The Team
Principal Investigator
Anne Saab
Anne Saab joined the Graduate Institute as an Assistant Professor in International Law in 2015. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 2021 and has been serving as Co-Director of the LL.M. in International Law programme since 2018. Anne obtained a PhD in International Law from the London School of Economics in 2015, an LL.M. from King’s College London in 2009, and an LLB from Leiden University in 2008. Her areas of interest and expertise include food and agriculture, climate change, intellectual property law and more recently, emotions and international law. Her first monograph entitled, Narratives of Hunger in International Law: Feeding the World in Times of Climate Change, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019. Prior to entering academia, Anne worked as a legal advisor and policy officer at the Ministry of Agriculture and Economic Affairs and at the Foreign Office in The Hague.
Postdoctoral researcher
Aliki Semertzi
Aliki Semertzi is an international legal scholar, inquiring into law as a mode of thinking, into the process of legal reasoning as a technique of engaging with the world. Aliki is the Postdoctoral Researcher at the SNF project on ‘Emotions and International Law’, analyzing the role of emotions in the use of artificial intelligence in warfare. She holds a PhD and a Master in International Law from the Geneva Graduate Institute (2022, 2016), and an LLM from the Vrije Universiteit Brussels in 2011. Her research interests and areas of expertise include legal theory and comparative law, international economic law and economic theories, laws of war and international humanitarian law, and most recently, new technologies, history of science and the role of emotions in automation, decision-making, and human-machine interaction. Prior to rejoining the Graduate Institute, Aliki was a Residential Fellow at the Institute for Global Law & Policy at the Harvard Law School (2021-2023). During her doctoral studies she also served as a Teaching Assistant at the International Law department of the Graduate Institute (2017-2020). Before entering academia, she worked as a legal advisor at the European Commission of the EU in Brussels, DG Trade.
PhD Researcher
Portia Karegeya
Portia Mbabazi Karegeya joined the Geneva Graduate Institute in September 2023 to pursue a PhD in Emotions and International Law. Her work is focused on shame and stigma in relation to infectious disease and the role of global health law and governance in shaping and maintaining conditions of inequity. Portia obtained her LLB at the University of Cape Town, and holds two LLMs from McGill University and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where she was a Sonke Health and Human Rights Fellow. Prior to reentering academia, Portia also worked as a Judicial Law Clerk at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, as a contractor on legal and policy matters under the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety with the UN Secretariat for the Convention on Biological Diversity (SCBD), and as a Legal Officer for The Centre for Law and Democracy (CLD) based in Halifax, Canada conducting legal research and human rights advocacy with respect to freedom of expression and access to information. She is also a member of the New York State Bar.
Case study:
Emotions in environmental law and food law
In addition to writing an introductory book on emotions and international law, I will continue to develop the role of emotions in my areas of interest and expertise, namely environmental law (notably climate change) and food law. I will build on work that I have already done on (discourses of) fear on climate change in international law. I plan to continue exploring the role of fear and anxiety also in the are of food law, particularly looking into how these emotions affect the legal regulation of new technologies in food such as genetic modification. Moving beyond the emotion of fear, I am currently working on a piece exploring the role of anger and hope and youth climate change litigation.
In this case study, I seek to show the influence of emotive discourses on the international legal regulation of climate change and food, areas that are especially emotional and at the forefront of global interest. I understand international law as a language and emotions as discourses. I draw on existing research within international law, including broad literature on critical legal studies and law and literature, as well as law and emotions scholarship in domestic law, emotions scholarship from international relations, and various relevant scholarship from communication studies, psychology, and philosophy.
Case study:
Emotions and Artificial Intelligence in Warfare
In my case study, I explore emotions and artificial intelligence (AI) in warfare. As a starting hypothesis, I see the role of emotions as revolving around two main aspects: (i) emotions in cognition, legal reasoning, and decision-making; and (ii) emotions in their historical and conceptual interrelation with ethics, morality, and law. Within the first aspect (emotions/ cognition), I investigate how emotions challenge the codability and algorithmability of the laws of war, working under the premise that legal reasoning is a purposeful human activity and emotions are closely linked with intentionality, strategic vision, and decision-making in the battlefield.
Here, I also inquire into how accepting this premise – that emotions and human psychology are intrinsically involved in legal reasoning – can contribute to recast the much-debated today notions of human judgment, human control, and human-machine interaction in the context of discussions on autonomous weapon systems (AWS). Within the second aspect (emotions/ ethics), I analyze how emotions have a long conceptual association with ethics – as in ‘moral feelings and sentiments’ or ‘moral psychology’ – and how this association is being employed in legal discourses to ban or restrict AWS, whereby the emotive power of legal arguments involves the invoking of specific emotions like empathy, compassion, respect for human dignity.
Case study:
Global Health Law and Infectious Disease Related Shame and Stigma
The theory underpinning my research project is that international health laws and governance systems structurally contribute to the prevalence of infectious disease related shame and stigma due to the inequity they uphold between high-income and low-income countries. I plan to demonstrate that this is due, at least in part to the (continued) legacy of the colonial paradigm and way of relating and conceptualising the world and approach to disease interventions under which health governance rules and regulations were (and continue to be) created.
My data sources will include public health and emotions research about shame and stigma; relevant legislation and policies relating to relevant legal actors (publicly available and readily accessible e.g. official WHO communications and technical guidance around COVID-19, HIV/AIDS, and Ebola); and Media narratives surrounding these previous pandemics and COVID-19.
Health is often only considered through an ‘objective’ scientific framework that pretends that a lack of resources and capacity is the primary reason for unequal distributions of medicine and care etc. and that there is no inherent bias about to whom and how much is given or shared. I think that drawing out this bias and exposing its historical roots is a useful exercise that can bring us closer to shifting that paradigm. I intend to contribute to the ongoing policy work being done in public health and law related to access to essential medicines, the integration of traditional knowledge into our approach to global health, and the meaning of capacity building that isn’t just knowledge transfer from the global north.