Award Edition 2021

Award Ceremony Lauterpacht Center Cambridge

The Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law of Heidelberg and the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law at the University of Cambridge are delighted to announce that the second Max Planck-Cambridge Prize for International Law (MaxCamPIL) has been awarded to

Sundhya Pahuja

Professor at the Melbourne University Law School.

The Prize was established in 2019 by the Max Planck Institute and the Lauterpacht Centre with the generous donation of the Max Planck Society’s Supporting Members. It will be awarded biennially to a mid-career scholar who has not only made an outstanding contribution to the study of international law but who is likely to continue to engage in substantial, innovative and cutting-edge research. The Prize seeks to highlight existing research and to support the prize winner’s future work, in a phase of reconfiguration of the global order.

The Prize Committee, composed of younger scholars and chaired by Professors Eyal Benvenisti and Armin von Bogdandy, is delighted to announce that Professor Sundhya Pahuja has been awarded the 2021 Max Planck-Cambridge Prize for International Law. The Committee was unanimous in its view that Professor Pahuja is an outstanding, original, and highly impactful scholar and mentor. She has made major contributions to wide-ranging and important questions in international economic law, law and development, global governance, and jurisdictional encounters between normative orders, and does so by employing a range of methodologies, including postcolonial theory, political economy, science and technology studies, and critical economic theory. Her work has increased awareness of the role played by structures of international law in perpetuating global inequality, poverty and existing power relations, and of the emancipatory role of international law. Professor Pahuja also provides an outstanding example to younger scholars of rigorous, imaginative, and challenging scholarship, and of academic citizenship and inclusive mentoring.

On December 2, 2022, the 2021 Max-Planck-Cambridge Prize was officially awared to Professor Pahuja in the context of an official award ceremony at the Lauterpacht Centre at the University of Cambridge. Organized by Director Professor Eyal Benvenisti, the participating guests including many emerging scholars were able to engage with Professor Pahuja. The Laudatio on behalf of Professor Armin von Bogdandy was given by Silvia Steininger as a member of the selection committee. Lauterpacht Centre Fellows Matilda Gillis and Darren Peterson provided an in-depth interview with Professor Pahuja, focussing on her work and career trajectory.

Sundhya Pahuja has organized a workshop "Global Corporations and International Law" in collaboration with Anne Peters and Alexandra Kemmerer from 13th to 14th July 2023.

More about the prize winner

$Ein Bild, das Menschliches Gesicht, Person, Lächeln, Kleidung enthält. Automatisch generierte Beschreibung$ Sundhya Pahuja is Professor of Law and the Director of the Institute for International Law and the Humanities at the University of Melbourne. Sundhya is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences, a past Fulbright Senior Scholar at the Harvard Institute of Global Law and Policy, Director of the Public International Law Stream at the Hague Academy and Fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies in South Africa. She has lectured and taught widely, including at Yale, SOAS, LUMS, Cambridge, National University of Singapore, Birkbeck, Osgoode Hall, UBC, LSE and NYU. She is the co-editor of the recently published Routledge Handbook of International Law and the Humanities (2021), and International Law and the Cold War (CUP, 2019), as well as the author of the award winning, Decolonising International Law (2011). Her current research projects centre on Global Corporations and International Law, the Populist Challenge to International Law and on reimagining international law as a Law of Encounter. She has a special interest in research supervision and mentoring emerging scholars, particularly those from the Global South.