Publications
Anne Saab, ‘Discourses of Fear on Climate Change in International Human Rights Law’, European Journal of International Law 34(1) (2023): 113-135.
Anne Saab, ‘Emotions and International Law’, ESIL Reflections, 10(3) (2021)
Anne Saab & Andrea Bianchi, ‘Fear and International Law-Making: An Exploratory Inquiry’ Leiden Journal of International Law 32(3) (2019)
Lara Stemple, Portia Karegeya, Sofia Gruskin, ‘Human Rights, Gender, and Infectious Disease: From HIV/AIDS to Ebola’, Human Rights Quarterly (HRQ) 38(4) (2016)
Works in progress
Monograph on Emotions and International Law
Anger and Hope in Youth Climate Change Litigation
AI and Nuclear: Emotion Parallels and the IAEA as a regulatory model for AI
Computation, Emotions, (Artificial) Intelligence: an alternative frame to approach human-machine interaction in warfare
Monograph on Emotions and International Law
I am working on a single-authored monograph on Emotions and International Law, currently under review at Oxford University Press and with expected completion in 2025.
This book provides a broad engagement with emotions and international law and serves as an introduction to the field of emotions and international law. In the book, I identify various important debates within international law that engage with emotions but not explicitly. I discuss how emotions literature from other disciplines can contribute to effectively addressing issues within international law. My intention is to show how an ‘affective turn’ can shed new light on existing debates and controversies within international law. Through a narrative of the emotional dimensions of international law, I present a socio-legal discursive of thinking about international law in relation to other disciplines.
Anger and Hope in Youth Climate Change Litigation
I am working on a full-length article exploring the role of anger and hope in youth climate change litigation. I have presented early versions of this research at the European Society of International Law annual conference in September 2023 and at a workshop at the Hertie School Centre for Fundamental Rights in November 2023. I will also present this research at the Law and Society Association annual conference in June 2024.
AI and Nuclear: Emotion Parallels and the IAEA as a regulatory model for AI
I am working on an article reflecting on the emotional parallel between AI and nuclear energy and how such an emotional parallel influences the legal form of regulatory proposals. I look in particular into how each new technology – AI, nuclear – makes us feel and the variety of existential inquiries it triggers; how each of the various emotions triggered is linked to a corresponding form of regulation (expert regulation, transparency requirements, bans, etc.); and how we can theorize such pairs of emotions/ legal form by drawing from literature on emotions, psychology, and the writings of key actors involved (scientists, lawyers, policy-makers, think-tanks). This research works further on my presentation given at the Seminar on ‘The Challenges of International Law-Making for the Use of Information and Communication Technologies’ at the Essex Law School in December 2023.
Computation, Emotions, (Artificial) Intelligence: an alternative frame to approach human-machine interaction in warfare
In this article, I explore what it entails that the future of the law of armed conflict envisages its own coding. Setting aside the extreme scenario of full decisional autonomy in autonomous weapon systems, here, I take up the more modest – and already in use or near at hand – types of algorithms that provide crucial decision-support to militaries on the battlefield (not just target selection, but also decision-support algorithms to calculate collateral damage in attacks, estimate the risk of an individual in detention decisions, algorithms-benchmarks for the ‘reasonable commander’ standard, etc.). In this scenario of AI in warfare in the form of vital decision-support algorithms, what is at stake is how to approach and think about human-machine interaction and its various configurations. I suggest an alternative frame that (i) revisits the notion of ‘computation’, what computational thinking means, and its limits; and (ii) sees these limits as linked to the inextricable but often unacknowledged role that emotions play in human cognition, in the interweaving of emotional intelligence and human reasoning.
