POSTPONED - Making Peace, Making Law - Sarah Nouwen

*** This event has been postponed to the 7th of April 2022 ***

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The Edinburgh Centre for International and Global Law presents

Making Peace, Making Law

Prof Sarah Nouwen, Professor of Public International Law, and Co-Director of the Academy of European Law at EUI

 

About the seminar
‘Peacemaking’, unlike for instance ‘dispute settlement’ or ‘peacekeeping’, is generally not considered a subfield of international law. It was not in 1989 and, judging by the table of contents of international law textbooks, it is not today. However, ever since UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali used the term in his 1992 Agenda for Peace, ‘peacemaking’ has risen in prominence as a concept of global governance. And, as more often, governance has been followed by a search for law. Peacemaking thus offers a terrain where we can see ‘field making’ at work, and all the competition that goes with this process of making: What will it be about? Who will define it? What/who gets co-opted and what/who remains outside it? On whose expertise will it depend? Rather than doctrinally summing up a ‘law of peacemaking’, this chapter presents a critical historical reconstruction to show how different groups of lawyers and to some extent non-lawyers have tried to capture this field by sowing it with the norms and practices they consider most relevant and in which they have expertise.

The chapter identifies three different projects to that effect, most of which with their own internal rivalries about the essence of the field: (1) the push for a jus post bellum (developing a law that makes ‘peace’ more ‘stable’ or ‘just’ or, more modestly, clustering existing law that relates to peacemaking especially in the context of foreign intervention); (2) the development of a lex pacificatoria (a term used for the very different projects of (a) advancing the normative status of peace agreements; (b) identifying existing law on issues negotiated during peace negotiations in non-international armed conflicts or indeed modifying it to make that law more conducive to peacemaking; (c) developing ready-made provisions for peace agreements) and finally (3) the push for a higher normative status of the practice of negotiating and mediating peace.

 

About the speaker

Sarah Nouwen has been a Professor of Public International Law at the EUI since September 2020. She is on leave from the University of Cambridge, where she is a Professor in Public International Law and a Fellow of Pembroke College and was for many years a Co-Deputy Director of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law. She is also an Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of International Law.


Nouwen received a 2-in-1 LLB and LLM from Utrecht University, doing part of her degree at the University of the Western Cape and the University of Cape Town. She then obtained an MPhil in International Relations and a PhD in Law at the University of Cambridge, where she subsequently became a Junior Research Fellow. Prior to assuming her lectureship at Cambridge in 2012, she worked in international diplomacy: at the Netherlands mission to the United Nations, at the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs in The Hague, at the Netherlands Embassy in Khartoum, and as a Senior Legal Advisor to the African Union High Level Implementation Panel in Sudan. She also served as a consultant for the UK Department of International Development in Darfur.

View Prof Nouwen's full profile on the EUI Website