The Centre warmly welcomes Tor Krever

The Centre is delighted to announce that Tor Krever, currently Assistant Professor at the School of Law, University of Warwick, will be joining the Lauterpacht Centre as a Fellow from immediate effect. He will be joining the Faculty of Law in October 2023 as Assistant Professor in International Law. 
 
Tor’s work is focused on the history and theory of international law, as well as critical and approaches to international law and left-legal theory more generally. His forthcoming book, which builds on his doctoral thesis, develops a materialist history of the pirate in international legal thought. The book reconstructs the conceptual history of the pirate in international law, analysing the theorisations of legitimate and illegitimate maritime commerce offered by international legal thinkers in their political-economic contexts. Against common assumptions that the pirate is a timeless legal category stretching backwards for millennia, he suggests that the modern juridical image of the pirate, as the enemy of trade, takes shape and crystallises only in the long-16th century, the product of this particular juncture reflecting inter-imperial rivalries and emerging merchant capitalist interests.
 
Looking forward, Tor is also developing a new research project on the relationship between anti-imperialism and international law, with a particular focus on the anti-imperial movements of the 20th century. An initial foray—a book chapter currently in press—considers the use of international law and legal argument as a mode of anti-imperial political resistance in the form of peoples’ tribunals—bodies set up by private citizens but modelled on legal courts for the purpose of judging and condemning state behaviour with reference to law. A further paper under work interrogates the treatment of the Third World movement in recent international legal histories, drawing attention to the erasure of political and ideological contestation and fractures within that movement.
 
Tor’s writing has appeared in a range of publications including New Left Review, the Harvard Journal of International Law, Third World Quarterly, the Leiden Journal of International Law, and the London Review of Books. He is also currently the co-General Editor of the London Review of International Law (Oxford University Press), which publishes critical, historical, socio-legal and other non-doctrinal international law scholarship.
 
Prior to joining the University of Warwick, Tor was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra in Portugal. He completed his PhD in Law at the London School of Economics and his earlier studies were at the University of Cambridge (MPhil and LLM) and Harvard University (AB and JD). He has worked on trade, humanitarian, and development issues at the United Nations in New York, human rights in Palestine, and international criminal law at the Special Court for Sierra Leone. He was also a visiting fellow at the Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia and, in 2011, was law research clerk to Deputy Chief Justice Dikgang Moseneke of the South African Constitutional Court. 
 
‘We are delighted to welcome Tor to the Faculty of Law and as a Fellow of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law. His expertise and knowledge of the history and theory of international law will be of great benefit to the Faculty and the Centre and we are very fortunate he is joining us.’ – Professor Eyal Benvenisti, Centre Director.