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Professor of International Law
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Sarah Nouwen is on leave from Cambridge to occupy a Chair in Public International Law at the European University Institute (Sept 2020 - Sept 2026).
Trained in both international law and international relations, Sarah 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.
Research centres and interest groups
CV / Biography
Sarah Nouwen is an Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of International Law, contributor to EJIL: Talk! and co-host of EJIL: The Podcast!.
She lectures and supervises Public International Law; International Criminal Law; International Human Rights Law and Transitional Justice at both undergraduate and graduate level.
She was a Visiting Professor at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies and at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, 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. She has given guest lectures at universities across the world.
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 has also served as an expert in international arbitration.
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.
Selected publications
Books
Making and Breaking Peace in Sudan and South Sudan: The Comprehensive Peace Agreement and Beyond (ed), 2020)
The Oxford Handbook of International Criminal Law (ed), 2020)
What's Wrong with International Law? Liber Amicorum A.H.A. Soons (ed), 2015)
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