Summary: This talk explains Sudan’s descent into a horrific war that is the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. The war has displaced over 11 million people, involved the targeting of civilians, including especially women, in mass violence, and precipitated a hunger crisis affecting over 24 million people, with over 630,000 currently facing famine. How, after a momentous civilian uprising in 2018-19 that toppled the dictator Omer el-Bashir after 30 years of authoritarian rule, did Sudan come to this? Unravelling the causes and events that led to tragedy begins with how counter-revolutionary actors within the State benefitted from the priorities of external peacemakers seeking to achieve a democratic transition in order to displace revolutionary forces, before carrying out a coup against that very transition. The war erupted when the counter-revolution itself unravelled, and its two primary bedfellows, the Sudan Armed Forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces fell-out violently with each other in a struggle for power. With complex regional geopolitical entanglements and drawing in other armed groups in Sudan, their war to the bitter end has mixed cruel indifference and intentional harm towards civilians in devastating ways. Remarkably, the revolutionary spirit of the Sudanese has not been vanquished, and has found expression in how neighbourhood resistance committees have transformed into ‘emergency response rooms’ to deliver life-saving support. Sudan’s plight and prospects lie precariously within these intersecting trajectories.

Sharath Srinivasan is David and Elaine Potter Professor of International Politics at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. He is also Founding Director, and currently Co-Director, of the University of Cambridge's Centre of Governance and Human Rights (CGHR). Professor Srinivasan is a Fellow and Trustee of the Rift Valley Institute and a Trustee and Vice-President of the British Institute in Eastern Africa.

Professor Srinivasan’s work focuses on contentious politics in Africa in global perspective, from explaining failed peace interventions in civil wars to rethinking democratic politics in a digital age. He is the author of When Peace Kills Politics: International Intervention and Unending Wars in the Sudans (Hurst/Oxford University Press, 2021) and co-editor of Making and Breaking Peace in Sudan and South Sudan: The Comprehensive Peace Agreement and Beyond (British Academy/Oxford University Press, 2020).

Chair: Dr Juliana Santos de Carvalho, Centre Fellow

Lecture summary: Property is a fundamental legal institution governing the use of things: who may own what, how and why. Given that such questions extend to a wide range of natural resources essential to human well-being, such as food, water and shelter, then it is reasonable to assume that human rights should play an important role in shaping property rights discourse and practice. And yet this assumption is somewhat misplaced. The relationship between property and human rights and property remains relatively underdeveloped in both practice and academic literature, and virtually non-existent when we move to the maritime domain. In this paper, I explore and question the role that property and human rights can and should play in the maritime domain. I outline how such rights arise and are protected under human rights instruments, before exploring how they might inform the moral and legal distribution of resources. In particular, I focus on how we might balance individual rights and public interests that arise in respect of property, and how these are informed by the nature of the oceans as a commons.

Richard Barnes is Professor of International Law at the University of Lincoln and Adjunct Professor of Law at the Norwegian Centre for the Law of the Sea, the University of Tromsø. His current research focuses on the human right to property, ocean commons, and the BBNJ Agreement. He is widely published in the fields of international law and law of the sea. Property Rights and Natural Resources (2009), won the SLS Birks Book Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship. He has edited several collections of essays including Research Handbook on Plastics Regulation (2024), Frontiers in International Environmental Law. Oceans and Climate (2021), Research Handbook on Climate Change, Oceans and Coasts (2020), and The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea: A Living Instrument (2016). Professor Barnes a member of the ILA Committee on the Protection of People at Sea. He has acted as a consultant for the WWF, Oceana, ClientEarth, the European Parliament, the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. He has also provided advice to foreign ministries. He has appeared numerous times before Parliamentary select committees on matters related to law of the sea, fisheries and Brexit. He is on the Editorial Board of International and Comparative Law Quarterly, the International Journal of Marine and Coastal Law, the New Zealand Yearbook of International Law, the German Yearbook of International Law, and the Portuguese Yearbook of the Law of the Sea.

Feminist activists, country representatives, and other civil society actors have debated how to define “gender” in international criminal law (ICL) for at least three decades. In the Rome Conference that established the International Criminal Court (ICC) and its Statute in 1998, defining “gender” was a hotly debated topic of negotiation. More recently, this debate has resurfaced in the steps leading to the International Law Commission’s Draft Articles for a Crimes Against Humanity Treaty, and continues to be discussed in the deliberations at the Sixth Committee on the Draft Articles. The CAH Convention is now expected to be negotiated between 2026-2029, and, more than a mere point of contention, the concept of ‘gender’ in its text can be crucial for prosecuting sexual and gender-based international crimes and thus fundamental to gender justice efforts worldwide. With this in mind, this roundtable gathers scholars and activists studying and working (often simultaneously) on the definition of gender in international criminal law, in an effort to learn from their specific positionalities, perceptions, and experiences about the challenges, strategies, and possibilities for (non-)defining the term.

https://www.lcil.cam.ac.uk/press/events/2025/02/panel-queering-gender-crimes-against-humanity-draft-possibilities-alliances-and-strategies