Board Members

European University Institute; University of Cambridge

Sarah Nouwen is a Professor of Public International Law at the European University Institute. She is on leave from the University of Cambridge, where she is a Professor in Public International Law and was for many years Co-Deputy Director of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law and Fellow of Pembroke College. Nouwen 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 Research Fellow. Prior to assuming her lectureship at Cambridge in 2012, Nouwen worked in international diplomacy: at the Dutch mission to the United Nations, 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 and worked with an NGO in Senegal on microfinance.

She has published extensively on international criminal law, transitional justice and international law more generally. She is the author of Complementarity in the Line of Fire: The Catalysing Effect of the International Criminal Court in Uganda and Sudan (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Her article ‘As You Set out for Ithaka: Practical, Epistemological, Ethical, and Existential Questions about Socio-Legal Empirical Research in Conflict) won the Leiden Journal prize for the best article published in 2013-2016. Nouwen also received a Philip Leverhulme Prize for her scholarship. She is currently doing research on international law and peace negotiations, including on the meaning of the term ‘law’ as it is used in literature on law and peace negotiations and on developments in the field of law and peace negotiations. The working title of her new book is ‘Peacemaking: What’s Law Got to Do With It?’. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Institute for Integrated Transitions’ Peace Treaty Initiative.