Gustav Kalm

Gustav Kalm

Gustav Kalm is a PhD Candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at Columbia University. Before turning to Anthropology he trained as a lawyer in France graduating from Sciences Po Economic Law masters in 2014. As a legal and economic anthropologist, he studies how technical regulations of international economic law govern human lives across international production and investment networks. His dissertation focuses on foreign direct investment and international investment protection and inquires how people in materially very different positions across state borders perceive the justness of their share in big international production and investment networks. The research is grounded in ethnographic fieldwork with project finance and investment arbitration lawyers in Paris and an extended case study of the projects to mine iron ore in the Simandou mountain chain in Guinea and the disputes stemming from those efforts. Combining an analysis of the submissions and hearings in the investor-state arbitration proceedings with the highest degree of publicity to date, an economic and legal analysis of the relevant financial models and mining conventions and, most of all, an ethnography with both the legal experts involved in the projects and the inhabitants of the Simandou mountain chain, this research offers unique insight into transnational investment networks as political configurations and fields of belonging.

Brenda Kombo

Brenda Kombo

Brenda Kombo is a sociocultural anthropologist and human rights lawyer with broad interests in legal anthropology, human rights, and international law. Previously a Norbert Elias Fellow at the University of Bielefeld’s Center for Interdisciplinary Research (Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung), she also recently held postdoctoral fellowships at the Free State Centre for Human Rights at the University of the Free State and New York University’s Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora. These fellowships followed several years of work with non-governmental organizations in the human rights field, primarily at the African continental level, including at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, Cyrus R. Vance Center for International Justice, and Equality Now. She also held research fellowships at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa’s African Centre for Gender and Social Development and the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris through the Yale Fox International Fellow Program. Brenda holds a PhD and MPhil in Anthropology from Yale University, a JD from Northeastern University School of Law, and a BA from Hampshire College.

At the IGLP, Brenda’s research will try to reimagine the social justice potential of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) by rejecting the assumption that free trade has a particular, predetermined structure and exploring the role law and lawyers can play in strengthening the AfCFTA’s ability to reach its goals of promoting socio-economic development and gender equality. She will use a focus on labor to reflect more narrowly on these issues.

Aliki Semertzi

Aliki Semertzi

Aliki is a Ph.D. candidate at the IHEID Geneva Graduate Institute. Her research focuses on the thesis of indeterminacy of international law. She engages with the currents of thought of structuralism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, postcolonial and cultural studies, and she analyses how the indeterminacy thesis has shaped international legal discourse. She asks what the potential of indeterminacy for contestation is – especially regarding queer approaches to international law. Aliki has served as Teaching Assistant at the IHEID’s International Law Department. She assisted courses and taught tutorials on theories of international law, transnational regulatory processes, discourse analysis of international law, and history of international law. She has worked as a research assistant to the IHEID’s Global Health Program, and to the UN’s International Law Commission (ILC). Prior to that, Aliki worked at the EU’s European Commission (DG Trade) and provided legal research during the negotiations of the EU’s Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). Her research is published in the Melbourne Journal of International Law and the Common Market Law Review. Aliki holds a Master in International Law from the IHEID Geneva Graduate Institute, an LLM in International and European Law from the Vrije Universiteit of Brussels, and an LLB from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.