E mail: ss203@st-andrews.ac.uk

Telephone: 01334 462944

Website: http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/intrel/people/index.php/ss203.html

Sibylle Scheipers joined the Changing Character of War Programme as Academic Director of Studies in July 2007. Prior to that she held a Transatlantic Postdoc Fellowship in International Relations at Chatham House, London. She wrote her PhD on the transatlantic conflict over the International Criminal Court (ICC) at Berlin’s Humboldt University, where she also held a teaching fellowship. She has extensive teaching experience, having taught various seminars on International Relations theory and human rights.

Sibylle currently works on a project entitled ‘Unlawful combatants: A Genealogy of the Irregular Fighter’. The project asks why and how particular categories of fighters have been, and continue to be excluded from moral and legal protections applying in war. It traces the development from the exclusion of ‘savages’, rebels and rioting peasants to the emergence of the ‘irregular’ around 1800. The project aims at unearthing the subsequent layers of moral and legal reasoning linked to the category of the irregular fighter and enquires how they impact on the contemporary discourse surrounding irregulars such as insurgents and terrorists. The objective is not to clarify moral and legal definitions and principles that have turned out to be problematic in recent military operations. Rather, the project intends to reconstruct the intellectual trajectories that lie behind the category of the irregular fighter, and to offer a critique of the concept that goes beyond the surface of the debate on legal rules and protections.

Dr Sibylle Scheipers is currently on maternity leave until April 2010.

Recent Publications

'Closing Guantanamo and Investigating the Past: Chances for Renewing Transatlantic Ties?’, Survival, 51 (3), pp. 66-69

'Closing Guantanamo: Is Europe Ready?', Survival, 51 (1), pp.5-12

(ed.) Prisoners in War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2009)

Negotiating Sovereignty and Human Rights: International Society and the International Criminal Court (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming).

‘Empowering Africa: normative power in EU-Africa relations’, Journal of European Public Policy 15/4 (2008), pp. 607-623 (co-authored with Daniela Sicurelli).

Coalition Warfare in Afghanistan: Burden-sharing or Disunity?, Chatham House Briefing Paper ISP/ASP 07/01 (2007), London: Chatham House (co-authored with Timo Noetzel).

‘Flüchten oder standhalten’, Internationale Politik 62(9) (2007), pp. 120-125 (co-authored with Timo Noetzel).

Die Nato in Afghanistan. Das Bündnis und die Grenzen seiner Strategiefähigkeit, SWP-Aktuell No. 44 (2007), Berlin: Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (co-authored with Timo Noetzel).

‘Civilization vs Toleration: The new UN Human Rights Council and the normative foundations of the international order’, in Journal of International Relations and Development, 10/3 (2007).

‘Normative Power Europe: A credible utopia?’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 45/2 (2007), pp. 435-457 (co-authored with Daniela Sicurelli).

‘Les combattant irréguliers: une réévaluation morale et légale’, in Christian Malis (ed.), La guerre irréguliere (Paris: Economica, forthcoming 2010).