Dr Gabriela A. Frei
My research and publications focus on the relationship between international law, trade and strategy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I have been particularly interested in the role of jurists in international politics, and how law shapes political agendas. I am also interested in current security and defence affairs and particularly in the interaction of international law and strategy.
Research Interests
- History of International Law in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
- Jurists and the First World War
- Maritime Strategy in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
In my current postdoctoral research project, funded by the British Academy, I examine how the understanding of a legal international order changed as a result of the First World War, and how an international economic order emerged during the interwar period.
In 2015 I was awarded a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant to organise an international workshop on „International Law and the First World War. Historical and Contemporary Perspectives“. The workshop brought together international lawyers and historians, to discuss the impact of the First World War on the development of international law after 1918. The results will be published in the form of articles in the European Journal of International Law in 2017/18.
In my doctoral research “Great Britain, International Law, and the Evolution of Maritime Strategic Thought, 1856-1914”, which I am currently revising for publication, I examine the role of international law for the making of British maritime strategy prior to the First World War. It offers an analysis of British state practice as well as an examination of the efforts of the international community to codify the laws of naval warfare.
More recently I have been engaged in researching and writing more generally about the law of the sea in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
