Rebecca Sutton

London School of Economics, Kathleen Fitzpatrick Visiting Doctoral Fellow 2016

Rebecca Sutton is a Canadian lawyer and PhD Candidate at the London School of Economics (LSE) in the UK. Her doctoral research project, which is supported by scholarships from the Trudeau Foundation and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), examines how international humanitarian actors engage with IHL’s principle of distinction in their everyday practices. In 2016 she visited Anne Orford’s ARC-funded Civil War, Intervention, and International Law project at the University of Melbourne, as a Kathleen Fitzpatrick Visiting Doctoral Fellow. Rebecca is also an external researcher with the ERC-funded Individualization of War project at the European University Institute (EUI), for which she conducts research on Protection of Civilians issues in South Sudan.

Rebecca has extensive experience in academic teaching as well as the training of practitioners. She is an Associate Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy, holding a Post-Graduate Certificate in Higher Education (PG Cert HE). In 2017, she was a Visiting Professor at Western Law School in Canada where she taught a critical course on IHL entitled Re-Imagining International Humanitarian Law. She has taught at SOAS and the LSE, and in 2017 she served as the Chief Examiner for the Complex Emergencies and Humanitarian Response course of the University of London. She has conducted IHL trainings for military actors, peacekeepers, police, and humanitarian practitioners in venues such as the Schlaining Peace Castle in Austria, the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre in Ghana and the NATO Multi-National CIMIC Group in Italy.

Rebecca holds a JD and a certificate in Aboriginal Legal Studies from the University of Toronto and an MSc in Violence, Conflict and Development from SOAS in the UK. She was called to the Ontario bar in 2014 after clerking at the Ontario Court of Appeal. Rebecca previously worked in the humanitarian field, serving as Country Director for War Child Canada in Darfur, Sudan from 2009-2011. Her research has been published in the National Journal of Constitutional Law, Criminal Law Quarterly, Citizenship Studies, Refuge, and the Canadian Graduate Journal of Sociology and Criminology. Rebecca is also a contributor to International Law Grrls and The Conversation.