Interests
Trained in both international law and international relations, Dr Nouwen works on the intersections of law and politics, war and peace and justice and the rule of law. Building on her experience in diplomacy and peace negotiations, her research focuses on how international law plays out in concrete situations. It combines doctrinal analysis and theory with empirical research and draws on law, politics, and anthropology.
Her book Complementarity in the Line of Fire: The Catalysing Effect of the International Criminal Court in Uganda and Sudan (Cambridge University Press, 2013) explores whether, how and why the complementarity principle in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court has had a catalysing effect on the legal systems of Uganda and Sudan. She spent many months in both countries, interviewing officials, observing proceedings and searching documents to discover whether domestic legal reforms have taken place in response to the Court’s involvement. She also served as a Visiting Professional for an ICC judge.
Her article on the research behind her book, "`As you set out for Ithaka': Practical, Epistemological, Ethical and Existential Questions About Socio-legal Empirical Research in Conflict", won the Leiden Journal of International Law Prize for best article published in 2013-2015. The jury praised the work for being "truly interdisciplinary and empirically grounded".
Her current research programme "Peacemaking: What's Law Got to Do with It", funded by a Philip Leverhulme Prize, an ESRC Future Research Leaders Grant and the Newton Trust, explores the role of international law in peace negotiations.
Recently finalised projects include a Symposium on the impact of International Commissions of Inquiry, together with Dr Doreen Lustig and Michael Becker, published in the European Journal of International Law and, with Alex de Waal, a Special Issue on the role of self-determination in the Horn of Africa, forthcoming in Nations and Nationalism. She is also one of the editors of the recently published Oxford Handbook of International Criminal Law and of a forthcoming British Academy book titled "Making and Breaking Peace in Sudan and South Sudan: The ‘Comprehensive’ Peace Agreement and Beyond".
Since September 2020, she is on leave from Cambridge to take up a chair at the European University Institute in Florence.
CV / Biography
Dr Nouwen is Co-Deputy Director of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law and Reader in International Law. She is also an Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of International Law.
She lectures and supervises Public International Law; International Criminal Law; International Human Rights Law and Transitional Justice at both undergraduate and graduate level.
She has given guest lectures at universities across the world, including Australia (University of New South Wales), Belgium (Université Libre Bruxelles), Canada (Queen's University Kingston), Germany (the University of Köln and Humboldt University), the Netherlands (Utrecht University, Free University Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam, Erasmus University, the Institute for Social Science), Sudan (the University of Nyala), Uganda (Makere University and Nkumba University), the United Kingdom (Oxford University, School for Oriental and African Studies, London School of Economics, King's College London, University College London, the University of Kent, Essex University, the University of East Anglia, the University of East London, Durham University) and the United States (Harvard).
She was a Senior Fellow of the World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, Boston, a visiting scholar at the Free University Amsterdam and a Research Associate of the Refugee Law Project, Makerere University, Kampala.
In 2010-2011, she served as legal advisor to the African Union High-Level Implementation Panel for Sudan, assisting in the negotiations between the Government of Sudan and the Government of Southern Sudan on issues of state succession and working on peace negotiations for Darfur.
She has advised on transitional justice, peace negotiations and the rule of law for the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs in New York, The Hague and Sudan and for the UK Department for International Development in Darfur. She worked with an NGO in Senegal on microfinance.
She holds an LLM (cum laude, Utrecht, with a specialisation in Cape Town), an MPhil in International Relations (Cantab) and a PhD in International Law (Cantab).
Some media interviews are available here:
http://ilareporter.org.au/2017/03/sarah-nouwen/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/russia-international-criminal-court_...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07cvlmb
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/04/bashir-sweeps-sudan-election-15042...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/01/24/israel-palestine-icc_n_6524798....
Some of the publications listed below are also available via Nouwen's SSRN Author Page.
Publications
Books
The Oxford Handbook of International Criminal Law (ed) (OUP, 2020)
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