2024-2025 Residential Fellows
Nader Andrawos
Nader Andrawos
Nader’s research focuses on social and political thought, critical legal studies, human rights studies, and intellectual history. His PhD explored the intellectual history of the Arab (specifically Egyptian) human rights movement. He was especially interested in the way socialist and radical thinkers moved towards the liberal project of human rights, and how they justified this move. During his time at the IGLP, he aims to further develop this question by looking at the history of “revolutionary lawyering” in the Arab world throughout the 20th century, and engaging with legal and political thought around the relation between revolution, rights and law. This interest grew out of his own prior involvement with the Egyptian rights movement. Prior to his time with the IGLP, Nader was a research manager at a grant project at the American University in Cairo, where he was looked into “Post-Neoliberal Futures.” He also often write essays for the online news website “Mada Masr.”
Nicole Stybnarova
Nicole Stybnarova
Nicole’s research addresses Public and Private International Law, political economy and various forms of social domination. Her PhD, completed at the University of Helsinki, studied the rules for marriage recognition in Migration Law, Private International Law, IHRL and Foreign Relations Law. It demonstrated ways in which the regulation of marriage in cross-border contexts functions in channelling the global flow of economic resources and simultaneously, in structuring the social domination of women and the Global South and North working classes. In her current project, Nicole looks at women’s social movements and International Law. She studies the overlap in the UN’s regulatory agendas of women’s rights and decolonization to argue how the regulatory co-optation of these agendas influenced the regulatory model of women’s rights applied today. She also engages historical women’s petitions sent from both the former imperial centres and their peripheries to influence the UN’s rights-making. The aim of this project, called ‘Global South Women as Theorists of International Law’, is to outline normative visions for radical rethinking of the regulatory model or women’s rights and more broadly, for rethinking the language and argumentative principles of International Law. Nicole is engaged in two further projects: one addresses the role of Private International Law in imperial governance; and the other one brings Eastern European anti-capitalist and anti-imperial critiques to a conversation with other, more prominent, critical theories. Prior to her appointment at the IGLP, Nicole was a lecturer at the University of Oxford, and an Assistant Professor at Leiden University.
Mikolaj Szafranski
Mikolaj Szafranski
Mikołaj’s research focuses on international economic governance and sustainability transitions. Mikołaj holds an LLB (Hons) from the University of Glasgow and an LLM from the London School of Economics. Before joining the IGLP, he was a PhD candidate at the LSE Law School.
His doctoral thesis surveyed the role of international law in the proliferation of waste by retelling how international legal instruments configure the waste footprint of smartphones. Treating waste not simply as an object of regulation, but as an externality generated in production, Mikołaj conducted a multi-regime study that followed the lifecycle of a smartphone. Overall, his thesis unveiled international law’s ability to organise global production networks along the ideas of disposability and wastefulness.
During his time at the IGLP, Mikołaj will conduct further research on global waste governance, focusing specifically on the intersection of the circular economy transition paradigm and resource extractivism.