of the Centre for Research on Social Exclusion and Social Justice. In 1999 he moved back to Ireland and took up the Chair in Social Policy at the University of Ulster. In January 2005, he was appointed to a Chair in Sociology at Queen’s University Belfast. His main research interest is in social order and control in modern welfare states focusing on a number of substantive areas: ‘crime’, social harm, political violence, poverty and inequality.

His past research has explored the changing strategies used to deal with political violence in Northern Ireland and Britain and the move towards a more coercive form of regulation in Britain involving the accretion of greater power to the police and other organisations which was non-accountable and not subject to adequate democratic control. More recently his research has focused on poverty, conflict and inequality in Northern Ireland. His latest research project funded by the ESRC explored women’s security and participation in three transitional societies – Northern Ireland, South Africa and the Lebanon. Along with colleagues at Bristol and Liverpool, he is interested in developing a new discipline, called Zemiology (from the Greek zemia), focusing on the study of the range of the social harms which people experience from the cradle to the grave, only a small proportion of which are captured by the criminal law.