Adil Hasan Khan

Adil Hasan Khan

Adil Hasan Khan was recently awarded his Ph.D. in International Studies (summa cum laude), with a specialization in International Law and a Minor in Anthropology and Sociology of Development, from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) in Geneva. His doctoral dissertation, titled Inheriting Persona: Narrating the Conduct of Third World International Lawyers, narrates the conduct of two generations of Third World international lawyers in their struggles to re-imagine, re-found and alternatively authorize international law, and identifies the defining struggle of the Third World in international law as being over temporal transmissions or inheritance.

Developing upon this dissertation he has recently started working on a research project examining how international lawyers respond to disasters. Taking different modes of authorization and jurisdictional practices as its object of analysis, the research aims to develop both an account of how the conduct of international lawyers produce disasters in the name of responding to them and how certain other modes of conduct are actually responsive to suffering and attentive to the longer histories and more global chains of causation that produce disasters.

He has previously been a Junior Visiting Fellow at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (IWM) in Vienna, a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for International Law and the Humanities (IILAH) in Melbourne and a Doctoral Exchange Student at the Harvard Law School in Cambridge. His research interests include the fields of international law and development; postcolonial legal studies; international legal histories, with a special focus on legal biographies; humanitarian law; legal theory; ethics and indigenous peoples’ rights. He has a B.A.LL.B. (Hons.) from the National Law Institute University (NLIU) in Bhopal, and a Masters in International Studies (MIS), with a specialization in international law, from IHEID, Geneva.

Christopher Gevers

Christopher Gevers

Christopher Gevers teaches international law at the School of Law, University of KwaZulu-Natal and is a Ph.D. candidate at Melbourne Law School. He has previously studied at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the University of KwaZulu-Natal. His research interests include international legal theory, global histories, law and literature, critical race theory and postcolonial studies. Christopher’s current research project traces the intellectual history of ‘Pan-African internationalism’: the project of Pan-African intellectuals to remake the world through the international, and at times through international law, from 1900 until 1963. It focuses on the Pan-African Congresses and the formation of the Organisation of African Unity (1963), and the Pan-African intellectuals (such as WEB Du Bois, George Padmore, Nnamdi Azikiwe and Kwame Nkrumah) who lived, thought and wrote, together at times, internationally.

It aims to explore how Pan-African internationalism converged at various points with the projects of 20th century international law and how this revealed commitments, and involved costs, that ultimately challenged or undermined the project of Pan-Africanism. These include the adoption of an unreconstructed, ‘Eurocentric’ view of history; the reduction of colonial emancipation to national liberation through the state-form; and the downplaying of the role of race and racism as organizing principles of the international order. Finally, it aims to consider how this history resonates with contemporary debates about the present international order, and Africa’s role in it.

Deval Desai

Deval Desai

Deval Desai is an SJD Candidate at Harvard Law School. He has published widely on law and development, and taught at Harvard, Manchester, SOAS, and Northeastern. He has been awarded grants from LSE and Harvard to explore the research-policy nexus; serves on the editorial board of the Hague Journal on the Rule of Law; and was made the inaugural International Rule of Law Fellow at the Bingham Center. Since 2009 he has also worked for the World Bank as a rule of law reform expert in Nigeria, Cameroon, Sierra Leone and Uganda; as well as advising the UN High-Level Panel on the Sustainable Development Goals on rule of law issues. He is a lifetime Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Research Associate at the Overseas Development Institute, and a member of the UN roster of experts on the rule of law. He holds an MA from Oxford, an LL.M. from Harvard and is a member of the Bar of England and Wales.