LCIL International Law Centre Podcast

In this talk, I’ll focus on multiple dimension of the global housing crisis - affordability, homelessness, loss of homes due to climate crisis, mass destruction of homes or domicide during conflict, migration and the idea of a home, the contestation over land, and the persistence of forced evictions, discrimination and increasing segregation - from an international legal perspective. Drawing on my work as UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to adequate housing, the key focus will be to ask how much international law matters to bring solutions to these aspects of the global housing crisis and how much international law itself is part of the root causes of these dimension of the housing crisis.
Speaker: Balakrishnan Rajagopal is Associate Professor of Law and Development at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing. He founded the Program on Human Rights and Justice at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and the Displacement Research and Action Network. He is recognized as a leading participant in the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) Network of scholars and is one of its founders, and is recognized as a leading global commentator on issues concerning the global South.Prof Rajagopal is visiting the University of Cambridge this term as the Leverhulme Professor.
Chair: Dr Joanna Gomula
This lecture was delivered on 22 May 2026 as part of the Centre's Friday Lunchtime Lecture series.

Lecture summary: President Trump’s decisive attack on foreign aid and USAID, leading to the restructuring of the latter and the closure of ongoing and future development aid work across the world, has left many vulnerable regions of the world in potential crisis. With some of the funds hitherto allocated to development aid in vulnerable Global South countries reallocated to national economic projects or redirected to support programs that deepen U.S. foreign policy objectives of America First abroad, one thing is clear: economic nationalism, power-based relations, and opposition to the rules-based order is back.
Calculated, unfair, and transactional politics is the name of the game for President Trump’s return to office so far. Whether it is in relation to a developed, developing, or least-developed country, the Trump administration has unapologetically proven that it does not care whose ox is gored. Despite the US Supreme Court ruling, the “Reciprocal Tariff Policy” has disrupted and entrenched the uncertainty in the multilateral trading system that was already confronted with crisis about its own existence, especially the World Trade Organization, and the resulting fragmentation in international trade has further exacerbated the socio-economic and fragile status of developing countries.
Olabisi Delebayo Akinkugbe is the Purdy Crawford Chair in Business Law and Associate Professor at the Schulich School of Law, Dalhousie University. Prof Akinkugbe obtained a Ph.D. in law from the University of Ottawa, an LL.M. from the University of Toronto, and an LL.B. from the University of Lagos, Nigeria. He previously served as the Viscount Bennett Professor of Law at the Schulich School of Law and was convenor of the annual Viscount Bennett Roundtable on International Economic Law.
In 2024, he was the recipient of the Hannah and Harold Barnett Excellence in Teaching Award.
In this paper, I analyse the multiple implications for developing countries in the African continent.
Chair: Prof Lorand Bartels
This lecture was delivered on 1 May 2026 and is part of the Friday Lunchtime Lecture series.

Based on his experience, but speaking in his personal capacity, Ambassador Tomohiro Mikanagi will discuss the current state of the rules of international law against attempts to acquire territory by force. When powerful States are not satisfied with the territorial status quo and are unwilling to give up their interests for the sake of international peace, there is an inherent difficulty in stopping their attempts to acquire territory by force. In the past 100 years, efforts have been made to stop such attempts. Based on the recognition of the efforts made so far, Ambassador Mikanagi will examine the current state of the rules of international law against such attempts. He will examine the relationship between the prohibition on the use of force and the prohibition on the acquisition of territory by force and will discuss the scope of these prohibitions. He will also discuss whether States can acquire territory by the use of force in self-defence and examine obligations for third States arising from the violation of the prohibition on the acquisition of territory by force.
Ambassador Tomohiro Mikanagi is the Ambassador and Deputy Permanent Representative of Japan to the United Nations and was the Japanese Legal Advisor from 2022 to 2024. He also holds the title of Ambassador-at-Large for Cooperation on International Law.
He was a visiting fellow at the Lauterpacht Centre of International Law and is currently an LCIL Partner Fellow. He participated in the proceedings of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for the Advisory Opinion issued on July 19, 2024. Japan's oral statement in February 2024 was unique as it focused exclusively on the prohibition on the acquisition of territory by force.
Chair: Prof Sandesh Sivakumaran

Lecture summary: In 1963, Stanley Hoffmann told the American Society of International Law: “Since every Power wants to turn its interests, ideas and gains into law, a study of the ‘legal strategies’ of the various units, i.e., of what kinds of norms they try to promote, and through what techniques, may be as fruitful for the political scientist as a study of more purely diplomatic, military or economic strategies.” In this lecture, Michael Byers outlines his two-decade long project to expose and explain how a class of highly sophisticated international lawyers, often referred to as ‘legal advisers’, strategically seek to manipulate law-making processes to make or change rules to favour their state.
Michael Byers (PhD Cantab) is Professor of Global Politics and International Law at the University of British Columbia. He also co-directs the Outer Space Institute, a global network of space experts united by their commitment to highly innovative, transdisciplinary research that addresses grand challenges facing the continued use and exploration of space. Dr. Byers has been a Junior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford University; Professor of Law at Duke University; and a Visiting Professor at the universities of Cape Town, Tel Aviv, Nord (Norway), Novosibirsk (Russia), St Andrews, and the Geneva Graduate Institute. His two most recent books, both published by Cambridge University Press, are International Law and the Arctic and Who Owns Outer Space?
Chair: Prof Lorand Bartels, Centre Fellow
The Friday Lunchtime Lecture series is kindly supported by Cambridge University Press & Assessment.

Lecture summary: Early March 1946 marked a rough midpoint in proceedings before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. The prosecution had closed its case, with France and the USSR just having presented most of the trial’s eyewitnesses – two of them women. The defense opened just as Churchill gave his Iron Curtain speech. Elsewhere in Palace of Justice, personnel were going home even as others arrived, to prepare subsequent proceedings. These new ‘Nurembergers’ included more women, more people of colour, and more people who had not served in the world war then on trial. By centring such developments, this talk will offer a less-travelled account of the first international criminal trial.
An expert in international law and its subfields, including legal history and international criminal law, Diane Marie Amann has served as Regents’ Professor, Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law, and Faculty Co-Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center at the University of Georgia School of Law, and is an Academic Affiliate at University College London Faculty of Laws. She was Special Adviser to International Criminal Court Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda on Children in & affected by Armed Conflict, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and has held leadership posts in the American and European societies of international law. Amann is writing an Oxford University Press book about lawyers and other women professionals at the first Nuremberg trial.