Janina Dill

Janina Dill is the John G Winant Professor of US Foreign Policy at the Department of Politics and International Relations (DPIR) of the University of Oxford. She is also a Professorial Fellow at Nuffield College and Co-Director of the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law, and Armed Conflict (ELAC).

Her research concerns the role of law and morality in international relations, specifically in war. In one strand of research, she develops legal and philosophical theories about how international law can be an instrument of morality in war, albeit an imperfect one. This work speaks to debates in just war theory and international law. The second strand of Janina Dill’s research seeks to explain how moral and legal norms affect the reality of war. She also studies how normative considerations can shape mass attitudes towards the use of force and the attitudes of conflict-affected populations. Several of her ongoing research projects concern the moral psychology of decision-making in war.

Her first book, entitled Legitimate Targets? International Law, Social Construction and US Bombing, proposes a constructivist theory of how international law influences the choice of targets of attack in US air warfare. The book tests the theory with three case studies of US air warfare. It further uncovers tensions between a legal and a moral definition of a legitimate target of attack and one guided by strategic considerations alone. The book appeared with Cambridge University Press as part of the series Cambridge Studies in International Relations in 2015.

In her second book, entitled Law Applicable to Armed Conflict (co-authored with Ziv Bohrer and Helen Duffy), Dill proposes a moral division of labour between human rights and humanitarian law. The contribution examines under what circumstances each body of law better fulfils what she argues are the moral tasks of law. The book appeared in January 2020 with Cambridge University Press.

In 2021 Janina was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for scholars "whose work has had international impact and whose future research career is exceptionally promising." Before joining Nuffield, Janina Dill was an Assistant Professor at the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Alongside her current appointments, she is a Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute. She holds a DPhil from Oxford, an MPhil from Cambridge, and a BA from the Technical University Dresden.