EVENTS

Each year, the Centre hosts public and by-invitation events dedicated to global governance, international law and institutions, and political theory and ethics. This page contains information for independent Centre events as well as the Centre’s pioneer ‘Research Conversations’ seminar series. More information on this seminar series can be found: here. All times are listed in the UK time zone.

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EVENTS OVERVIEW

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UPCOMING EVENTS

At this CGLG event, Professor Andrea Bianchi of the Geneva Graduate Institute will present his work on international law and emotions.

Andrea’s research interests lie in treaty interpretation and the production of knowledge, as well as the ‘unsaid’ and the ‘unseen’ in international law. His recent books include: Demystifying Treaty Interpretation (co-authored with Fuad Zarbiev), CUP (2024), International Law’s Invisible Frames: Social Cognition and Knowledge Production in International Legal Processes (co-edited with Moshe Hirsch, OUP, 2021). The second edition of his monograph International law Theories: An Inquiry into Different Ways of Thinking (OUP 2016) is under way.

Andrea will discuss how the study of emotions in international legal processes has gained traction lately, but fundamental challenges remain as to what a research agenda in this area might look like as well as what methodologies should be used in the pursuit of such an investigation. The aim of his research is to foreground some of the main challenges in developing this relatively new field of international legal scholarship, as well as the main prospects for moving it productively forward.

Ultimately, navigating through the universe of emotions represents not only a challenge but an incredible opportunity for international lawyers to overcome the narrow boundaries of classical jurisprudence and to provide a better explanation of how international legal processes actually take place.

At this CGLG event, we will discuss Professor Christian Kreuder-Sonnen’s (Friedrich-Schiller Universität Jena) and Anette Stimmer’s (University of St Andrews) paper on the relationship between the UN Security Council (UNSC) and the Office of the Ombudsperson (OO).

Since its creation in 2009, the UNSC’s Office of the Ombudsperson (OO) has been locked in a protracted struggle with its principal. While the Council repeatedly sought to curtail the Ombudsperson’s autonomy, through restrictive mandates, poor working conditions and delayed appointments, the eminent jurists heading the Office have learned to ‘fight back’ through subtle institutional maneuvers, public reporting and quiet diplomacy. Despite recurrent attempts at undermining it, the OO has become a surprisingly solid and effective corrective in the UN’s counterterrorism regime.

This dynamic is puzzling: rather than a clear-cut case of principal control or agency slack, the relationship between the UNSC and the OO unfolds as a tacit and iterative contest over authority. Christian and Anette argue that this pattern results from the mediation of the principal/agent relationship by external legitimacy audiences, notably courts and advocacy networks, that constrain the Council’s capacity for control while providing the OO with normative resources to resist. These audiences define the bounds of acceptable action, within which both actors navigate a precarious equilibrium — what we call the legitimacy frontier.

Drawing on semi-structured elite interviews with Ombudspersons, UN officials and state representatives, Christian and Anette’s paper traces this legitimacy-mediated struggle to theorize how IO authority evolves under normative constraint.

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PAST EVENTS