Marika Sosnowski works as a legal anthropologist with primary research interests in the fields of armed conflict (mainly ceasefires), local/rebel governance and legal systems (particularly issues around citizenship and belonging).

From June 2023 until May 2026 she was based in the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness at Melbourne Law School leading a group of 10 interdisciplinary scholars on a project which examined the legal after-life of war and revolution. The project aimed to better understand how people internalise and experience the law at an everyday level after mass violence or world-shaping events in a range of contexts including Myanmar, Colombia, Cyprus, North Korea, Pakistan, Syria, Jordan, Germany and Australia; and how these afterlives map onto first-hand encounters at checkpoints, with sexual and gender-based violence, with access to documents and citizenship rights, in frozen conflicts, with movements for peace, transitional, youth and criminal justice.

A major output of this project was a creative non-fiction book, 58 Facets which was shortlisted for the 2026 Stella Prize and the NSW Literary Awards Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction.

Marika's academic work has been published in the Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Third World Quarterly, Citizenship Studies, International Studies Quarterly, the Leiden Journal of International Law and Civil Wars among others. Her first book Redefining Ceasefires: Wartime Order and Statebuilding in Syria came out in June 2023 with Cambridge University Press. For this book, and other associated work, she was unanimously awarded the University of Melbourne's prestigious 2024 Woodward Medal in Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. 

From 2020 until 2023 Marika was based at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA) in Hamburg. During this time her work was supported by grants from the Fritz Thyssen Foundation and the Swedish Development Fund to research Syria's supposedly "post" war landscape (i.e. security control, housing, land and property rights, citizenship) as well as legal identity documents issued by a range of non-state actors in Syria and beyond.

She is a regular media commentator and has published a range of more public-facing work including for AllegraLab, al Jumhuriya, Middle East Eye, the Lieber Institute West Point, The Conversation, The Atlantic Council and the Washington Institute.