Prof Charlie Peevers
Professor of International Law
Charlie Peevers is Professor of International Law and member of the Glasgow Centre for International Law & Security. She is on research leave until August 2027 working on the Scottish Disarmament Project.
Charlie’s research grapples with the stakes involved in public contestation of international law, charting the politics of legal argument and world-making through law. She is currently working on two sole authored book projects, one charting the legal history of Scottish disarmament activism over the long 20th century; the other interrogating the projection of future worlds through canal building at Suez and Panama. She is also co-editing a book with the WIL project team, ‘Women, Law and Legal Work in Scotland: Dialogues about our past, present and future’ due out in 2025 with EUP.
She has been awarded grants from the Royal Society of Edinburgh (Personal Fellowship, 2022-24) and the Arts & Humanities Research Council (RDE Fellowship, 2024-2026) and is a Senior Fellow of the Institute for International Law & the Humanities, Melbourne Law School (2024-2026) as well as regular Faculty of the Institute for Glasgow Law & Policy, Harvard Law School. For over a decade she has contributed to the IGLP’s intensive writing workshops for doctoral candidates and policy professionals, and to the Global Scholars Academy, a collaboration between the Graduate Institute, Geneva and the IGLP, supported by the Open Society University Network.
Charlie has taught at a number of international institutions including LSE, King’s College, London, Auckland, Melbourne and Sydney Law Schools and has been recognized with awards for teaching excellence. She is a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy.
Charlie collaborates with colleagues in the School of Law and other organisations on the Women in Law project. The project includes tracing the early years of professional practice in Scotland, women’s entry into academia, and women engaged in legal activism outside the formal study and practice of law, whose impact on Scottish history is both profound and woefully under-acknowledged.
She has an interdisciplinary background in history, politics, international relations and law and has practised across a broad range of legal areas (called 2009, Middle Temple, England & Wales). Charlie continues to engage in consultancy work on human rights and international law.
Below is a list of key publications. For a full list please click on the following links:
The Politics of Justifying Force: the Suez Crisis, the Iraq War, and International Law
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What are the politics involved in a government justifying its use of military force abroad? What is the role of international law in that discourse? How and why is international law crucial to this process? And what role does the media have in mediating the interaction of international law and politics? This book provides a fresh and engaging answer to these questions. It introduces different actors to the study of international law in this context, in particular highlighting the importance of institutional actors and the role of the media. It takes a theoretical approach, informed by detailed empirical analysis of key case studies, which challenges the traditional distinction between the spheres of 'the international' and 'the domestic' in global affairs, and the role of international law in the making of public policy.
