Join us as our speakers examine the role of international law amid the current landscape of violence and conflict in the Middle East. What are the challenges of enforcing accountability and how do legal frameworks influence the complexities of diplomatic strategies?
Presented by the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute, the Krieger School of Arts & Sciences, the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, and Hopkins at Home.
This event is part of the ongoing discussion series, “Conflict in the Middle East: Context and Ramifications.” For more information about other upcoming events in the series, click here.

Kevin Jon Heller is Professor of International Law and Security at the University of Copenhagen’s Centre for Military Studies, which is part of the Department of Political Science. He is an Academic Member of Doughty Street Chambers in London and a Member of the Advisory Board the Bar Human Rights Committee of England and Wales. He also currently serves as Special Advisor to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court on War Crimes.
Prof. Heller’s books include The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law (OUP, 2011) and four co-edited volumes: The Handbook of Comparative Criminal Law (Stanford, 2010), The Hidden Histories of War Crimes Trials (OUP, 2013), the Oxford Handbook of International Criminal Law (OUP, 2018), and Contingency in International Law: On the Possibility of Different Legal Histories (OUP, 2021). He also serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the international-law blog Opinio Juris, where he has blogged for more than 17 years.

Prior to rejoining the Department of Justice, he was a regular contributor to several blogs and web sites, including Balkinization, SCOTUSblog, Opinio Juris, and Slate, writing principally on issues relating to separation of powers, war powers, torture, detention, interrogation, international law, treaties, executive branch lawyering, statutory interpretation and the First Amendment. He served as law clerk to Chief Judge Jack B. Weinstein on the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, and to Judge Frank M. Coffin on the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.


Prior to joining FP as a deputy editor, she was the global identities and borders writer at Vox, a position she originated. Sarah Wildman has lived in and reported from Paris, Vienna, Madrid, Washington, Jerusalem and Berlin. She was a Dart Center Ochberg fellow (a project of the Columbia School of Journalism) in 2015 and the 2014 Barach Non Fiction Writing Fellow at the Wesleyan Writers Conference. Wildman won the 2010 Peter R. Weitz Prize, from the German Marshall Fund, a prize awarded for “excellence and originality,” in European coverage, a 2011 Rockower Award from the American Jewish Press Association for commentary, and a 2008 Lowell Thomas Award Winner for travel writing.
Wildman has received numerous grants and competitve fellowships including an Arthur F. Burns Fellowship in Berlin, an American Council on Germany Fellowship in Berlin, a Milena Jesenská fellowship at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria, and a Pew Fellowship in International Journalism (now called the International Reporting Project). In March 2013 she received a Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting grant to report on the future of Jerusalem. Wildman wrote Paper Love, for Riverhead/Penguin, while a visiting scholar at the International Reporting Project at Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies.
Wildman is a regular contributor to the New York Times, Slate, and the New Yorker online. She has been on staff at The New Republic, a senior correspondent at The American Prospect and the Washington correspondent for The Advocate. Her stories have appeared in the Daily Beast, Newsweek, The Guardian, The Nation,The Washington Post, Travel and Leisure, New York, Departures, The Christian Science Monitor, Elle, Marie Claire, O the Oprah Magazine, Real Simple, Glamour, and Jerusalem Report, among others.