Dr Boyd van Dijk

Research Fellow

Nuffield College

boyd.vandijk@history.ox.ac.uk

I am an historian of the international (legal) order. I received my PhD from the European University Institute (EUI) and have previously studied at Columbia University and the University of Amsterdam. I have also been a McKenzie Fellow at the University of Melbourne and taught at Queen Mary, King's College London, and the London School of Economics. I am now based at Nuffield College, the Faculty of History, and the Oxford Martin School, where I am working as a Research Associate on the Changing Global Orders programme. My latest monograph, Preparing for War: The Making of the Geneva Conventions, came out in 2022 with Oxford University Press. It has received the 2023 Certificate of Merit in a Specialized Area of International Law from the American Society of International Law. I have also published articles and essays for The American Journal of International Law, Humanity, Past & Present, Law and History Review, Yad Vashem Studies, as well as magazines (Le Grand Continent) and newspapers (Washington Post).

Research Interests

Most of my research focuses on global history and the international (legal) order. I am particularly interested in the history of mass violence, humanitarianism, human rights, international law, decolonisation, and international organisations.

Among my current projects is a new global history of the Geneva Conventions and their practice in the period of the Cold War and decolonisation, 1954-1977. This project is part of the Changing Global Orders programme at the Oxford Martin School. The overarching research aim of my project is to develop a new comparative account of the laws of war and their practice grounded in an archival and global history. In light of contemporary crises, historicising the underlying mechanisms behind the Conventions' practice in armed conflict can hardly be more urgent.

The central figures of my new research project are those political actors who developed alternative models of international law in wartime oriented globally. Third World revolutionaries and secessionists used and contested the Conventions to denounce oppression at home and linked their local struggles with global campaigns against domination and for aspirations of liberation and (collective) rights. By exploring these and other conceptions of international law in wartime, and the chosen actors’ understanding of the relationship between notions of sovereignty, rights, and world ordering, I explore the deeper mechanisms behind the practice of Global South engagements with ethics in war during the second half of the twentieth century.

The overall objective of my work is to historicise and develop new means of analysing the international (legal) order comparatively, and to improve our understanding of its historical entanglements with empire, ideas of sovereignty and rights, and visions of world ordering.

You can follow me on Twitter @boyd_vandijk

Preparing for War: the making of the Geneva Conventions (OUP, Feb 2022)

The 1949 Geneva Conventions are the most important rules for armed conflict ever formulated. To this day they continue to shape contemporary debates about regulating warfare, but their history is often misunderstood.

For most observers, the drafters behind these treaties were primarily motivated by liberal humanitarian principles and the shock of the atrocities of the Second World War. This book tells a different story, showing how the final text of the Conventions, far from being an unabashedly liberal blueprint, was the outcome of a series of political struggles among the drafters.

Dr Boyd van Dijk

Featured Publications

Preparing for War: the making of the Geneva Conventions (OUP, Feb 2022)