The Project ‘Constructing Authority in International Law’ is a two-year research project, funded by the United Kingdom Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and due to run until January 2018. The project aims to develop a conceptual framework through which the concept of legal authority can be understood on the international plane, and then to explore and study the strategies used by various international actors and how they construct their claim to authority within the international legal system. To the extent that the project seeks to illuminate the role of such authorities within the wider international legal discipline, it seeks to build a critical self-awareness within the international legal profession of some powerful external critiques. Please see the Research page for more information about the research questions tackled by this project, and our intended research outcomes.
Dr Gleider I. Hernández, Reader in Public International Law at Durham Law School, is the AHRC Early Career Research Leadership Fellow. He is accompanied by Dr Giedre Jokubauskaite, Post-Doctoral Research Associate at Durham Law School. Both are Fellows of the Durham Global Policy Institute, of which Dr Hernández is also Deputy Director.
The Project also contains a substantial collaborative component, the objective of which is to connect the scholars whose work is closely related to the topic of this research. Accordingly, a collaborative workshop is planned which will lead to an edited collection; all the authors contributing to this collection have met for a workshop hosted by Durham Law School in April 2017. We hope that the originality of this book project will come from the dialogue between those international lawyers who tend to work within the system and its rules, as well as those who look at the effects of international law in different contexts, in particular through a critical lens.
Please consult our pages on the Fellowship, Workshop and Contributors regularly, as they will develop in the coming months, for more information about each of the project components.
If you wish to get in touch with us for research collaboration and/or more information, please see the Contact us page for further details. Below you can see the latest news and developments within the project.