At its founding in 1945, the United Nations aimed to “maintain international peace and security” and to encourage “respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.” The international institutions envisioned in this charter face severe challenges today. Political leaders alternately challenge the legitimacy of the United Nations or manipulate it to their own purposes. International institutions have not stopped state-sponsored violence against civilians in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Myanmar, and many other regions of the world. And yet the institutions associated with international law often seem to be the only alternative to military escalation.

This panel will provide a historical perspective on international law and discuss the role that international institutions can play in reducing the likelihood and consequences of war in the shifting geopolitical environment of the 21st century.

Light lunch will be served at 11:45 am.

Moderator
Jens Ohlin is the Allan R. Tessler Dean of the Cornell Law School. His scholarly work stands at the intersection of four related fields: criminal law, criminal procedure, public international law, and the laws of war. Trained as both a lawyer and a philosopher, his research has tackled questions as diverse as criminal conspiracy and the punishment of collective criminal action, the philosophical foundations of international law, and the role of new technologies in warfare, including cyberwar, remotely piloted drones, and autonomous weapons. Ohlin’s latest research project involves foreign election interference and the use of disinformation as a mode of statecraft by foreign actors. 

About the Panelists
Kathryn Sikkink is the Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. She works on international norms and institutions, transnational advocacy networks, the impact of human rights law and policies, transitional justice, and the laws of war. Her publications include International, Norms, Moral Psychology, and Neuroscience (with Richard Price); The Hidden Face of Rights: Toward a Politics of Responsibilies; Evidence for Hope: Making Human Rights Work in the 21st Century; The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions are Changing World Politics (awarded the Robert F. Kennedy Center Book Award and the WOLA/Duke University Award); Mixed Signals: U.S. Human Rights Policy and Latin America; Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (co-authored with Margaret Keck and awarded the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas for Improving World Order and the ISA Chadwick Alger Award for Best Book in the area of International Organizations); and The Persistent Power of Human Rights: From Commitment to Compliance (co-edited with Thomas Risse and Stephen Ropp). 

Siba N’Zatioula Grovogui is originally from Guinea, where he attended Law School before serving as law clerk, judge, and legal counsel for the National Commission on Trade, Agreements, and Protocols. He is the author of Sovereigns, Quasi-Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-determination in International Law (University of Minnesota Press, 1996) and Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy: Memories of International Institutions and Order (Palgrave, April 2006). Grovogui has recently completed and submitted a book manuscript titled The Gaze of Copernicus: Postcolonialism, Serendipity, and International Relations (University of Manchester Press). He frequently intervenes on international events including most recently in Foreign Policy Magazine on Western intervention in Libya and the German Die Zeit on the War in Ukraine. He was recently elected President of the International Studies Association for 2025-26.

Isabel V. Hull is John Stambaugh Professor of History Emerita at Cornell University.  Her research has ranged broadly in German history from the early modern to the modern period, and from governance, the history of sexuality, military culture, to international law.  A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law in the First World War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014) won the American Society of International Law book prize in 2016.  A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Hull was awarded the Max Weber Stiftung-Historisches Kolleg Prize for lifetime achievement in German history and studies in 2013.  She is currently writing a book on the international law governing when states could legitimately go to war (jus ad bellum) in Europe just before 1914. 

David Cortright is professor emeritus of the practice at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. Previously, Cortright was the director of policy studies at the Keough School’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and director of the institute’s Peace Accords Matrix project, the largest existing collection of implementation data on intrastate peace agreements. Cortright has written widely about nonviolent social change, nuclear disarmament, and the use of multilateral sanctions and incentives as tools of international peacemaking. He has provided research services to the foreign ministries of Canada, Denmark, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland, and has served as a consultant or advisor to agencies of the United Nations, the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, the International Peace Academy, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Host
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies

Co-host
Cornell Law School

Co-sponsor
Department of Government
Africana Studies & Research Center
Institute for European Studies