Professor Anne Orford is "without a doubt, one of the field’s Greats" writes OpinioJuris, a leading blog on international law published in association with the International Commission of Jurists. Photo: Andrew Robertson

Anne Orford is Melbourne Laureate Professor and Michael D Kirby Chair of International Law at Melbourne Law School, and Visiting Professor of Law and John Harvey Gregory Lecturer on World Organization at Harvard Law School. She researches and teaches in the areas of international law, international dispute settlement, international economic law, and climate change. She is a Visiting Legal Fellow at the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade for 2022-23.

Over the past two decades, Professor Orford has developed an influential body of work analysing the field of international law and military intervention. She has, among other things, written books that have informed thinking about humanitarian action across a broad range of fields and disciplines - both within and beyond the academy. Her most recent monograph, International Law and the Politics of History (Cambridge University Press, 2021), has been praised by many as a highly pioneering and innovative contribution to research in the field. 

Beeing a generalist professor of international law, Anne Orford has a valuable capacity to synthesise and think critically about developments taking place across different sub-fields of international law. Her scholarship has drawn upon social and political theory, jurisprudence, history, philosophy, and political economy to explore the transformations of international law and its relevance to some of the major challenges of our time, including food security, civil war, humanitarian crises, global inequality, the legacies of colonial rule, and currently climate change.

Will be an important resource for several institutions

During her research stay in Sweden from July to December 2024, Anne will be a visiting professor at the Faculty of Law at Stockholm University and the Stockholm Centre for International Law and Justice, as well as at the Department of Law at the University of Gothenburg, where she will be involved in existing research groups led by Professors Pål Wrange and Gregor Noll. She also plans to give lectures and lead research seminars at the Faculties of Law in Lund and Uppsala. 

– I’m delighted to have been awarded the Olof Palme Visiting Fellowship, to work on a project critically exploring the securitization of climate change. The visit is designed to provide a focal point and resources for researchers, practitioners, and activists with shared interests in climate justice and international law, Says Anne, continuing;

– I’m looking forward to building on my decades-long collaboration with ground-breaking Swedish researchers at Stockholm, as well as Göteborg, Lund, and Uppsala. And I’m grateful to have a chance to spend some more time in Sweden, where I (and my family) have been so warmly welcomed by academic friends and colleagues since first visiting in 2005.