Dr Tor Krever

Tor's work is focused on the history and theory of international law, as well as critical and Marxist approaches to international law and left-legal theory more generally. He is currently completing a book manuscript that develops a materialist history of the pirate in international legal thought. The book reconstructs the conceptual history of the pirate in international law, analysing the theorisations of legitimate and illegitimate maritime commerce offered by international legal thinkers in their political-economic contexts. Against common assumptions that the pirate is a timeless legal category stretching backwards for millennia, he suggests that the modern juridical image of the pirate, as the enemy of trade, took shape and crystallised only in the long-16th century, the product of this particular juncture reflecting inter-imperial rivalries and emerging merchant capitalist interests.

He is also developing a new research project on the relationship between anti-imperialism and international law, with a particular focus on the anti-imperial movements of the 20th century. A recent book chapter considers the use of international law and legal argument as a mode of anti-imperial political resistance in the form of peoples’ tribunals, while a further paper under work interrogates the treatment of the Third World movement in recent international legal histories, drawing attention to the erasure of political and ideological contestation and fractures within that movement.

Tor’s writing has appeared in a range of publications including New Left Review, the London Review of Books, the Harvard Journal of International Law, Third World Quarterly, the Leiden Journal of International Law, and Law, Culture and the Humanities. He is currently the co-General Editor of the London Review of International Law (Oxford University Press), which publishes critical, historical, socio-legal and other non-doctrinal international law scholarship.

Tor joined the University of Cambridge in 2023. He was previously Assistant Professor at the University of Warwick, Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra in Portugal and Visiting Fellow at the Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia. He was educated in Australia, the US and UK, completing his PhD in Law at the London School of Economics. He also holds an LLM from the University of Cambridge, a JD from Harvard Law School, an MPhil (Development Studies) from the University of Cambridge, and an AB (Social Studies) from Harvard University. He has worked on world trade, humanitarian, and development issues at the United Nations in New York, human rights in Palestine, and international criminal law at the Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague where he assisted with Charles Taylor's defence. In 2011, he was law research clerk to then-Deputy Chief Justice Dikgang Moseneke of the South African Constitutional Court.