Book Launch: The Humanitarian Civilian

Join us to celebrate the launch of The Humanitarian Civilian: How the Idea of Distinction Circulates Within and Beyond International Humanitarian Law by Dr Rebecca Sutton.

Hosted by the Edinburgh Centre for International and Global Law (ECIGL) and PSRP, with co-host the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict. With commentary from Frederic Megret (McGill) and Helen Kinsella (Minesota).

Register here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScp0tzJHEbjinHGA-jZeV3-C1pKy8zV3Po7zZOGTZoT3Ox_Mw/viewform

Speakers

Rebecca Sutton is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at Edinburgh Law School, where she conducts research on the role of emotions in international humanitarian law and leads a ‘participatory action research’ project with displaced Rohingya youth in Cox’s Bazar. Before joining Edinburgh Law School, Rebecca was a Postdoctoral Researcher on the ERC-funded Individualization of War project; she was based at the Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict (ELAC) at the University of Oxford. Rebecca also completed a postdoc in the Faculty of Law at McGill University, with the support of a grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). As a Trudeau Scholar and SSHRC Scholar, Rebecca earned a PhD in International Law from the London School of Economics in 2018. Her doctorate on the humanitarian figure, which was based on field research in South Sudan and at civil-military trainings, eventually became The Humanitarian Civilian.

Helen M. Kinsella is Associate Professor of Political Science & Law, and Affiliate Faculty of Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies, the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, the Human Rights Center, and the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change. Her research focuses on the theorization of gender and armed conflict. She is currently working on a manuscript entitled “War Fatigue: On Not Being Able to Sleep”. She is the author of The Image before the Weapon: A Critical History of the Distinction between Combatant and Civilian (Cornell University Press) which won the 2012 Sussex International Theory Prize and received an Honorable Mention for the 2012 Joseph S. Lepgold Book Prize (Georgetown University). Her work has also appeared in journals such as International Studies Quarterly, Review of International Studies, International Theory, Political Theory, Political Power and Social Theory, Feminist Review, among others. Helen’s main interests lie in International humanitarian law; international norms and institutions; international security; gender and armed conflict; international relations theories; contemporary political thought; feminist theories

Frédéric Mégret is a Professor of Law and a William Dawson Scholar at McGill University. He held the Canada Research Chair on the Law of Human Rights and Legal Pluralism from 2006 to 2015. He was promoted to full professor in 2019. He was named co-director of the Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism in 2021. Professor Mégret is currently co-authoring a book on Diasporas and International Law with Larissa van den Herik (Leiden University). He is the co-editor with Philip Alston of The United Nations and Human Rights: A Critical Appraisal (Oxford University Press, 2020); with Immi Tallgren of The Dawn of a Discipline: International Criminal Justice and its Early Exponents (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and, with Kevin Jon Heller, Sarah Nouwen, Jens David Ohlin and Darryl Robinson of The Oxford Handbook of International Criminal Law. Professor Mégret’s interests lie in international criminal justice, international human rights law, international humanitarian law, the law of international organizations, transitional justice, criminal law, and general international law.