Gaza 2023: International Law and the Palestinian Struggle

Ibrahim Awad

Professor of Practice in Global Affairs and Director, Center for Migration and Refugee Studies

The American University in Cairo

Ibrahim Awad is at present Professor of Practice in Global Affairs and Director, Center for Migration and Refugee Studies, School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, at the American University in Cairo. He holds a BA degree in political science from Cairo University and a Ph.D degree in political science from the Graduate Institute of International Studies, University of Geneva, Switzerland. He has worked for the League of Arab States, the United Nations and the International Labour Organization, holding positions of Secretary of the Commission, UN-ESCWA, Director, ILO Sub-regional Office for North Africa and Director, ILO International Migration Programme. He currently is Chair of the Global Knowledge Partnership on Migration and Development (KNOMAD), hosted by the World Bank, Chair of the Steering Committee of the Euro-Mediterranean Research Network on International Migration (EuroMedMig) and Senior Fellow at the Migration Policy Centre (MPC) of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. He also serves on the editorial boards of several academic journals.

Nesrine Badawi

Associate Professor, Political Science Department

The American University in Cairo

Nesrine Badawi is an associate professor of public and international law at the Department of Political Science. She received her PhD in Law from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She holds an LLM in international and comparative law, a License en Droit and a BA in political science. Badawi has experience working with United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees on refugee law and has offered consultancy work to several organizations on humanitarian law and Islamic law. She has supervised several theses in the fields of Islamic law, international humanitarian law and international human rights law and she serves as an advisory editor at the University of Bologna Law Review.

Jason Beckett

Associate Professor, Law Department

The American University in Cairo

Jason Beckett studied law at the universities of Dundee (LLB) and Glasgow (LLM and PhD); and taught at the Universities of Newcastle and Leicester. He initially studied and wrote from the heart of the mainstream, on topics ranging from the Law of the Sea, through the theory of International Law, to the Use of Force, and tried hard to defend a mainstream understanding of Public International Law from the critical challenge. He failed; and, after completing his PhD on the ontology and methodology of Customary International Law, reluctantly accepted that the mainstream project was not viable.

Since then, Beckett has examined both the indeterminacy and the biases of international law. He has analyzed the religious structure of legal discourse and the silencing of non-European White Male voices and critiqued the pursuit of universal truths and justice. His current research focuses on poverty, feminism, cultural pluralism, and the self-justification of mainstream legal analysis. Beckett also analyses the limitations, or futility, of abstract legal critique; and advocates for alternative approaches to international justice.

Nonetheless, he enjoys working with and coaching, University teams in the Telders', Jessup's, and the African Court of Human and Peoples' Rights, mooting competitions.

At The American University in Cairo (AUC), Beckett has taught courses in Public International Law, International Human Rights, Legal Perspectives on the Question of Palestine, and Jurisprudence; and supervised many dissertations in related areas. He always includes current research in his teaching and often develops research projects from his classroom experiences.

He has delivered presentations in Africa, Australasia, Europe, and America, often to some acclaim. But he remains, at heart, a classroom teacher, as attested by more than fifteen years of students.

Hani Sayed

Associate Professor, Law Department

The American University in Cairo

Hani Sayed has joined AUC's Department of Law in 2005.  He received a Licence en Droit from the Faculty of Law at Damascus University, a D.E.S. in international relations from the Graduate Institute of International Studies at the HEI in Université de Genève, and an S.J.D.  from Harvard Law School. He teaches and writes in a diverse set of topics in international law including human rights and humanitarian law, law and development, international economic law, global governance and legal theory.