Christine Bell, FBA, FRSE, is a legal scholar specialising in human rights law, and a senior mediator with over 30 years of experience mediating violent conflict. She was principle investigator and Director of large-scale research grants establishing the Political Settlements Research Programme and the Peace and Conflict Resolution Platform (PeaceRep). As of 2026, she is Emeritus Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Edinburgh, and Honorary Professor The Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, Queen's University of Belfast.
Bell graduated from Selwyn College, Cambridge, with a first class law degree in 1988, before completing a master of laws degree at Harvard University in 1990. She qualified as a Barrister in Northern Ireland in that year and, after passing the New York bar examination, she worked at Debevoise & Plimpton. She was then Director of the Centre for International and Comparative Human Rights Law at Queen's University Belfast from 1997 to 1999, and then Professor of Public International Law at the University of Ulster from 2000 to 2011.
Bell has made major contributions on the nature and status of peace agreements, arguing that they operate as a category of legalized document, with legal and political effects. One of Bell's contributions is the concept of the lex pacificatoria. This is the idea that the practice of conflict resolution has created new forms of legal consensus relating to how issues such as powersharing, minority rights, and transitional justice are dealt with in peace agreements or accords.
Bell has also been the lead researcher responsible for the PA-X Peace and Transition Data, and has innovated in the PeaceTech area. She has pioneered 'Peace Analytics' as a concept, and also been key to peacetech developments.
In 2015, Bell was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences. In 2019 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She won the Francis Deák Prize of the American Society of International Law in 2007. In 2011 she was awarded the UK Society of Legal Scholars Hart/SLSA Book Prize for her book 'On the Law of Peace'. Bell and the PA-X team were awarded the RSE'S Mary Sommerville Medal for their work on peace and transition process data.