My research explores how law shapes disaster governance, humanitarian action, and political subjectivity. Working at the intersection of international law, legal theory, and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL), I examine how legal institutions respond to disasters and influence how suffering, responsibility, and historical memory are understood. My work combines doctrinal legal analysis with critical legal theory to investigate the relationship between law, governance, and justice in the Global South. While my research is grounded in international disaster law, it also engages broader debates on humanitarian governance, environmental regulation, feminist international law, and postcolonial legal thought.

Current Project: 

The Politics of Disaster Risk Creation: Humanitarian Legality, Oblivion, and International Disaster Law.

My doctoral research examines how international disaster law governs disaster response beyond questions of emergency management or humanitarian assistance. It develops the concept of Oblivion to explain how humanitarian legality can recognise suffering while simultaneously obscuring the historical and political conditions through which disaster risk is produced.

Using the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in Aceh, Indonesia, as its principal case study, the project investigates how law shapes political subjectivity, historical memory, and responsibility in post-disaster governance.

Research Themes

International Disaster Law

Examining the evolution of international disaster law and its relationship to humanitarian action, state responsibility, and disaster governance.

Humanitarian Governance

Investigating how humanitarian institutions organise disaster response, recovery, and legal protection while shaping forms of political authority and legal subjectivity.

Legal Theory

Using critical legal theory to explore how law produces knowledge, structures recognition, and mediates questions of justice, responsibility, and historical memory.

Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL)

Examining how colonial histories and global inequalities continue to influence international legal responses to disaster and humanitarian crises.

Disaster Jurisprudence

Developing theoretical approaches to understand disasters as legal and political phenomena rather than solely natural or technical events.

Selected Research Areas

• International Disaster Law

• Humanitarian Governance

• Legal Theory

• Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL)

• Disaster Jurisprudence

• Feminist International Law

• Environmental Governance

• Indonesia and the Asia-Pacific