12 Aug New Opportunities to Research Civil War at Melbourne Law School
My colleague Anne Orford has just received — and deservedly so — a very significant Australian Laureate Fellowship for a program entitled Civil War, Intervention, and International Law. The program is funded by the Australian Research Council from 2015 to 2020 and will establish an interdisciplinary research team based at Melbourne Law School. Here is a snippet from the description of the program:
Professor Orford’s ARC Laureate Fellowship Program will undertake a comprehensive analysis of one of the most pressing questions in contemporary international law and politics: whether, and if so under what conditions, foreign actors can lawfully intervene in civil wars. The lawfulness of external intervention in the domestic affairs of states is one of the most enduring and contested topics of debate within the disciplines of international law and international relations. The intensity of debates about the legality of intervention by the US and its allies in Iraq and Syria on the one hand, and by Russia in the Ukraine on the other, illustrates both the urgency of this issue and the difficulty of finding general principles to address it. The project will combine archival research, legal analysis, and critical theorising to develop a conceptual framework that can better grasp the changing patterns and practices of intervention.
The program is now inviting applications for two Postdoctoral Fellowships, which are full-time, fixed term research positions that can last up to five years. Here is the description:
The Postdoctoral Fellows will be appointed to undertake projects that explore the historical and contemporary practice of interventions in a specific region, chosen from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, or the Middle East. The specific regional studies, as well as the cases to be explored as part of those regional studies, will be chosen by the Postdoctoral Fellows in conjunction with Professor Orford. The Postdoctoral Fellows will take responsibility under the supervision of Professor Orford for developing the regional studies and for drawing out cross-cutting themes between them. The aim will be to map and evaluate the specific legal, political, and economic issues that have influenced and shaped interventions in civil wars in particular regions, the legal justifications that have accompanied those interventions, and the normative innovations that have resulted. It is well accepted, for example, that the principle of non-intervention has a particular meaning and importance in the inter-American context, as many early formulations of the principle emerged out of attempts to renegotiate the relation between the US and its near neighbours in Central and South America. Similarly, the responsibility to protect concept has a close association with African states and attempts to manage civil wars on that continent. The cases within each regional study may include pre- and immediately post-World War 2 situations (such as those in Spain and China), early post-colonial conflicts (such as those in Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia), proxy wars of the 1980s (such as those in Afghanistan and Nicaragua), and post-Cold War situations (such as those involving the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Libya, Iraq, Ukraine, and Syria). The focus of the program is on developments over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but proposals focusing on nineteenth century practice will also be considered. It is anticipated that the studies undertaken by the Postdoctoral Fellows will be published as monographs.
The program is also seeking two PhD students:
The doctoral projects will each study an emerging area of conceptual innovation that has played a role in reshaping the broader normative framework governing intervention in civil war over the past decades. One project will analyse the impact of the related concepts of humanitarian intervention and the responsibility to protect, and the second will analyse the impact of the concepts of collective self-defence and intervention by invitation that have been invoked in the context of the war on terror. The projects will study particular cases of intervention in civil war that were justified either in terms of protecting civilians (using concepts such as humanitarian intervention or the responsibility to protect) or of responding to terrorism (using concepts such as collective self-defence or intervention by invitation). The projects will involve detailed analyses of how legal arguments have been used in practice – for example, the ways in which legal concepts have been invoked by parties to civil wars (including foreign interveners), the extent to which the use of legal arguments has been innovative and directed to transforming existing norms, the patterns of diplomatic and military practice that those legal arguments have sought to justify, how other states have responded to such justifications, what positions states have taken publicly in debates on relevant issues in the General Assembly and the Security Council, and how decisions by external actors to support or recognise particular groups have been publicly justified. It is anticipated that the resulting doctoral theses will be published.
Anne is a fantastic scholar, the law school has a superb academic culture, and there are very few places in the world more pleasant to live than Melbourne. I hope interested readers will apply. You can find more information here.
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