Emotions & International Law Workshop
Geneva Graduate Institute
4 & 5 June 2026
PROGRAMME
Location: Maison de la Paix, Room S11 & The Fab
This workshop brings together scholars from international law, international relations, sociology, and philosophy to engage in conversations about the role of emotion in law. Workshop participants share their projects and ideas in four themed conversations: emotions in courts; emotions, conflict and humanitarianism; law and emotion in technology, migration, and environment; and radical hope.
Convenors
Participants
THURSDAY 4 JUNE 2026
14:00-14:30 – Welcome and introducing the Emotions & International Law project
Anne Saab, Aliki Semertzi, Portia Karegeya
14:30-15:30 – Setting the workshop scene on law and emotions
Round of the room with 2-minute introductions per participant. The following questions can guide these introductions:
- Why and how to study emotions in international law?
- How do emotions relate to legal principles such as impartiality / objectivity / neutrality / fairness / justice?
- What does the frame of emotions add to the many existing themes and debates (including norms, language, culture, aesthetics, power)?
15:30-16:00 – coffee break @The Fab
16:00-17:45 – Emotions in courts (Themed conversation 1)
Set(s) of 10-minute presentations by participants, followed by discussion.
Moderator: Anne Saab
Presentations:
- Stina Bergman Blix: ‘Epistemic Emotions– The Orderly Feelings of Legal Decision-Making?’
- Anna Spain Bradley: ‘Judicial Emotion at the ICJ’
- Emiliano Buis: ‘The Past That Pleads: Sentimental Memory as a Technology of Legal Argument in ICJ Proceedings’
- Alex Batesmith: ‘The Emotional Labour of International Criminal Lawyers’
- Emanuela Ceva & Annamaria Astrologo: ‘Criminal Proceedings and Affective Load: Crans-Montana case’
FRIDAY 5 JUNE 2026
9:00-11:00 – Conflict, humanitarianism, emotions (Themed conversation 2)
Set(s) of 10-minute presentations by participants, followed by discussion.
Moderator: Aliki Semertzi
Presentations:
- Roland Bleiker with Emma Hutchison: ‘Emotions and Conflict Resolution’
- Heidi Gilchrist: ‘Visibility and Invisibility in International Law’
- Rebecca Mignot-Mahdavi: ‘Feeling Beyond the Blast: How International Humanitarian Law Narrows the Emotional Life of Violence’
- Rebecca Sutton: ‘Gamifying a Law and Emotions Approach to Peacebuilding and Humanitarianism’
- Yussef Al Tamimi: ‘Practices of Mourning in International Law’
- Sandra Penic: ‘Emotion Norms in Conflict Transformation’
11:00-11:30 – coffee break @The Fab
11:30-12:45 – Technology, migration, environment (Themed conversation 3)
Set(s) of 10-minute presentations by participants, followed by discussion.
Moderator: Portia Karegeya
Presentations:
- Cecilia Nordquist: ‘The Video Link as Vice and Virtue in Swedish Courts’
- Magdalena Kmak: ‘The Role of Emotions in the Rise and Fall of Refugee Law in Europe 1921-2021’
- Louise Victoria Johansen: ‘Emotions, Green Penology, and the Governance of Nonhuman Harm’
12:45-14:00 – Lunch break @The Fab
14:00-16:00 – Radical hope (Themed conversation 4)
Set(s) of 10-minute presentations by participants, followed by discussion.
Moderator: Anne Saab & Portia Karegeya
Presentations:
- Åsa Wettergren: ‘Emotionalising Hope in Times of Climate Change’
- Gerry Simpson: ‘Melancholia, or Senses of an Ending’ / ‘The Life of the Death of International Law’
- Deval Desai: ‘Governing Between Hope and Despair’
- Emily Kidd White: ‘How Not to Kill the Poem: On the Philosophy of Emotion and Practices of Radical Hoping’
- Christine Schwöbel-Patel: ‘Towards Degrowth of Extractivist Law and the Refusal of Despair’