Congratulations to our Research Associate, Dr. Lys Kulamadayil, for being awarded the prestigious Ambizione career grant by the Swiss National Sciences Foundation (SNSF) for her four-year project 'Law by Colour Code: Locating Race and Racism in International Law'. This project will be jointly be hosted by the Global Governance Centre and the International Law Department and will explore international law’s role in shaping food and ecosystems using the prism of structural racism.
MOre About the project
Law by Color Code aims to explore the role of race and racism in international law by focusing on the legal governance of nature and food systems in the Anthropocene. It accepts that the meaning of the term ‘race’ is context-contingent. It uses the term ‘racism’ to describe the process of naturalizing the enjoyment of entitlements, rights, and privileges, for one racially defined group, at the expense of another. ‘Structural racism’ is then understood as the maintenance of hierarchies and dependencies structured by racial identities. The project is primarily concerned with European practices of international law, The focal points of this project are the legal systems of Germany, France, the Netherlands, and the European Union. It builds on scholarship exploring the colonial legacies of international law and on domestic legal scholarship on racial discrimination and racism.
Click here to find out more about the project.
About Lys Kulamadayil
Lys Kulamadayil is an international lawyer, writer, and a senior research fellow at Helmut-Schmidt University. She holds an LL.B. jointly awarded by the Universities of Bremen, Oldenburg and Groningen; an LL.M. from the London School of Economics, and a PhD from the Geneva Graduate Institute. Dr. Kulamadayil has previously held posts with the humanitarian affairs division of the German Federal Foreign Office and has been an SNSF-funded mobility post-doc in Amsterdam. She also served as an advisor to the UN mandate on the human right to food, as well as to the Carter Center’s Extractive Industries Governance project in Lubumbashi. She has had research stays at the Vienna Institute for Human Sciences and at Harvard Law School. Dr. Kulamadayil’s research interests include mineral resources, corruption, climate change, development, international legal knowledge production, public international law, human rights legal theory. In her forthcoming monograph, she explores the role international law has played in the extraction of mineral resources in post-colonial countries (Hart Publishing).
Photo by Ricardo IV Tamayo at Unsplash
