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.

Research projects, clusters and working groups

Ongoing

Completed

Supervisees

Fields of expertise

Public international law Politics of international law International criminal law International human rights law Transitional justice Peace negotiations, peacebuilding, peacemaking Third World approaches to international law International law and international relations International law and constitutional law Anthropological approaches to international law Qualitative empirical research in international law Critical approaches to international law History of international law Eurocentrism and international law

Recent research output

JAIN, Neha; NOUWEN, Sarah Maria Heiltjen (2024), North-south skirmishes over transitional justice : 1975-2000, Working Paper
NOUWEN, Sarah Maria Heiltjen (2023), Gezina van der Molen : a journey from universalism to pluralism, Contribution to book
NOUWEN, Sarah Maria Heiltjen (2024), 'Law & peace' : law, in what sense?, Working Paper
NOUWEN, Sarah Maria Heiltjen (2023), Tensions between the pursuit of criminal accountability and other international policy agendas in situations of armed conflict, Contribution to book
NOUWEN, Sarah Maria Heiltjen (2023), Peacemaking, Working Paper
QUINTANA, Francisco Jose; NOUWEN, Sarah Maria Heiltjen (2022), In defense of international law?, Article

View more Research Output Go to Cadmus

Supervision interests

"I am interested in supervising in any of the areas of my own research interests, listed above, and beyond. I plan to be working on a book on international law and peace negotiations, so synergies in PhD supervision might be mutually inspiring"