Summary: This talk explains Sudan’s descent into a horrific war that is the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. The war has displaced over 11 million people, involved the targeting of civilians, including especially women, in mass violence, and precipitated a hunger crisis affecting over 24 million people, with over 630,000 currently facing famine. How, after a momentous civilian uprising in 2018-19 that toppled the dictator Omer el-Bashir after 30 years of authoritarian rule, did Sudan come to this? Unravelling the causes and events that led to tragedy begins with how counter-revolutionary actors within the State benefitted from the priorities of external peacemakers seeking to achieve a democratic transition in order to displace revolutionary forces, before carrying out a coup against that very transition. The war erupted when the counter-revolution itself unravelled, and its two primary bedfellows, the Sudan Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces fell-out violently with each other in a struggle for power. With complex regional geopolitical entanglements and drawing in other armed groups in Sudan, their war to the bitter end has mixed cruel indifference and intentional harm towards civilians in devastating ways. Remarkably, the revolutionary spirit of the Sudanese has not been vanquished, and has found expression in how neighbourhood resistance committees have transformed into ‘emergency response rooms’ to deliver life-saving support. Sudan’s plight and prospects lie precariously within these intersecting trajectories.

Sharath Srinivasan is David and Elaine Potter Professor of International Politics at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. He is also Founding Director, and currently Co-Director, of the University of Cambridge's Centre of Governance and Human Rights (CGHR). Professor Srinivasan is a Fellow and Trustee of the Rift Valley Institute and a Trustee and Vice-President of the British Institute in Eastern Africa.

Professor Srinivasan’s work focuses on contentious politics in Africa in global perspective, from explaining failed peace interventions in civil wars to rethinking democratic politics in a digital age. He is the author of When Peace Kills Politics: International Intervention and Unending Wars in the Sudans (Hurst/Oxford University Press, 2021) and co-editor of Making and Breaking Peace in Sudan and South Sudan: The Comprehensive Peace Agreement and Beyond (British Academy/Oxford University Press, 2020).

Chair: Dr Juliana Santos de Carvalho, Centre Fellow

Lecture summary: Property is a fundamental legal institution governing the use of things: who may own what, how and why. Given that such questions extend to a wide range of natural resources essential to human well-being, such as food, water and shelter, then it is reasonable to assume that human rights should play an important role in shaping property rights discourse and practice. And yet this assumption is somewhat misplaced. The relationship between property and human rights and property remains relatively underdeveloped in both practice and academic literature, and virtually non-existent when we move to the maritime domain. In this paper, I explore and question the role that property and human rights can and should play in the maritime domain. I outline how such rights arise and are protected under human rights instruments, before exploring how they might inform the moral and legal distribution of resources. In particular, I focus on how we might balance individual rights and public interests that arise in respect of property, and how these are informed by the nature of the oceans as a commons.

Richard Barnes is Professor of International Law at the University of Lincoln and Adjunct Professor of Law at the Norwegian Centre for the Law of the Sea, the University of Tromsø. His current research focuses on the human right to property, ocean commons, and the BBNJ Agreement. He is widely published in the fields of international law and law of the sea. Property Rights and Natural Resources (2009), won the SLS Birks Book Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship. He has edited several collections of essays including Research Handbook on Plastics Regulation (2024), Frontiers in International Environmental Law. Oceans and Climate (2021), Research Handbook on Climate Change, Oceans and Coasts (2020), and The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea: A Living Instrument (2016). Professor Barnes a member of the ILA Committee on the Protection of People at Sea. He has acted as a consultant for the WWF, Oceana, ClientEarth, the European Parliament, the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. He has also provided advice to foreign ministries. He has appeared numerous times before Parliamentary select committees on matters related to law of the sea, fisheries and Brexit. He is on the Editorial Board of International and Comparative Law Quarterly, the International Journal of Marine and Coastal Law, the New Zealand Yearbook of International Law, the German Yearbook of International Law, and the Portuguese Yearbook of the Law of the Sea. 

Feminist activists, country representatives, and other civil society actors have debated how to define “gender” in international criminal law (ICL) for at least three decades. In the Rome Conference that established the International Criminal Court (ICC) and its Statute in 1998, defining “gender” was a hotly debated topic of negotiation. More recently, this debate has resurfaced in the steps leading to the International Law Commission’s Draft Articles for a Crimes Against Humanity Treaty, and continues to be discussed in the deliberations at the Sixth Committee on the Draft Articles. The CAH Convention is now expected to be negotiated between 2026-2029, and, more than a mere point of contention, the concept of ‘gender’ in its text can be crucial for prosecuting sexual and gender-based international crimes and thus fundamental to gender justice efforts worldwide. With this in mind, this roundtable gathers scholars and activists studying and working (often simultaneously) on the definition of gender in international criminal law, in an effort to learn from their specific positionalities, perceptions, and experiences about the challenges, strategies, and possibilities for (non-)defining the term.

https://www.lcil.cam.ac.uk/press/events/2025/02/panel-queering-gender-crimes-against-humanity-draft-possibilities-alliances-and-strategies

Sovereign debt crises have surged since the end of the Bretton Woods system and currently threaten a lost decade for many countries across the world. Indermit Gill, in the World Bank Group’s 2024 International Debt Report, describes the situation in many of the poorest countries as a ‘metastasising solvency crisis that continues to be misdiagnosed as a liquidity problem’. Despite their severe socioeconomic consequences, no comprehensive legal framework exists to address these crises—arguably the most significant gap in international economic law.

This lecture, based on Dr Karina Patrício Ferreira Lima’s forthcoming book Governing Sovereign Debt Crises: The Case for International Sovereign Insolvency Law (Hart Publishing), makes the case for creating such a mechanism under international law. The book challenges prevailing narratives that attribute sovereign debt crises solely to debtor states’ mismanagement or misfortunes, instead arguing that sovereign insolvency is a systemic feature of the international monetary system. Current solutions—voluntary, ad hoc, and fragmented—fail to equitably allocate losses across an increasingly diversified sovereign creditor base, leaving many creditors worse off. At the same time, debtor states and their populations remain vulnerable to macroeconomic crises and enduring austerity, which often lead to long-term economic stagnation.

The book adopts a legal political economy approach to illustrate how power asymmetries among stakeholders and the absence of enforceable rules perpetuate inefficiencies and inequities in resolving sovereign debt crises. Drawing on the legal theory of finance, insolvency law, and common resource governance theory, it illustrates how these governance failures result in a dual tragedy: a tragedy of the commons and a tragedy of the anticommons. The lecture will also examine the growing complexity of sovereign debt markets, including the diversification of creditor types, the erosion of ‘gentlemen’s agreements,’ and the limitations of initiatives like the Paris Club and the G20’s Common Framework for debt treatments. It concludes by arguing that only international sovereign insolvency rules can resolve the delays, inefficiencies, and inequities that plague sovereign debt restructuring, while exploring avenues for implementing such a proceeding and discussing the role of domestic law in a well-functioning international sovereign debt architecture.

Dr Karina Patrício Ferreira Lima is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Leeds. Her research focuses on the intersection of law, finance, and sovereign debt within the broader context of global economic governance. Her research portfolio covers the legal governance of sovereign debt crises, the law and policy of international financial institutions, and the macroeconomic impact of financial law and regulation.

Dr Patrício advises public entities, NGOs, and leading law firms on various aspects of financial and monetary law, including sovereign debt restructuring, financial regulation, and the governance of international financial institutions. Her work has been recognised with prestigious awards, including the 2022 Society of International Economic Law-Hart Prize and the 2022 John H. Jackson Prize, conferred by the Journal of International Economic Law. She also serves as a peer reviewer for top law and social sciences journals globally.

Speaker: Arman Sarvarian, University of Surrey

Date: Friday Lunchtime Lecture: Friday 31 January 2025

Dr Arman Sarvarian will speak about his forthcoming monograph The Law of State Succession: Principles and Practice to be published by Oxford University Press in April. The product of seven years’ labour of approximately 170,000 words, the work includes a foreword by Professor August Reinisch of the University of Vienna and International Law Commission. The following is the summary of Oxford University Press:

'The Law of State Succession: Principles and Practice provides a comprehensive, practical, and empirical overview of the topic, establishing State succession as a distinct field with a cohesive set of rules.

From the secession of the United States of America in 1784 to that of South Sudan in 2011, the book digests and analyses State practice spanning more than two centuries. It is based on research into a wide and diverse range of case studies, including archival and previously unpublished data. Reconstructing the intellectual foundation of the field, the book offers a vision for its progressive development - one that is rooted in an interpretation of State practice that transcends the politics of the codification projects in the decolonization and desovietization eras.

The book examines international law on State succession with respect to territorial rights and obligations, State property (including archives) and debt, treaties, international claims and responsibility, as well as nationality and private property (including concessions and investments). Its central focus is identifying the general rules of international law in order to guide States in the negotiation of succession agreements, the interpretation of ambiguous or incomplete provisions, and the regulation of succession in default of specific agreement.

A highly relevant work, The Law of State Succession offers governments, judges, legal practitioners, and scholars an authoritative account of the current law. It enables negotiators to identify different legal paths within succession and assists adjudicators in interpreting provisions of succession agreements and regulating questions omitted from such agreements.' The book is available for pre-order at the OUP website.

Dr Arman Sarvarian a public international lawyer in academia and private practice. A Reader in Public International Law at the University of Surrey, he regularly acts as legal adviser and counsel to States, companies and individuals. He is counsel to the Republic of Côte d’Ivoire in the pending Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change advisory proceedings of the International Court of Justice and counsel in two pending investor-State arbitrations. Since 2019, he has served as legal adviser to the Republic of Armenia at the Legal Committee of the UN General Assembly for the annual reports of the International Law Commission and International Court of Justice as well as multilateral negotiations on reform of investor-State arbitration in Working Group III of the UN Commission on International Trade Law. He served as judge ad hoc in the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights in 2020.

A generalist of broad interests and expertise, his first monograph Professional Ethics at the International Bar (Oxford University Press, International Courts and Tribunals Series, 19 September 2013) was the first comprehensive work on the subject and has been widely cited, including in proceedings before the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, investment arbitrations and the International Court of Justice. His second monograph The Law of State Succession: Principles and Practice will be published by Oxford University Press in April 2025. He is a Humboldt Research Fellow in Climate Change Law at the University of Kiel from 2024 to 2026.

Chair: Dr Jamie Trinidad, Centre Fellow

Speaker: Gregory Fox, Wayne State University

Date: Friday Lunchtime Lecture - Friday 24 January 2025

Summary: Does international law place any constraints on a possible Ukraine-Russia peace agreement? While we can only speculate about its contents, two aspects appear certain: Ukraine will be asked to relinquish (at a minimum) territory now occupied by Russia, and it will only contemplate entering into an agreement because Russia invaded its territory. Professor Fox will examine the implications of these and other factors for the validity of an agreement.

Gregory H. Fox is a Professor of Law at Wayne State University School of Law, where he is the Director of the Program for International Legal Studies. Professor Fox is an elected member of the American Law Institute. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan Law School and the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, a Visiting Fellow at the Lauterpacht Research Centre for International Law at Cambridge University, a Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Public International Law and Comparative Public Law in Heidelberg, Germany, and a Fellow at the Schell Center for Human Rights at Yale Law School, among other institutions.

Professor Fox has written widely on a variety of international law topics, including civil war peace agreements, the powers of the UN Security Council, international occupation law, international control of territory, and international efforts to promote democratic governance. His most recent article, Of Looting, Land and Loss: The New International Law of Takings, was published in Volume 65 of the Harvard International Law Journal.

Professor Fox was co-counsel to the State of Eritrea in the Zukar-Hanish arbitration with the Republic of Yemen concerning the status of a group of islands in the southern Red Sea. He has also served as counsel in several human rights cases in US courts.

Professor Fox was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation/Social Science Research Council Fellowship in International Peace and Security. He began his career in the Litigation Department of the firm Hale & Dorr, now WilmerHale. He is a graduate of Bates College and New York University Law School.

Lecture summary: Many political economists, economic historians, and historical sociologists understand the transition from the 1970s to the 1980s as involving a shift from debates about inflation, oil shocks, floating currencies, and the New International Economic Order to neoliberalism's political and ideological breakthrough, first in the industrialized states of the North Atlantic and shortly thereafter in much of the global South. By contrast, among most scholars of international law, the 1980s are remembered chiefly for signalling the effective close of the decolonization era, and with it the struggle to transform and reconstruct international law to meet the demands of 'economic' in addition to 'political' sovereignty. This talk puts these two perspectives into conversation. Drawing mainly from the work of Simon Clarke and Nicos Poulantzas, core figures in the Marxist state-theoretical debates of the 1970s and 1980s, the talk examines changes to prevailing conceptions of economic development and international human rights at the end of the decolonization era in light of broader structural changes in the juridicopolitical architecture of capitalist states.

Umut Özsu is Professor of Law and Legal Studies at Carleton University. His research interests lie mainly in public international law, the history and theory of international law, and Marxist critiques of law, rights, and the state. He is the author of Formalizing Displacement: International Law and Population Transfers (OUP, 2015) and Completing Humanity: The International Law of Decolonization, 1960–82 (CUP, 2023). He is also co-editor of the Research Handbook on Law and Marxism (Elgar, 2021) and The Extraterritoriality of Law: History, Theory, Politics (Routledge, 2019), as well as several journal symposia.

Lecture summary: In this talk Sharifah Sekalala examines this critical moment in the making of Global Health Law, with two treaty making processes: the newly finalised revisions of the International Health Regulations and ongoing negotiations by the Intergovernmental Negotiation Body for a possible pandemic Accord or Instrument, as we well as soft-law proposals for the World Health Organization proposal for a medical countermeasures platform.

The lecture will illustrate that despite the laudable objectives of creating a new system of international law that attempts to redress previous inequalities in accessing vaccines and countermeasures, they are unlikely to meet these broader objectives. The lecture will argue that this is because, despite being a public good, Global Health Law has always been underpinned by capitalist and post-colonial rationales which privilege trade. In order to make lasting changes, the current system of Global Health Law must focus on broader questions of ‘reparations’ that will achieve greater equity.

Sharifah is a Professor of Global Health Law at the University of Warwick and the Director of the Warwick Global Health Centre. She is an interdisciplinary researcher whose work is at the intersection of international law, public policy and global health. Professor Sekalala is particularly focused on the role of human rights frameworks in addressing global health inequalities. Her research has focused on health crises in Sub-Saharan Africa, international financing institutions and the rise of non-communicable diseases and she has published in leading legal, international relations and public health journals.

Prof Sekalala is currently the PI on a Wellcome-Trust-funded project on digital health apps in Sub-Saharan Africa. Professor Sekalala is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (FaSS) and she has consulted on human rights and health in many developing countries and worked for international organisations such as UNAIDS, the WHO and the International Labour Organisation (ILO). Her research has also been funded by the Wellcome Trust, GCRF, ESRC, Open Society Foundation and international organisations including the International Labour Organisation and the WHO. Sharifah also sits on the Strategic Advisory Network of the ESRC.

Sharifah holds a PhD in Law (Warwick, 2012), an LLM in Public International Law (Distinction in research, Nottingham, 2006) and an LLB Honours (Makerere University, Uganda 2004). She was called to the Ugandan Bar in 2005.

Lecture summary: The United Nations Charter order (UNCO) and the co-evolved liberal international order (LIO) are contested with a heretofore unknown force. The steep rise in contestations in the realm of public politics rather than the courtroom demonstrates a shift from normal contestation as a source of legitimacy and ordering towards deep contestation as a political challenge of foundational elements of liberal order. Today, not only in the Global South but also across Europe and North America, sceptics of globalization on the political left and nationalist-populists on the political right are challenging the fundamental pillars of the LIO (i.e., democracy, economic openness, and multilateralism). The process is paired by growing contestations of international law that is codified in the UN Charter including contestation of core norms of the UNCO (i.e., non-intervention, human rights, and sovereignty). While the effect of deep contestation is unknowable, we do know however that normal contestation is the essence of everyday politics. The clash of interests, norms, and ideas is entirely normal. Yet, contestation can also be degenerative, moving political outcomes away from desired ends through ad hoc and perhaps inconsistent compromises. As core norms of the LIO and UNCO have become deeply contested, we require a better understanding about the expected effects. Access to contestation as the right to speak and participate in political decisions is a necessary condition for normative legitimacy and mutual recognition of the norms that govern us. Achieving this condition involves struggles about norm(ative) meaning-in-use which take place on distinct sites of global order. This raises a question about time, substance, and norm(ative) change in global order more generally and, more specifically, which elements of international order ought to be retained. The lecture posits that the observed qualitative shift from constitutive everyday contestations towards potentially degenerative political contestation calls for a methodological stocktake of how contestations work with regard to global re/ordering, i.e. whose practices count and whose norms ought to count in that process?

Professor Antje Wiener FAcSS, MAE, holds the Chair of Political Science, especially Global Governance at the University of Hamburg where she is a member of the Faculty of Business and Social Sciences as well as the Law Faculty. She is an elected By-Fellow of Hughes Hall University of Cambridge, a Fellow of the UK’s Academy of Social Sciences, and a Member of the Academia Europea. Her research and teaching centres on International Relations theory, especially norms research and contestation theory. Previously she held Chairs in International Studies at Queen’s University Belfast and the University of Bath and taught at the Universities of Stanford, Carleton, Sussex and Hannover. Current research projects include ‘Contested Climate Justice in Sensitive Regions’ at the Cluster of Excellence Climate, Climatic Change and Society (CLICCS) as well as ‘Doing Theory – From Where and What For? A Backpackers’ Guide to Knowledge Production’ at the Centre for Sustainable Society Research (CSS) among others. With James Tully, she is co-founding editor of Global Constitutionalism (CUP, since 2012 ). And she also edits the Norm Research in International Relations Series (Springer). She serves on several Committees of the Academy of Social Sciences . In 2021, she concluded her second three-year term as elected member of the Executive Committee of the German Political Science Association (DVPW). Her book ‘Contestation and Constitution of Norms in Global International Relations’ (CUP 2018) was awarded the International Law Section’s Book Prize in 2020. And her most recent book ‘Contesting the World: Norm Research in Theory and Practice’ co-edited with Phil Orchard was published with CUP in 2024.

Lecture summary: Grand corruption – the abuse of public office for private gain by a nation's leaders (kleptocrats) - has devastating consequences. As then UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said, the amount lost to corruption each year is enough to feed the world's hungry 80 times over. Grand corruption contributes to climate change and is a major impediment to ameliorating it. The refugees creating humanitarian and political crises around the world are largely fleeing failed states ruled by kleptocrats. Grand corruption is antithetical to democracy. Indignation at grand corruption has prompted uprisings in many countries and created grave dangers for international peace and security.

Grand corruption does not thrive and endure in many countries because of a lack of laws. 186 UN member states are parties to the UN Convention against Corruption (UNCAC). Virtually all of them have the laws required by the UNCAC criminalizing corrupt conduct, and international obligations to enforce them against their corrupt leaders. However, kleptocrats have impunity in the countries they rule because they control the police, the prosecutors, and the courts.

Therefore, the proposed International Anti-Corruption Court (IACC) is urgently needed. It will be a court of last resort, to prosecute kleptocrats and their private conspirators, for violating treaty counterparts of the laws of countries that are unwilling or unable to do so themselves. Successful prosecutions, and civil suits, in the IACC will result in the recovery and repatriation of stolen assets. The imprisonment of kleptocrats, who are among the worst abusers of human rights, will create opportunities for the democratic process to replace them with leaders dedicated to serving their citizens rather than enriching themselves. It will also deter others tempted to emulate their example.

The effort to establish the IACC is rapidly progressing. It has been publicly endorsed by: more than 350 world leaders, including 55 former Presidents and Prime Ministers; the European Parliament; the Netherlands, Canada, Ecuador, Nigeria, Moldova, and the UK Labour Party before it recently took office. Many other countries have privately expressed support for the IACC or strong interest in seriously considering the treaty being drafted to establish it that will be ready to be reviewed in early 2025.

Speaker: Mark L. Wolf is a Senior United States District Judge and Chair of the Integrity Initiatives International (III), which has catalyzed and is coordinating the campaign to create the IACC. Prior to his appointment in 1985, Judge Wolf served as a Special Assistant to the Attorney General of the US after Watergate and as the chief federal corruption prosecutor in Massachusetts. He has taught a course on combatting corruption internationally at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He has spoken on the role of a judge in a democracy, human rights issues, and combatting corruption in many countries, including Russia, China, Ukraine, Turkey, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, Hungary, Egypt, Cyprus, Panama, Colombia, Mexico, Norway, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, and at the Vatican.