Profile
Lys Kulamadayil profile

Lys KULAMADAYIL

SNSF Ambizione Fellow
email
Spoken languages
English, German, Malayalam, French
Areas of expertise
  • General international law
  • Corruption
  • Decolonization
  • Development and rule of law
  • Climate Change
  • Natural Resources Management
  • Racism

Lys Kulamadayil is an international law scholar and a Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione Fellow, serving as principal investigator of the project Law by Colour Code: Locating Race and Racism in International Law. Her research interests span extractivism, mineral resource governance, the legal regulation of food and ecosystems, human rights, economic law, legal theory and philosophy, as well as international law’s role in social hierarchies, particularly with regard to racism and ableism.  She has published widely on these subjects in peer-reviewed journals, including the London Review of International Law, the Leiden Journal of International Law, Transnational Legal Theory, and the Journal of the History of International Law. She is also the author of the monograph The Pathology of Plenty: Natural Resources in International Law.

Currently, she serves as a research advisor to the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food for which she is based at the German Institute of Human Rights. Prior to joining the Geneva Graduate Institute, she was a Senior Research Fellow at Helmut-Schmidt University and worked in the humanitarian affairs division of the German Federal Foreign Office. Dr Kulamadayil was previously awarded a grant by the Swiss National Science Foundation to undertake post-doctoral research on a project names Depleted Fortunes at the Amsterdam Center for International Law. She also completed visiting fellowships at the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna and Harvard Law School.  As a faculty member or mentor, she has contributed to various doctoral programmes and doctoral mentoring schemes, including at the University of Amsterdam, Sciences Po, and as part of the the LPE in Europe project, the International Economic Law Collective, and the Law and Society Association. 

Dr Kulamadayil 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 in International Law from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies.

 

Selected Publications


Monograph

“The Pathology of Plenty: Natural Resources in International Law.” Hart Publishing, forthcoming.

Peer-reviewed articles and essays

Blog Posts News Media, Policy Work
 

  • "Die globale Politik gegen Hungersnöte und das Völkerrecht.“ Deutsches Institut für Menschenrechte, 2024.
  • "Die Reproduktion Sozialer Hierarchien Im Deutschen Jurastudium," Verfassungsblog, 9 September 2024. 
  • "Germany: an elegy for principled humanitarianism", Social Europe, 21 February 2024 (2024).
  • "Germany’s Reliance on Its Healthcare ‘Brown Angels’" Social Europe, 5 January 2022 (2022).
  • "Self-Reflexivity on the Judicial Bench," Völkerrechtsblog (2021).
  • "The Unexplored Nexus between Money-Laundering and Humanitarian Needs," The Global (2020).
  • "Informed Dissent or Misinformed Rebellion? Making Sense of India’s Farmer Protests" In Völkerrechtsblog, (2021).
  • "Have You Met Dan Gertler?" Social Europe, 16 February 2021, (2021).
  • "Die Diplomatie und das deutsche Volk", taz blogs, 19.06.2020, (2020).

 

Podcasts
 

  • Or, Barak, and Lys Kulamadayil. "Oil / Coal." Narrated by Marie Petersmann and Dimitri Van Den Meerssche, Underworlds - Sites and Struggles of Global Dis/Ordering (2024).
  • Kulamadayil, Lys, "#31 UN-Behindertenrechtskonvention: Ableismus und Recht(-swissenschaft)," narrated by Erik Tuchtfeld, Isabel Lischewski and Jan-Henrik Hinselmann, Völkerrechtsblog (2023).
  • Kulamadayil, Lys, Peer Schouten, Godefroid Muzalia Kihangu, and Bienvenu Mukungilwa, "The logics of conflict in the DRC: from the mineral to the checkpoint economy," narrated by Luke Cooper and Azaria Morgan, LSE Conflict Zones (2021).

 

Book Reviews
 

  • Miriam Bak Mckenna ‘Cover Reckoning with Empire: Self-Determination in International Law’, Asian Journal of International Law, 14(1) 2024, 213-14.
  • Marie Petersmann ‘When Environmental Protection and Human Rights Collide’, Transnational Environmental Law 12(2) (2022), 456-60.
  • Mbenguem, Makane, and Jean D'Aspremont, eds. Crisis Narratives in International Law. Leiden: Brill, 2022 & Bandopadhyay, Saptarishi. All Is Well: Catastrophe and the Making of the Normal State. Oxford University Press, 2022, Asian Journal of International Law, 12(2) 2022.

  • Eliana Cusato ‘The Ecology of War and Peace: Marginalising Slow and Structural Violence in International Law’, Asian Journal of International Law 12(1) (2022), 197–98.

     

Funded RESEARCH PROJECTS
 

  • Law by Colour Code: Locating Race and Racism in International Law, Swiss National Science Foundation, Ambizione, Grant No. PZ00P1_216005, 

  • Depleted Fortunes: Law in a World of Exhaustible Natural Resources, Swiss National Science Foundation, Early-Post-Doc Mobility, Grant No. P2GEP1_181535.