The Memory Seeker (to be published in February 2023), a mystery thriller, is Ronald Niezen's first novel. When Dutch-Canadian Peter Dekker is hired as an investigator by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, he has no inkling of the war crimes that lie in his own family's history. His work takes him to Timbuktu, where he collaborates with Malian colleagues to document war crimes from a recent and only partly-ended civil war. While he is on assignment, his live-in girlfriend, Nora, gets to know Peter's estranged aunt living in The Hague and uncovers a dark history of murder, revenge and collaboration with the Nazi occupiers. As the stories of his family under Nazi rule unfold and the intrigues multiply, Peter is confronted with a war crime in which he finds himself next-of-kin rather than an investigator. The Memory seeker takes on the experiences of war violence and its aftermath, the vagaries of memory, and the incompleteness of courtroom justice pitted against the temptations of revenge.

Ronald Niezen was born in Kimberley BC. His parents were immigrants to Canada from the Netherlands after WW II. Nizen currently splits his time between San Diego, CA, USA and Victoria, BC.

He is a Professor of Practice in Sociology and Political Science / International Relations at the University of San Diego and completed a doctoral degree in Social Anthropology at Cambridge for which he spent ten months living and travelling in northern Mali. His first job after earning his PhD was with the Cree Board of Health and Social services of James Bay, following which he spent many years working with Indigenous organizations based in northern Canada, occasionally accompanying them to meetings at the United Nations headquarters in Geneva and New York. He was for many years a professor in the Department of Anthropology and Faculty of Law at McGill University and also held positions as a professor of anthropology and of social studies at Harvard University.

Niezen has published ten nonfiction books on human rights and social justice activism. For his recent work on digital witnessing, he received training in open-source investigation in workshops sponsored by the NGO Bellingcat, Berkeley’s Center for Human Rights, and the Institute for International Criminal Investigations in The Hague.

BOOKS

The Memory Seeker (Black Rose Writing, 2023) $22.95 (Fiction)
Narratives of Mass Atrocity (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Co-written with Sarah Federman.
#HumanRights (Stanford University Press, 2020)
Truth and Indignation (University of Toronto Press, 2017)
Palaces of Hope (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Co-written with Maria Sapignoli.
Public Justice and the Anthropology of Law (Cambridge University Press, 2010)
The Rediscovered Self (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009)
Defending the Land (Prentice-Hall, 2008)
A World Beyond Difference (Wiley-Blackwell, 2004)
The Origins of Indigenism (University of California Press, 2003)
Spirit Wars (University of California Press, 2000)