The Lauterpacht Centre for International Law is the scholarly home of International law at the University of Cambridge. The Centre, founded by Sir Elihu Lauterpacht QC in 1983, serves as a forum for the discussion and development of international law and is one of the specialist law centres of the Faculty of Law.
The Centre holds weekly lectures on topical issues of international law by leading practitioners and academics.
For more information see the LCIL website at http://www.lcil.cam.ac.uk/
Eli Lauterpacht Lecture 2025 - - 'Hard Law in Times of Liquid Modernity: Treaty Law and Practice in the 21st Century' - Santiago Villalpando, Legal Advisor and Director of UNESCO
The speaker for the Eli Lauterpacht Lecture 2025 was Santiago Villalpando (https://www.unesco.org/en/legal-affairs/oisla/dir-la), Legal Advisor and Director of UNESCO.
Lecture summary: Is international law facing a decline of treaties?
In recent years, several authoritative voices have pointed out certain developments which seem to indicate that States are shifting away from treaty law-making for the governance of their international relations.
Taking as a starting point the sociological concept of “liquid modernity” introduced by Zygmunt Bauman, this lecture will explore how treaties, archetypes of solid and stable law-making, have reacted to an unstable global community where norms seem to be eroding and long-term commitments appear to be challenged.
As the lecture will show, there is no doubt that the law and practice of treaties have evolved to adapt to a shifting international environment, but the news about the death of treaties is greatly exaggerated.
The Eli Lauterpacht Lecture was established after Sir Eli's death in 2017 to celebrate his life and work. This lecture takes place on a Friday at the Centre at the start of the Michaelmas Term in any academic year.
These lectures are kindly supported by Dr and Mrs Ivan Berkowitz who are Principal Benefactors of the Centre (https://www.lcil.cam.ac.uk/about-centre/benefactors-centre).
11 Nov 2025
International Police Cooperation in an Era of Rising Authoritarianism
Lecture summary: Over centuries and across continents, authoritarian governments have demonstrated a large appetite for international cooperation to target political opponents across borders. As the world’s premier body for international police cooperation, Interpol is not supposed to facilitate this kind of transnational repression -- and yet, in recent years, there is growing concern that authoritarian governments are abusing Interpol's tools. Interpol has taken meaningful steps to curb such abuse, but the durability of those protections is in doubt given the rising influence of authoritarian governments in that organization. The looming question is at what point universal multilateral cooperation with respect to law enforcement might cease to be viable.
Kristina Daugirdas (https://michigan.law.umich.edu/faculty-and-scholarship/our-faculty/kristina-b-daugirdas) is the Francis A. Allen Collegiate Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. She teaches and writes primarily in the fields of international law and institutions.
Her scholarship currently focuses on international organizations, accountability mechanisms, and the ongoing evolution of the international legal system. She is a member of the editorial board of the International Organizations Law Review and the State Department’s Advisory Committee on International Law. She also serves as an adviser to the American Law Institute’s Restatement (Fourth) of Foreign Relations Law.
In 2016–2017, Daugirdas was a visiting fellow at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva and served as a consultant on public international law issues for the World Intellectual Property Organization. From 2014 to 2017, she co-authored the Contemporary Practice of the United States Relating to International Law: A section of the American Journal of International Law. In 2014, she was awarded the Francis Deák Prize for an outstanding article published in the American Journal of International Law by a younger author.
Daugirdas has taken on significant leadership roles at the law school, including serving as Associate Dean for Academic Programming from 2021 to 2024. She also led a subcommittee of the Advisory Committee on the University of Michigan Principles on Diversity of Thought and Freedom of Expression.
Prior to entering academia, Daugirdas was an attorney-adviser at the State Department’s Office of the Legal Adviser, receiving multiple honors for her service. As an attorney-adviser, she provided guidance on the negotiation and implementation of UN Security Council sanctions and amicus participation by the US government in lawsuits with foreign policy implications.
Chair: Prof Fernando Lusa Bordin
This lecture was given on 7 November 2025 and is part of the Friday Lunchtime Lecture series at the Lauterpacht Centre.
3 Nov 2025
Is the disorder of our times unprecedented?
Lecture summary: Most observers – at least in the West – agree that the twenty-first century has been particularly tumultuous. But while some explain the volatility of our times by reference to historical analogies, e.g. moments of power transition in the twentieth century, others claim that we are in a moment of polycrisis for which there is no precedent. In this talk I split the difference: mainstream International Relations is wrong to assume the twenty-first century will resemble the twentieth century, but there are other historical precedents we can use to better think about our current predicament.
Ayşe Zarakol is Professor of International Relations at the University of Cambridge (Emmanuel College). She is the author of After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West (Cambridge UP, 2011) and Before the West: The Rise and Fall of Eastern World Orders (Cambridge UP, 2022), and the editor of Hierarchies in World Politics (Cambridge UP, 2017). Before the We has won six awards, including the SSHA and ISA annual best book prizes. In 2024, she was elected to fellowship in the British Academy and the Academia Europea. Also in 2024, she received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Copenhagen. At the moment, Zarakol is overseeing an international research collaboration on Global Disorder funded by a British Academy Knowledge Frontiers Grant. She is also one of the two Associate Editors of International Organization. Her next book, Ozymandias, is a world history of strongmen, aimed at a general audience. This book is under contract with William Collins (UK) and Grove Atlantic (US).
Chair: Prof Surabhi Ranganathan
This lecture was given on 31 October 2025 and is part of the Friday Lunchtime Lecture series at the Lauterpacht Centre.
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