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:
Humanitarianism and Affect-Based Education: Emotional Experiences at the Jean-Pictet Competition
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For international lawyers seeking to promote compliance with international humanitarian law (IHL), some level of affective awareness is essential – but just where one might cultivate an understanding of emotions, and at which juncture of one's career, remains a mystery. This article proposes that what the IHL lawyers and advocates of the future need is an affect-based education. More than a simple mastery of a technical set of emotional intelligence skills, what we are interested in here is the refinement of a disposition or sensibility – a way of engaging with the world, with IHL, and with humanitarianism. In this article, we consider the potential for the Jean-Pictet Competition to provide this education. Drawing on our observations of the competition and a survey with 231 former participants, the discussion examines the legal and affective dimensions of the competition, identifies the precise moments of the competition in which emotional processes take place, and probes the role of emotions in role-plays and simulations. Presenting the Jean-Pictet Competition as a form of interaction ritual, we propose that high “emotional energy” promotes a humanitarian sensibility; indeed, participant interactions have the potential to re-constitute the very concept of humanitarianism. We ultimately argue that a more conscious engagement with emotions at competitions like Pictet has the potential to strengthen IHL training, to further IHL compliance and the development of IHL rules, and to enhance legal education more generally.
Read the room: legal and emotional literacy in frontline humanitarian negotiations
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This chapter engages with law and emotions in frontline humanitarian negotiations with armed groups, illustrating how international humanitarian law (IHL) functions in the hands of different actors. Drawing on fieldwork from the Central African Republic and Southeast Asia, as well as practitioner-oriented negotiations literature, the chapter explores the legal and emotional literacy of humanitarian negotiators. Showcasing (and critiquing) the objective/subjective divide that pervades the literature, the discussion takes law and emotions in turn. The first part establishes that law is treated mainly as a tool, yet few clues are given as to how and why law might be deployed. A tension also materialises around whether IHL is itself ‘negotiable’, leaving humanitarian negotiators to navigate this conundrum—and law’s indeterminacy more generally—with little guidance. The second part demonstrates that emotions are overlooked and misunderstood in the literature. Emotions are presented as reason’s opposite, making it easy to side-line them and to call for their suppression. The thin and largely ambivalent treatment of emotions is of little help to humanitarian negotiators who, in practice, must contend with emotions at every turn. The central claim advanced is that, even as the legal and affective dimensions of humanitarian negotiations remain undertheorised, a heavy burden is imposed on humanitarians to discern what each negotiation encounter demands of law and of human feelings. This matters for IHL and it also has material consequences: those humanitarian negotiators who are unable to ‘read the room’ may find their attempts to persuade armed groups thwarted.
In: Krieger, H., Kalmanovitz, P., Lieblich, E. and Mignot-Mahdavi, R. (eds.) Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law, Volume 24 (2021). T.M.C. Asser Press: The Hague, pp. 103-139
The Humanitarian Civilian: How the Idea of Distinction Circulates Within and Beyond International Humanitarian Law
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In international humanitarian law (IHL), the principle of distinction delineates the difference between the civilian and the combatant, and it safeguards the former from being intentionally targeted in armed conflicts. This monograph explores the way in which the idea of distinction circulates within, and beyond, IHL. Taking a bottom-up approach, the multi-sited study follows distinction across three realms: the Kinetic realm, where distinction is in motion in South Sudan; the Pedagogical realm, where distinction is taught in civil–military training spaces in Europe; and the Intellectual realm, where distinction is formulated and adjudicated in Geneva and the Hague. Directing attention to international humanitarian actors, the book shows that these actors seize upon signifiers of ‘civilianness’ in everyday practice. To safeguard their civilian status, and to deflect any qualities of ‘combatantness’ that might affix to them, humanitarian actors strive to distinguish themselves from other international actors in their midst. The latter include peacekeepers working for the UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS), and soldiers who deploy with NATO missions. Crucially, some of the distinctions enacted cut along civilian–civilian lines, suggesting that humanitarian actors are longing for something more than civilian status–the ‘civilian plus’. This special status presents a paradox: the appeal to the ‘civilian plus’ undermines general civilian protection, yet as the civilian ideal becomes increasingly beleaguered, a special civilian status appears ever more desirable. However disruptive these practices may be to the principle of distinction in IHL, it is emphasized that even at the most normative level there is no bright-line distinction to be found.