Francisco-José Quintana is a legal scholar who specialises in the politics, theory, and history of international law and global governance, with a focus on the Global South. He is currently a Florence-Geneva Postdoctoral Fellow at the Geneva Graduate Institute, where he teaches ‘International Law and Geopolitics’. Before Geneva, he was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute. Francisco also serves as Associate Editor at the European Journal of International Law.

Francisco is engaged in two major research projects. The first is a forthcoming book based on his doctoral dissertation at the University of Cambridge, offering a history of human rights in Latin American international legal thought. The second project builds upon his established research on semi-peripheral agency in international law, expanding the geographical and temporal scope of his research to encompass the broader emerging world and the making of international law in the present. As part of this project, he is writing on BRICS, global finance, and international legal change.

Francisco’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in leading journals and edited volumes including the European Journal of International Law, the American Journal of International Law, the Journal of the History of International Law, and the Cambridge History of International Law. He co-edited the special issue ‘Bogotá at 75’ in the Journal of the History of International Law (2024). He has also written for broader audiences in newspapers such as The New York Times and influential international law blogs such as EJIL:Talk! and Opinio Juris.

Francisco was trained across the United Kingdom, the United States, Argentina, Switzerland, and Spain. He holds a Ph.D. in Law from the University of Cambridge. He earned an LL.M. from Harvard Law School, receiving two Dean’s Scholar Prizes, and an LL.M. in Public International Law with Distinction from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He began his education with a law degree (Abogado) from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, for which he was granted the Award for Academic Excellence by the Buenos Aires Bar Association. He has been a Gates Cambridge Scholar, a Chevening Scholar, a Fulbright Scholar, and a De Fortabat Fellow.

Francisco brings extensive academic and practical experience in international law and politics. He has taught at institutions such as the Geneva Graduate Institute, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, and the University of Cambridge, and was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Revista Latinoamericana de Derecho Internacional. He has participated in legal teams handling cases before international courts and tribunals on critical issues such as climate change and crimes against humanity. Before transitioning to academia, he worked across the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of government in Argentina.