About

History and Mission

The Interest Group on International Organisations or simply IG-IO was formally established in January 2017 with the purpose of serving as an arena for academics and professionals working on international organizations to dialogue, debate and exchange their experience continually and through specific events and publications. As of December 2017, it counts 290 members and it continues to attract new affiliates.

The activities of the IG-IO form an integral part of the activities of the European Society of International Law. The IG-IO is administered autonomously by a Coordinating Committee in accordance with the ESIL Articles of Association and relevant ESIL rules and subject to supervision by the Board. The members of the Coordinating Committee serve as editors of of the IG-IO Blog.

Coordinating Committee

Lorenzo Gasbarri

2019-2023

Research fellow in international law and visiting lecturer at Bocconi University. He has studied at the University of Florence, Milan and at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. Lorenzo has held research positions at University College London and at the University of Helsinki and has been visiting fellow at the University of Copenhagen and at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg. He is junior editor of the Oxford database on international organizations (OXIO).

Laura Huici Sancho

2022-2026

Laura Huici Sancho is a senior lecturer at the Faculty of Law of the University of Barcelona.  She has more than 25 years of teaching and research experience at the UB and other Spanish and foreign universities in the field of Public International Law and European Union Law. Her main areas of research are the law of international organizations, the mechanisms of control and promotion of the application of public international law, particularly in the field of human rights, and EU law, in particular European citizenship and EU institutions. She has also assumed management responsibilities at the UB as Secretary of the Department of International Law and Economics and as assistant to the Vice-Dean of Research and International Relations of the UB Law School. She is currently coordinator of the Section of Public International Law and International Relations of the Department of Criminal Law, Criminology, Public International Law and International Relations of the UB. 

Gail Lythgoe

2019-2023

Gail Lythgoe is a lecturer in International Law and co-director of the Manchester International Law Centre. Gail completed her PhD at the University of Glasgow on the topic of the territoriality of international law and global governance.  She has studied law at the Universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow and Singapore (National University of Singapore). Gail has been a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Götttingen. Her research interests include public international law, legal theory, international legal history, international organisations, critical geography and political theory. Gail is Assistant Book Review Editor of the European Journal of International Law and Associate Editor of EJIL:Talk!

Negar Mansouri

2022-2026

Negar Mansouri is a PhD candidate in international law at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID), Geneva, Switzerland. She is writing a thesis on the histories of the International Telecommunication Union, the International Maritime Organisation and the International Tropical Timber Organisation between 1960s and 1990s and the ways in which they reconfigured production relations around the materiality they deal with. Negar has been researching different aspects of international bureaucracies for over a decade. She was a research assistant in the project UN Reform and Effectiveness at the Graduate Institute. In October 2021, she organised an international conference on alternative approaches to international organisations in international law and is now co-editing a volume on international institutional law and trans-disciplinary methods. She is an OXIO rapporteur. She has also worked for several UN agencies in the past. Negar’s research interests are international institutions, critical IR and critical international political economy, history of internationalism, history of global capitalism and anti-colonialism in world politics

Miša Zgonec-Rozej

2022-2026

With thanks for our former committee members:

Catherine Brölmann

2018 – 2021

Associate Professor of International Law at the University of Amsterdam. She has done extensive research into issues of international lawmaking and legal aspects of international organizations, both in academic publications and in national and international legal practice. Brölmann is a member of the Advisory Committee for Public International Law of the Netherlands Government. She is one of the editors-in-chief of Oxford International Organizations (OXIO).

Richard Collins

2018-2021

Lecturer in International Law at University College Dublin (UCD), where he currently teaches and researches in the fields of public international law, international organisations and philosophy of law. Prior to joining UCD in January 2015, Richard was a lecturer at the School of Law, University of Sheffield, where he completed his PhD in 2011 looking at the institutional structure of the international legal order. An updated and revised version of his PhD thesis was recently published as “The Institutional Problem in Modern International Law (Hart, 2016). Richard also co-edited (with Nigel D White) the volume, “International Organizations and the Idea of Autonomy” (Routledge 2011). He has held visiting research positions at the Amsterdam Center for International Law (ACIL) and the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights. In 2018, Richard will be a visiting scholar at Osgoode Hall Law School, Canada and the University of Sydney, Australia.

Sufyan Droubi

2018-2021

Lecturer (Teaching and Research) in Law within the School of Social Sciences, University of Dundee. Previously, Sufyan was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of São Paulo, the São Paulo Research Foundatiton (FAPESP) and at the University of Manchester. He holds a PhD in Law from the University of Essex. His doctoral thesis examined resistance to mandatory resolutions of the UN Security Council, which was published as a monograph in 2014 (Routledge). He carried his previous studies in law at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo. Fully qualified lawyer in Brazil since 1996, he spent twelve years in practice in international investment and trade law before turning to the academia. He is one of the editors of the Melland Shill Perspectives to International Law (Manchester University Press). He is one of the coordinators of the Interest Group on International Organisations of the European Society of International Law and remains a member of the Manchester International Law Centre at the University of Manchester.