Janina Dill

Guest Author

Janina Dill (@JaninaDill) is the Dame Louise Richardson Chair in Global Security at the Blavatnik School of Government. She is a Fellow at Trinity College and Co-Director of the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law, and Armed Conflict (ELAC).

Janina’s research concerns the role of law and morality in international relations, specifically in war. In one strand of research, she develops legal and philosophical theories about how international law can be an instrument of morality in war, albeit an imperfect one. This work speaks to debates in just war theory and international law.

Another strand of Janina’s research seeks to explain how moral and legal norms affect the reality of war. She contributes to debates about the capacity of international law to constrain military decision-making. She also studies how normative considerations can shape public opinion on the use of force and the attitudes of conflict-affected populations, for instance, in Afghanistan, Ukraine and Iraq.
In 2021, Janina won a Philip Leverhulme Prize for researchers “whose work has had international impact and whose future research career is exceptionally promising.” She will use the prize to conduct further research on the moral psychology of decision-making in war.
In 2022–24, Janina co-convened (with Scott Sagan) a research project on the “Law and Ethics of Nuclear Deterrence,” which is part of the Research Network on Rethinking Nuclear Deterrence, funded by the MacArthur Foundation and hosted by the Harvard Belfer Centre.
Starting in 2024, Janina will also work on a three-year project entitled “Cumulative Civilian Harm: Addressing the Hidden Human Cost of the Law’s Blind Spot”, which is funded by a joint grant from the ESRC and the National Science Foundation.