Professor Surabhi Ranganathan
Professor of International Law, University of Cambridge
Surabhi Ranganathan’s current work traces the co-constitution of international law and the ocean from 1945 to now, unsettling what we take as the givens in relation to the spatial zones, resource allocations and functional jurisdictions effected by the law of the sea. It extends the history and critique of international law into new areas, such as ocean depths and bottoms, global commons, marine infrastructures, and techno-utopian imaginaries, and, from the underexplored vantage point of oceanic law-making, throws new light on current preoccupations of international legal histories: statehood and territory, decolonization and the new international economic order, the Cold War, race and empire, and the emergence of new legal forms and institutions.
Her writings on the oceans, the history and politics of international law, treaties, and global governance have been published in, among others, the European Journal of International Law, the British Yearbook of International Law, the American Journal of International Law, and the Journal of the History of International Law. Ranganathan is also the author Strategically Created Treaty Conflicts and the Politics of International Law (Cambridge University Press), a study of international legal thought and practice, exploring treaty conflicts in nuclear governance, the law of the sea, and international criminal justice, which was an EJIL Editors’ Choice for 2015.