Jennifer Welsh

Academic title(s): 

Professor; Canada 150 Research Chair in Global Governance and Security; Director of the Centre for International Peace and Security Studies (CIPSS)

Jennifer Welsh
Contact Information
Address: 

855 Sherbrooke St. W.
Montreal, Quebec
H3A 2T7

Phone: 
514-398-1759
Email address: 
jennifer.welsh [at] mcgill.ca
Office: 
Leacock 422
Degree(s): 

D.Phil. in International Relations, St. Antony's College, University of Oxford (Oxford, England)

Curriculum vitae: 
Research areas: 
International Relations
Biography: 

Professor Jennifer M. Welsh is the Canada 150 Research Chair in Global Governance and Security at McGill University (Montreal, Canada). She was previously Professor and Chair in International Relations at the European University Institute (Florence, Italy) and Professor in International Relations at the University of Oxford, where she co-founded the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict. From 2013-2016, she served as the Special Adviser to the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, on the Responsibility to Protect.

Professor Welsh is the author, co-author, and editor of several books and articles on humanitarian intervention, the evolution of the notion of the ‘responsibility to protect’ in international society, the UN Security Council, and Canadian foreign policy. Her most recent books include The Return of History: Conflict, Migration and Geopolitics in the 21st century (2016), which was based on her CBC Massey Lectures, and The Responsibility to Prevent: Overcoming the Challenges of Atrocity Prevention (2015). She was a former recipient of a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship and a Trudeau Fellowship, and from 2014-2019 has directed a five-year European Research Council-funded project called “The Individualisation of War: Reconfiguring the Ethics, Law and Politics of Armed Conflict”. She is also a frequent media commentator on international affairs and Canadian foreign policy.

Professor Welsh sits on the editorial boards of the journals Global Responsibility to Protect, International Journal, and Ethics and International Affairs, and on the Advisory Boards of the Peace Research Institute in Frankfurt, The Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, and the Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation. She has a BA from the University of Saskatchewan (Canada), and a Masters and Doctorate from the University of Oxford (where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar).

Areas of interest: 

The ethics and law of armed conflict; humanitarian intervention and the ‘responsibility to protect’; the prevention of mass atrocity crimes; United Nations Security Council; history of ideas on intervention; evolution of sovereignty.

Group: 
Professor
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