Symposia

[Andrew Clapham is a Professor of International Law at the Geneva Graduate Institute. He has been a Commissioner with the UN Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan since 2017. He is an Honorary Member of the International Commission of Jurists. In 2021 he published a book entitled War.] Preparing for War is a fascinating read. Dr Boyd van Dijk takes us to the heart...

[Doreen Lustig is a Senior Lecturer at Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law. She studies the history and theory of international law, global governance and constitutional law. She is the author of Veiled Power: International Law and the Private Corporation 1886-1980 (Oxford University Press, 2020).] Preparing for War is an insightful account of the history of the drafting of the four...

So far, the 2020s have been a great decade for books on the history of international humanitarian law. 2020 saw the publication of Giovani Mantilla’s exceptional Lawmaking Under Pressure, on the history of Common Article 3; 2021 gave us Samuel Moyn’s Humane, a powerful critique on the idea that war can be humanised; and now 2022 starts off with Boyd van Dijk’s Preparing for War. I...

Over the coming five days, we are happy to host a book symposium on Boyd van Dijk’s new book, Preparing for War: The Making of the Geneva Conventions, published by Oxford University Press. In addition to comments from van Dijk himself, we have the honor to hear from this list of renowned scholars and practitioners: Eyal Benvenisti, Andrew Clapham, Doreen Lustig, Katharine Fortin, Karin Loevy...

[Raghavi Viswanath is a PhD researcher at the European University Institute in Florence and a Senior Research Associate at Public International Law and Policy Group. Tejas Rao is Researcher, Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor, University of Cambridge and Associate Fellow with the Centre for International Sustainable Development Law.] Academia boasts of 17,000,000 members, of which 178,000 follow @academicchatter. This (admittedly poor) proportion split...

[Yvonne McDermott is a Professor of Law at Swansea University, UK. From 2018-2021, she was PI on OSR4Rights, funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council. From July 2022-June 2027, she will lead TRUE, a European Research Council Starting Grant project that examines the impact of the rise in deepfakes on trust in user-generated evidence.] Research funding has increasingly become a...

[Lucas Lixinski (@IntHeritageLaw) is Professor at the Faculty of Law & Justice, UNSW Sydney.] One of the key reasons people in law do PhDs is because we are at least contemplating a life in academia. Otherwise, we would just go into legal practice, where a PhD gives no discernible advantage. While research is what we are taught to do during a PhD, there is...

[Barrie Sander (@Barrie_Sander) is Assistant Professor of International Justice at Leiden University – Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs. Rebecca Sutton (@RebeccaAnneLaw) is Senior Lecturer in International Law at the University of Glasgow School of Law. She is the author of The Humanitarian Civilian (OUP, 2021).] In international law academia, there are many processes that remain somewhat shrouded in secrecy. Writing a book...

[Fleur Johns (@FleurEJ) is Professor in the Faculty of Law & Justice and Australian Research Council Future Fellow at UNSW Sydney.] Abstracts are often afterthought texts: frequently dashed off while one is pressed against the railing of a deadline. Yet they are gateway texts on which much can hinge. Conference doors can swing open or close on the strength of an abstract. A successful response...

[Başak Etkin (@EtkinBasak) is a PhD candidate at Université Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas, and the co-host of the philosophy of international law podcast, Borderline Jurisprudence.] “Do as I say, not as I do”, the saying goes in Turkish. As an early career researcher, answering a call for abstracts for conferences or workshops can be a daunting experience – it certainly was for me at first. Now as...

[Alexander Gilder (@DrAlexGilder) is Lecturer in International Law and Security and Deputy Director of Global Law at Reading at the University of Reading.] In my first post I introduced you to various aspects of academia in the UK, including the types of positions and the Research Excellence Framework, as well as suggestions for how to lay the groundwork to be competitive in the job...