Prof Rebecca Sutton
Professor of International Law
Rebecca Sutton is Professor of International Law in the School of Law at the University of Glasgow. She is the Academic Coordinator of the LLM in International Law and Security, and convenes courses in the Laws of Armed Conflict, International Human Rights Law, International Law and International Security. She is a member of the School of Law’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Committee and the Staff-Student Forum on Decolonising the School of Law. Rebecca is a founding member of the Games and International Law Teaching Network (GILTNet) and serves on the Advisory Board of the Scottish Council on Global Affairs.
Rebecca was previously a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at Edinburgh Law School, a post-doc on the Individualization of War project at the European University Institute, and a post-doc in the Faculty of Law at McGill University. She holds a PhD in International Law from the London School of Economics and is licensed to practice law as a Barrister and Solicitor in Canada.
Rebecca’s main expertise is in the areas of International Humanitarian Law, International Human Rights Law, humanitarianism, civilian agency, youth peacebuilding, and conflict transformation. Rebecca is currently a Co-Investigator of the Beyond Compliance Consortium, an academic-NGO partnership researching civilian harm in war, funded by the FCDO (5 million GBP, 2024-2027). She is the Principal Investigator of Flourish and Rest, a 2-year collaborative project to develop a new ECR support programme based on creative practices, funded by the Chancellor’s Fund (2023-2025).
For the past decade, Rebecca’s scholarship has revolved around international law and practices of humanitarianism in armed conflict. Drawing on her experiences as a former aid worker, her doctorate focused on how humanitarians struggle with the principle of distinction in their relationships with peacekeeping and military actors. This project involved multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in South Sudan and at civil-military trainings, forming the basis for her Oxford University Press book The Humanitarian Civilian.
In connection with her Leverhulme Trust project ‘Frontlineland: The Everyday Life of International Humanitarian Law’ (2020-2022) Rebecca has sought to develop the nascent scholarly fields of international law and emotions, and international law in everyday life. As part of this work she explores the feelings and perceptions of frontline actors in armed conflict, and she has developed a curriculum for teaching emotions in the conflict resolution classroom: Emotion Bites. Rebecca’s curiosity about how innovative pedagogical approaches can cultivate legal and emotional literacy extends to games and gaming, and she is increasingly turning her attention to Peacegaming.
Rebecca has lived or worked in Darfur, Sudan; South Sudan; Ghana; northern India; South Africa; Central African Republic; Thailand; Indonesia; Cox’s Bazar. Rebecca has facilitated trainings, delivered projects and consulted for organizations such as: War Child Canada; EU Aid Volunteers; Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre; UNICEF; UNHCR; NATO CIMIC. She also collaborates with young peacebuilders on participatory action research (PAR), for example with Rohingya youth during Covid-19.
Below is a list of key publications. For a full list please click on the following links:
The “phantom local” and the everyday distinction practices of humanitarian actors in war: a socio-legal perspective. New Political Science
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This article is concerned the everyday practices of international humanitarian actors who deliver assistance in armed conflict zones. Drawing on original fieldwork conducted in South Sudan, it elucidates how humanitarian actors engage with the principle of distinction in international humanitarian law (IHL). The article considers how the desire to enforce distinction impacts humanitarian actors’ relationships with others, and introduces the concept of everyday distinction practices. These practices have an important performance component, designed to appease the “phantom local.” It is proposed that such practices may have adverse implications for the humanitarian–beneficiary encounter. By positioning war-affected populations as an audience for distinction, everyday distinction practices reconfigure the victims of war from being receivers of aid to perceivers of aid. By lumping beneficiaries together with armed actors as part of the “phantom local,” distinction practices also paint the victims of war as an object of mistrust, fear, and potential danger.
The (self) protection of civilians in South Sudan: popular and community justice practices. African Affairs
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Over the past decade, a body of scholarship on civilian self-protection (CSP) has emerged, advancing understandings of civilian agency in war. In this article, we argue that CSP has been conceptualized in a narrow manner, reflecting the nascent status of the field. Scholars have focused on responses to threats directly related to the dynamics of conflict, physical in nature, and caused by the presence of armed groups. Using the case study of the Protection of Civilians (PoC) sites in South Sudan and drawing on over 150 interviews, we identify one type of protective response neglected in the literature: community and popular justice. Although the PoC sites provide a measure of protection, residents face a range of daily threats that are indirectly related to the conflict, such as crime. In this context, community justice emerged as a natural response, an overlooked yet vital form of CSP that addresses immediate protection needs and fulfills a social ordering function. By conceiving of justice in this way, this article aims to deepen understanding of civilian agency and start a conversation with scholars and practitioners about the boundaries of (self) protection.
Enacting the ‘civilian plus’: international humanitarian actors and the conceptualization of distinction. Leiden Journal of International Law
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The civilian-combatant frame persists as the main legal lens through which lawyers organize the relationships of conflict zone actors. As a result, little attention has been paid in international legal scholarship to different gradations of ‘civilianness’ and the ways in which some civilians might compete to distinguish themselves from each other. Drawing attention to international humanitarian actors – particularly those working for NGOs – this article explores the micro-strategies these actors engage in to negotiate their relative status in war. Original qualitative empirical findings from South Sudan illuminate the way in which humanitarians struggle over distinction with individuals working for the UN peacekeeping mission, UNMISS. As is shown, humanitarian actors are doing away with a static civilian-combatant binary in their daily practice. A more fluid logic informs both their self-conceptualization and their interactions with others who share the operational space. Humanitarian actors envision civilianness as a contingent concept, and they operate according to a continuum along which everything is a matter of degree and subtle gradation. As civilianness is detached from the civilian, any given actor might acquire or shed civilian-like, or combatant-like, characteristics at any moment. The distinction practices that humanitarian actors enact can be understood as a bid for legibility, so that they might be rendered intelligible in international law and in the eyes of other actors as a special kind of civilian – the ‘civilian plus’.
How the emotions and perceptual judgments of frontline actors shape the practice of international humanitarian law
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Positioned in a nascent ‘affective turn’ in international humanitarian law (IHL) scholarship, this chapter draws attention to the long-overlooked emotional life and perceptual judgments of those who are expected to enact IHL. With reference to original fieldwork conducted at civil-military trainings in Sweden, Germany, and Italy, the chapter examines the interplay of law and emotions in everyday humanitarian-military interactions. As is shown, military actors are frustrated by the routine efforts that humanitarian actors make to dissociate from them. Complicating matters, humanitarian actors also sometimes call upon military actors for help. The chapter conceptualizes these humanitarian practices as a relational effort to cultivate detachment. The way that military actors experience humanitarian detachment prompts them to assemble an imaginary humanitarian figure actor who is aloof, mercurial, and often feminized. We thus find one soldier likening humanitarian NGOs to an ex-girlfriend who ‘only calls when she wants to cuddle’’. The chapter proposes that these festering sentiments of hostility influence the way in which military actors interpret their legal mandate to facilitate the work of humanitarian actors. The more general claim advanced is that we need to recognize individual conflict actors as people in order to fully grasp how IHL hits the ground.
In: Bandes, S. A., Madeira, J. L., Temple, K. D. and White, E. K. (eds.) Research Handbook on Law and Emotion. Series: Research handbooks in legal theory. Edward Elgar Publishing Limited: Cheltenham, UK ; Northampton, Massachusetts, USA, pp. 477-4
Empathy in frontline humanitarian negotiations: a relational approach to engagement. Journal of International Humanitarian Action
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Humanitarian access—people’s ability to reach aid and aid's ability to reach people—is widely understood to be a central challenge in humanitarian action. One of the most important ways in which humanitarian access is practically secured in conflict settings is through frontline humanitarian negotiations. In this type of negotiation, humanitarians engage in face-to-face interactions with conflict parties to secure safe access to, and protection of, civilian populations in situations of armed conflict. An underdeveloped aspect of such negotiations that is ripe for further exploration is the role of empathy. The purpose of this article is thus to draw on the insights of the empathy literature to explore how empathy shapes humanitarian protection work in the specific domain of frontline humanitarian negotiations. Part one conceptualizes empathy, drawing on the interdisciplinary field of scientific research. Part two introduces the practice of frontline humanitarian negotiation and explains why empathy is critical, particularly in the increasingly fragmented environments that negotiators must operate. Adopting a relational approach, Part three advances a framework for analyzing empathy in frontline humanitarian negotiations. We theorize empathy's salience across four different axes of negotiation, drawing insights gleaned from scholarship and a systematic review of the grey literature on humanitarian negotiation, including field manuals, training materials, and operational guidance. We do not ultimately argue for ‘more empathy’ in this type of work, but rather a more thoughtful approach to empathy—one that entails the cultivation of core empathy-related skill areas, including: emotion regulation, perspective-taking, social awareness, and strategic conveyance of empathy. We contend that this approach could help to alleviate numerous problems in the humanitarian sector, including aid worker burnout.
The identity work of journalists and humanitarians in South Sudan’s Protection of Civilians sites
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This article interrogates the simplistic juxtaposition of protectors and protected in South Sudan’s Protection of Civilians (PoC) sites, by asking: who was civilian in South Sudan, and how were civilians being protected? We present a civilian landscape that is much broader and more complex than the dominant PoC imaginary. Drawing attention to civilians who engage in professional tasks, the article considers the everyday practices of humanitarians and journalists. This illustrates that the category of ‘civilian’ is not the bureaucratic or legal certainty suggested by international law or PoC discourse, but unstable, shifting and constructed through everyday practice.