KNAW Early Career Partnership award for proposal on international legal resonance
Published 27 May 2025
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Now in its third year, the devastating war in Sudan, marked by immense human suffering, regional instability, and a paralysed peace process, remains underreported and overlooked on the global stage.
Researcher Carl Emilio Lewis (Asser Institute/University of Amsterdam) has been granted a prestigious KNAW Early Career Partnership 2025. This award, presented by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), recognises promising young researchers and provides €10,000 to organise an interdisciplinary meeting.
Dr Lewis's successful proposal, "International Legal Resonance in the Global Attention Economy," addresses a critical contemporary issue in international law. The project proposes a fundamental question: Why is it that certain issues, events, crises etc., seem to resonate more strongly across the international legal community than others? Its core aim is to explore the relationship between attention and widespread legal mobilisation by interrogating what factors, if any, contribute to some issues receiving more focus within international legal institutions and amongst professionals than others.
The project will facilitate an interdisciplinary workshop bringing together scholars from International Law, International Relations, History, Sociology, and Philosophy. The aim is to gain new insights on how the international legal discipline engages with global crises, and assess concerns over the disproportionate distribution of attention within the field. The project will also contribute to knowledge dissemination through a public event and podcast, making its findings accessible to policymakers, legal practitioners and the broader public.
About Carl Emilio Lewis
Dr Carl Emilio Lewis is a researcher in International Law at the T.M.C. Asser Institute, currently focusing on Public International Law, International Human Rights Law, and international adjudication.
About the KNAW Early Career Partnership
The KNAW Early Career Partnerships are intended to encourage early-career researchers to enter into or develop interdisciplinary partnerships that will lead to new insights in research across all domains. Up to ten Partnerships are awarded annually. The KNAW Early Career Partnerships are made available from the KNAW Academy Fund.
In 2020, Dr Berenice Boutin (Asser Institute) was awarded the KNAW Early Career Partnership for a conference on Law and Ethics of Artificial Intelligence in the Public Sector: from Principles to Practice and Policy. In 2021, Asser Institute Associate Fellow Dimitri Van Den Meerssche received the award for an interdisciplinary conference on Legal Method, Methodology and Critique in a Digital Era, the closing workshop of the highly succesful online lecture and workshop series on ‘’Method, methodology and critique in international law”.
