Martti Koskenniemi

Professor of international law

Martti Koskenniemi is a professor of international law at the University of Helsinki, and director of the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights. He was a member of the Finnish diplomatic service (1978–1994), a judge with the Administrative Tribunal of the Asian Development Bank (1997–2002) and a member of the United Nations’ International Law Commission (2002-2006). He has worked with several UN agencies and pleaded with the International Court of Justice. He has held visiting professorships at, among others, NYU, Columbia University, University of Cambridge, London School of Economics, Melbourne University and Universities of Brussels, Paris, Sao Paulo and Utrecht. He is a fellow of the British Academy and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His main publications include From Apology to Utopia; The Structure of International Legal Argument (1989/2005), The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870-1960 (2001) and The Politics of International Law (2011). His latest work on the (pre-)history of international law is To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth: Legal Imagination and International Power (2021).