Guest Lecture with Associate Professor Anne Saab: Hope and Climate Justice
The Research Group for Human rights and International Law at The Faculty of Law at UiT the Arctic University in Norway.
Law, including international law, has traditionally been based on rationalist assumptions with little room left for emotions in making, interpretation and application of law. In recent years, however, scholars and practitioners have increasingly recognized the influence emotions have on the field of international law.
This lecture by Anne Saab, that builds upon a forthcoming paper, invites us to reflect on the role of anxiety, anger and hope in constructing litigants in climate cases. The lecture will specifically expand on the emotion of hope, discussing how hope is understood and invoked in climate cases, whose hopes are recognized, and what the relationship is between hope and climate justice.
The session will be moderated by Gor Samvel, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Norwegian Centre for the Law of the Sea (NCLOS) and the Faculty of Law at UiT, and a member of the Research Group for Human Rights and International Law.
Anne Saab is an Associate Professor of international law at the Geneva Graduate Institute, where she has been a faculty member since 2015. She was also co-Director of the LLM in International Law Programme from 2018 to 2025. Anne obtained a PhD in International Law from the London School of Economics in 2015. Her areas of interest and expertise include food and agriculture, climate change, intellectual property law and more recently, emotions and international law. Anne Saab is the principal investigator of the research project on Emotions and International Law funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Its objective is to open up a new field of study on emotions and international law to help the field’s adaptation to increasing complexity of global problems.
Her first monograph entitled, Narratives of Hunger in International Law: Feeding the World in Times of Climate Change, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019. Her second monograph, Emotions and International Law, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Prior to entering academia, Saab worked as a legal advisor and policy officer at the Ministry of Agriculture and Economic Affairs and at the Foreign Office in The Hague.