Senior Lecturer in International Relations
Adam joined the School of International Relations in October 2015. His research explores the development of international norms and law and their impact in restraining forms of armed violence. Theoretically, he examines how actors strategically engage with international institutions and how norms and legal rules in turn shape and constrain future policy choices. He studies these dynamics in the fields of arms control and disarmament, international humanitarian and criminal law, and the governance of outer space activities.
Adam was the founding co-director of the Centre for Global Law and Governance and sits on the Steering Committee of the Institute for Legal and Constitutional Research. He is a member of the St Andrews Centre for Exoplanet Science, a Fellow of the Outer Space Institute (a global network of transdisciplinary space experts), and serves on the management team of the Scottish Council on Global Affairs. From September-December 2024, he is a residential Fellow at the Academy of International Affairs NRW in Bonn, Germany. Adam was previously a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford (Department of Politics and International Relations and Nuffield College) and a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of British Columbia in 2012.